MK Lit Fest Autumn Festival: 42 – The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams
Start Date: 14/10/2023
End Date: 14/10/2023
Start Time: 11:00 am
End Time: 12:00 pm
Cost of Entry: £8
Milton Keynes Central Library 555, Central Milton Keynes, MK9 3HL, GB
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When Douglas Adams died in 2001, he left behind 60 boxes full of notebooks, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches and even poems. In the Sunday Times bestselling 42, compiled by Douglas's long-time collaborator Kevin Jon Davies, hundreds of these personal artefacts appear in print for the very first time.
Douglas was as much a thinker as he was a writer, and his artefacts reveal how his deep fascination with technology led to ideas which were far ahead of their time: a convention speech envisioning the modern smartphone; sheets of notes predicting the advent of electronic books; journal entries from his forays into home computing; musings on how the internet would disrupt the CD-Rom industry, among others.
42 also features archival material charting Douglas's school days through Cambridge, Footlights, collaborations with Graham Chapman, and early scribbles from the development of Doctor Who, Hitchhiker's and Dirk Gently.