FORD: Six pints of bitter. And quickly please, the world's about to end.
BARMAN: Oh yes, sir? Nice weather for it.

Douglas Adams rules, pretty much like bricks don't. The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy is one of the classic works in Science Fiction (originally produced as a radio series and later turned into a BBC TV series). in which Adams manages to create an interesting, intelligent and entertaining world out of a handful of characters and a few simple premises. A myriad of flabbergasting events come from this, all related to an alienating state of being, accustomed to slightly eery concepts such as instantaneous time travel, the demolition of earth, new methods of vessel propulsion, super computing and some intensive messing with advanced probabilisitc math. All of this is cleverly interleaved with fine humour and sprinkled with tiny linguistic gems. Adams creates a protagonist - Arthur Dent - that plays the role of a slow, tragic and rather passive audience to his own life, rather than an actual hero.

This non-heroic heroism makes Arthur Dent both fun and depressing. He's an anti hero, a bit stuck-up and dim-witted, and pretty much everything else that would lead someone to being a dismal failure. Despite this, he actually succeeds in building an impressive carreer in space travel, meeting the most interesting of people in the western spiral arm of the galaxy, and finding the love of his life. This makes Arthur Dent, always seeming to draw the short straw, a rather appealing character.

Douglas Adams himself has compared Dent to "characters who either have, or come to realise that they have, no control over their lives whatsoever ­ Pilgrim, Gulliver, Hamlet, Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last. Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit ­ quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him - then calms down and has a cup of tea. My kind of guy!". I tend to agree.

In a thoroughly different and alltogether more down-to-earth setting, he manages to accomplish a different feel of the same high quality, with Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency books. Clever and imaginitive. His biggest succes, however, remained the "H2G2", which went on to sell more than 14 million copies worldwide.

The books are not only funny in and of themselves, but sometimes relate to the alienation nostalgia of the 20th century twilight spawn from internet connectivity, large inert organisational bodies deciding your house and life have to move for a Greater Plan, hot new interesting gadgets and technologies, interesting alcohol beverages and cocktails, and the futile search for sense and meaning - which are probably carefully hidden away in the dark stairless basement of a bunker somewhere on a small planet near Ursa Minor, in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".

Douglas Adams recently passed away, aged 49. He died on Friday morning, may 11th in Santa Barbara, California, following a heart attack. He will be hugely missed...