Review: Douglas Adams Live in Concert

Douglas Adams Live in Concert by Douglas Adams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's great to hear Adams himself relate some episodes from his works, which he does with little elaboration. I think the only footnote he offers is that the rock star Hotblack Desiato, who is reported as "spending a year dead for tax reasons", has a name used with approval of an actual firm. So many Adams fans called the firm, however, that they had to change their name.

The first piece, of which are delivered solo is Chapter 1 from Life, the Universe and Everything:

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.

It wasn’t just that the cave was cold, it wasn’t just that it was damp and smelly. It was that the cave was in the middle of Islington and there wasn’t a bus due for two million years.

Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.

...

From the same work, Dent is confronted with the being has has unwittingly killed time and time again:

...With a sudden ping, there was a rabbit there in the black labyrinth with him, a huge, monstrously, hideously soft and lovable rabbit - an image again, but one on which every single soft and lovable hair seemed like a real and single thing growing in its soft and lovable coat. Arthur was startled to see his own reflection in its soft and lovable unblinking and extremely huge brown eyes.

"Born in darkness, - rumbled the voice, - raised in darkness. One morning I poked my head for the first time into the bright new world and got it split open by what felt suspiciously like some primitive instrument made of flint.

"Made by you, Arthur Dent, and wielded by you. Rather hard as I recall.

"You turned my skin into a bag for keeping interesting stones in. I happen to know that because in my next life I came back as a fly again and you swatted me. Again. Only this time you swatted me with the bag you'd made of my previous skin.

- Arthur Dent, you are not merely a cruel and heartless man, you are also staggeringly tactless"....

In conclusion, there is "one last short piece" from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe where Marvin faces a Frogstar battle tank at the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy offices in Ursa Minor Beta.

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