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Daily Blah for... Thursday, June 09, 2005
DNA and I
I don't know if it's some kind of delayed reaction to seeing the movie. Maybe it's a kind of self-reinforcing behavioral feedback loops based on one of my oldest influences -- once started, it just blows up. Whatever the reason, I find myself this week in the midst of a full-on Douglas Adams/Hitchhiker's kick. It feels like a form of madness. I'm hungrily devouring every last piece of Adams' work I hadn't yet finished (the last few chapters of Mostly Harmless and Last Chance to See, as well as the "Salmon of Doubt" section of, er, Salmon of Doubt). I'm trawling through the MP3s of the radio series, looking for the bits from the Guide itself, then editing them together in a brand new MP3, which I will then burn on CDs and foist upon all my friends. And I also dug up, un more temps, the one interview I was lucky enough to do with DNA himself, a year before his death.
I think I mentioned this before, many, many Blahs ago, back at the beginning (I started this blog right around the time of his untimely death). I think I promised to post the interview, then promptly forgot to do so. Regardless, it was the one interview I've ever done that I transcribed it in full -- every word, every "erm" -- as if it were, say, a radio script. That wasn't required; the final Q&A on the People page was roughly the size of a peanut. But something must have told me this was a special, never-to-be-repeated occasion. How I wish I hadn't been right.
So here it is, in all its unexpurgated glory -- a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a timeless genius, and into the well-honed interviewing style of his interlocutor, which pretty much boils down to "just say anything that comes into your head."
To set the scene: it's early 2000. The dotcom bubble has not yet burst. The hottest handheld gadget is the Palm VII, Palm's first wireless network device. Douglas is working on his website, H2G2.com -- a sort of early Wikipedia -- and has just announced he will be creating a handheld version of the Guide. (Whatever happened to that plan after his death, I have no idea). Oh yes, and I'd only just found the message telling me what his phone number was, an hour after I was apparently supposed to call him.
CDT: Hi, Douglas Adams?
DNA: Speaking?
CDT: Chris Taylor, Time Magazine.
DNA: Oh, hello, hi, how are you.
CDT: Hello. Yes, I understand you were expecting a call from me.
DNA: Yes, that's right. I was kind of expecting it an hour ago and I was just wondering if something had gone wrong.
CDT: Yeah, I was expecting a call from you. I just presumed that —
DNA: Oh, oh I'm sorry about that, I—
CDT: No, that's okay—
DNA: —I didn't even have a number to call you on, actually.
CDT: Right, yes, I—well, ditto. So I guess that—I was trying to get in touch with Sophie [his assistant], and er—
DNA: Right. I think that Sophie's not well today. Oh, well, we've got it sorted out now.
CDT: Okay. We got there in the end. Er, so anyway, so I guess we, er, need to talk about, er, the new products—
DNA: Right.
CDT: The, er, website—
DNA: Yup.
CDT: The handheld device, and, er, the screenplay. I don't know if you're, ah—
DNA: Yes, all—we can talk about all those things.
CDT: Okay. Um, so you're in Santa Barbara right now?
DNA: That’s right, yup.
CDT: And you've been— is this a house thing you have there, or—
DNA: Er, yes, we're renting a house, with a view that, er, assuming this year goes well, you know, not only for me but for my family living here, then you know, we'll look to buy, and, you know, sort of settle.
CDT: Hmm. No, I just remember that you mention Santa Barbara in the fourth part of the trilogy.
DNA: Yes. Oddly enough, that was about the first time I went up to Santa Barbara. We lived in Los Angeles in 1983, and after just a few months kind of ran screaming. But had just noticed, just before we ran screaming, that Santa Barbara seemed a nice place. And since my life seems to consist of commuting across the Atlantic, which I was trying to, wanted to cut down on, erm— it's funny this thing about air miles? We're becoming aware of, actually discover what the function of air miles are. It's a video game score.
CDT: [laughs] Yes, whoever collects the most wins.
DNA: Yeah, yeah. But I really wanted to sort of cut down on that, and since— basically, what it seemed to me was that, erm, my work tended to divide into stuff I could do
anywhere and stuff that required me to be somewhere, and anything that required me to be somewhere required me to be in America, mostly on the West coast.
CDT: Right.
DNA: So—
CDT: So what can you tell us about the screenplay?
DNA: The screenplay is, erm, well, we hope it's gonna be, um, er, I mean, I've done God knows how many drafts, and I'm working on another one at the moment. But er, we have another writer currently working on my draft to, they hope, fix the structure. I mean, the structure of the thing has always been the problem. When it started out, you know, it was, erm, you know, I was writing it for radio and it was just kind of one damn thing after another—anything I could think of to fill up next week's episode kind of thing. And, so, erm, so, it's been a question of trying to discover what the wood is amongst all the trees.
CDT: Right, it's been an evolving story line, right from the radio series—
DNA: Oh, yes, well, it always have been, I mean every version I've done of it for different media has been quite a radically different storyline, because you think of a better way of doing it, or the medium makes certain things—the next medium you move it into makes certain things impossible or other things possible, so you rejig them.
CDT: Do you get to the stage where you feel you have to change it for the next—
DNA: Hmmmm — I guess so. I mean, the thing is, I left it alone for many many years, and coming back to it, it was actually— there were fresh things that occurred to me, fresh ideas that came along. And quite a lot of them are sparked by the fact that you're going to be able to see something on a big screen instead of just listening to it. And—
CDT: We are talking about the equivalent of the first book?
DNA: Yeah, I mean what I've always said about it is, yes, it's the first book, but more specifically what I'd say is it's the first book that it specifically contradicts.
CDT: [laughs] Can you tell us what contradictions there are at this stage, or is it just—
DNA: Oh, well, it's just the characters' motivations. There are lots of new scenes in it, and quite a few things that go. Inevitably, the new scenes in it are the ones I'm particularly fond of. But you know, the reason why everyone's doing what they're doing is the thing that always changes. So they may be doing the same things for different reasons.
CDT: I always thought it was a great example of the many universes theory.
DNA: Yes, yes, it's a sort of homage to David Deutsch.
CDT: Is it being Americanized, going through the Disney wringer?
DNA: Well, the thing is, it's an odd thing, although the Americans have always felt it was quintessentially English, a lot of people in England thought it was American. So, I hope it'll be, the end product will be reasonably international; the casting will almost certainly be a mixture of British and American actors, and I think that's fine.
CDT: I guess the real question is, have you been Americanized?
DNA: No, I don't think so. It's funny that my five-year-old daughter started attending school here, has been at school for a few weeks, and she has a very, very English accent, but any new words she learns, she learns them in an American accent. So she came back from school the other day and said "Mummy, Daddy, I've been learning new ways of doing writing, and now I do my letters on a slant."
CDT: The question there is, you know, will she be writing "colour" with a "u", or—
DNA: Oh, er, she will be writing "color" without a "u" here.
CDT: Yes, it's a sad loss.
DNA: [laughs] well, yes, it's funny, I was talking to somebody else I met over here, who's English, but has lived a lot here and a lot in France. He says his children are complete chameleons, that in London they speak with a very proper English accent, and when they're in France they speak English with a French accent, oddly enough, and when they're in, when they arrive in California they turn into Los Angeles brats.
CDT: Right. Really, trilingual, or tridialectal.
DNA: Yeah. Yeah.
CDT: So, when can we expect the movie?
DNA: I think the current schedule we're looking at is, assuming we get the screenplay into a shape where Disney, are satisfied with what they've got, er, between the end of this year, and the director's ready to start pre-production probably about February next year. And we're all looking at a summer 2001 release. So that's slipped already. But the thing is it's such an expensive project to make, those tend to go slower because everyone gets a little anxious and wants to have their own say about how its going to go.
CDT: yeah, I mean, how long has the project been going on now?
DNA: Well on and off for— it depends what you define as the project and what you don't, because there was a project to film it way back in 83, that then never happened. After several years passed, I bought the rights back, which was one of the most painful financial things I've ever done. And then there was another project to produce it with a film producer guy called Michael Nesmith, who's a very smart guy.
CDT: Not the Michael Nesmith?
DNA: Yes, yes, many many many years ago he wore a bobbly hat and played in the Monkees.
CDT: Just reading his novel as well, I think.
DNA: Yes, yes, he's a very smart guy. But even so, we didn't manage to get that project off the ground, and then suddenly Disney lept into the — well, actually, it was Roger Bienbaum at Caravan and now Spyglass who lead the charge to get it. You know Roger Bienbaum?
CDT: No, no, I er—
DNA: Well, he's a – one of the major producers— over the years he's produced Rain Man and Gorillas in the Mist and Gross Point Blank and GI Jane and most recently, the Sixth Sense.
CDT: Oh right. It seems somehow Disney is sucking in heroes of independent or alternative culture here, with David Lynch – his Disney movie is about to come out, and now—
DNA: Well, the thing is, Disney is just a huge media empire. It's funny, a number of people have said to me, why on earth are you doing it with Disney? Doesn't that mean it's going to be all sort of fluffy animals and family values and so on, and you have to point out that Disney wasn't just the company that did Bambi, it was also the company that did Pulp Fiction. And this is much bigger than Walt Disney pictures. So yes, they're spreading in all sorts of directions, but that's how big they are.
CDT: So we're not going to see a sort of cutesy CGI animated Marvin?
DNA: No. It may well be CGI, but I don't think it's going to be cutesy.
CDT: Well, that's good news. What about the book? I presume that the book will be a major—
DNA: Well, I think we have the opportunity of doing something really kind of astonishing on the screen with that. There is a little bit of background natter going on, and this is not by any means a firm proposal yet, of maybe also doing a 3-D Imax version of part of it or something, but actually being able to do parts of the book in 3-D hanging above the audience would be absolutely wonderful. It's very interesting, because when I— I'm not trying to make great claims of prescience, it was just sort of the accident of the moment, looking back, when we first tried putting this on TV, back in 1980, 81 or whenever this was, putting all these computer graphics on the screen, and that they went—I mean, the little animation company that had the job of doing that, those graphics, they didn't actually have a computer, so they had to paint all the computer graphics by hand, and—
CDT: But they did look stunning at the time.
DNA: But, what was interesting, that was a very hard sell at the time, trying to get people to understand what I was trying to do, and particularly trying to translate that into something that Hollywood at the time was absolutely impossible. Now it's suddenly becoming the most sort of, the lingua franca of the world—computer displays. So the challenge, really, is, you know, I first came up with the thing 21 years ago, and was coming up with something that was kind of far in the future science fiction. Now that future has kind of almost arrived, it's a question of how you can throw the ball forward again, in terms of how you actually see it, you know, how the thing responds to you, what you actually see on the screen. One of the guys I've been talking to in relation to this is somebody who's a little bit of a hero of mine, a guy called Douglas Trumper, who many years ago was the guy who did all the special effects in 2001, he's kind of remained very much at the forefront of digital graphics technology and communications technology and so on. He has some very interesting insights into those, and I very much hope he'll turn out to be involved in the movie.
CDT: One could almost imagine, with the incredible special effects, a movie in which the book is the main attraction and the story almost takes a back seat.
DNA: Well, I think, to be honest, if I was given completely free rein, that's exactly what would happen. I think, you know, when you're doing a movie and they're going to spend, I'm probably not even allowed to say how much money, but a lot of money, obviously, it's got to work as a story over a hundred, 110, 120 mins, whatever it is. So, there's a lot of pressure on me to tell the story, and there's a lot of pressure from me to realize all this stuff, and we'll come to a happy medium somewhere.
CDT: Hmm. But with the increasingly, I mean audiences are increasingly aware of and used to media saturation, which is sort of what the Guide is—
DNA: You're absolutely right. I mean, it's interesting watching the way in which you know, children will sometimes watch a video just on fast forward, and just absorb it all that way. And they're used to flicking backwards and forwards, watching a bit of this, bit of that. Actually, you know, we tend to, the older generation, we tend to think of this as an attention span deficit. But we all learn to, we all have our different languages. If you read Stephen Pinker's book on the language instinct, he talks about the ways in which, when children pass through the language acquisition stage in the first two years of their life, they aren't really acquiring language, they're almost just inventing it as they go along. They take whatever they find and make new languages out of it. Which is what the difference between a pidgeon language and a creole …. The next generation creates a very grammatically rich language. So I think when we look at the ways in which children interact with information and just think, you know, they're not concentrating properly, they're just absorbing information in a completely different way, and I think it's important to try and understand that and try and stay abreast of it. And understand what the implications are. And I think that therefore, that given any movie has a substantial part of its life in the cinema, it also has a second life in video or DVD now, and I think it's worth thinking about making sure there is a certain intensity that matches that medium.
CDT: Right. Well, let's segue from the Guide on the screen to the Guide in real life. First thing I wanted to ask is, you've talked to a certain extent in the past about the way you visualized the guide originally, as it was at the time that the first pocket calculators came out—
DNA: Right. Yep.
CDT:—and I wondered if there's been this whole evolution in your imagination of the Guide in your imagination from pocket calculator to Palm VII.
DNA: Very much so. Again, when I was thinking of it 20 years ago, I can't pretend I thought about it very deeply. These technologies were a long way in the future, I didn't have any particular grand insight into them, I was just sort of er, creating a storytelling device. It's interesting that I, not in the radio thing, but in the book or maybe it's on the TV, I can't remember, I actually have Ford, once he gets off Earth, sort of reconnecting to the general network out there, which is — I don't know where that came from, but it was about right. I guess what I hadn't foreseen, and let's face it, nobody had foreseen, was that completely open system that anybody could belong to, anybody could add stuff to, anybody could communicate across in any way they liked, would arrive— and the actual machines— the machines you use to access the Internet can be as big or small or purple or yellow as you like. It's completely irrelevant. It isn't a function of the machine, they're simply the buckets you take to the well, you can dip any size, shape of bucket into the well that suits you, your kind of purpose.
CDT: So early on, you had this idea of a network device.
DNA: Yep.
CDT: Right.
DNA: And the thing was, it was a kind of information source where people created collaboratively. So we had all these— I mean, Ford Prefect is just one researcher who's going out there and putting stuff into the guide. And, you know, I imagined, there are millions of researchers out there. I guess I hadn't quite, I hadn't realized, and I don't think anybody had until relatively recently, is that I probably don't actually need, the actual researcher as such — as a separate hired entity — is really a function of book publishing. When you have something like the Web where information that goes into it is instantly accessible to anybody, and anybody else can read it or comment on it or whatever, it means that the distinction between researchers and readers kind of disappears. It means that everybody is really sharing information, sharing knowledge.
CDT: It is also sort of an outdated concept that, I suppose was necessary, the whole idea that the entry on the Earth was cut back to two words.
DNA: Yup. I mean, that's completely outdated. I mean, that was completely wrong. But, you know. I think the surprise is that I got anything right, not that I did anything wrong. [laughs]
CDT: There is all this talk about the sub-ether net, and—
DNA: Yeah, yeah! It's very, well—
CDT:—quite visionary.
DNA: Yeah, well, it's kind of you to say that. I think it was just the luck of the moment.
CDT: So the er, where did the idea that came in pretty early, the origin of the Don't Panic cover. What was that?
DNA: Erm… to be honest, I can't remember. I mean, very often what happens when you're writing, I mean, you're working to a particular general, possibly quite vague idea. Er, but the very specific things that end up on the page tends to be what the sentence demands, if you see what I mean. So you need some nice way of ending this paragraph, or ending the sentence, and the actual words you use kind of come out of that rhythm. And then you think, does that mean anything? Does that sound as if it means anything? And if it sounds as if it means anything, it can stay there. If it doesn't, [laughs] I'll have to think of something that sounds better. You know. I think that just saying that saying it would have Don't Panic on it just seemed like a nice conclusion to that paragraph more than anything else.
CDT: So you're changing your mind all the time, for the sake of—
DNA: Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. Just thinking about the way in which you write books, now the text of Hitch-hiker's or any other books are set in stone, unless somebody makes a misprint, and very often I'll look at a bit of it and I'll see some paragraph that makes me wince, and think, oh, God, I wish I could change that, you know, I was really struggling a bit that day and really felt I had to write something, and then other occasions—there was one of the Dirk Gently books that people kept on asking me, you know, "I don't understand the end, what happened at the end," and I'd say "oh, just read it again, it'll all make sense, you just sort of read it again, read it more carefully," and they'd go away and read it again more carefully and come back and say "I still don't understand it," and I'd say "well, it's all there, it all makes sense." And then after a while I had to do a reading to tape of it, and I got to the end and thought, "humm. I don't quite understand what's happened there." [laughs] So I began to see what everyone else meant and what I meant. And if this stuff was out there soft, rather than printed on millions of pieces of paper, you'd all be adjusting that, I think the "leave-it" idea of the text as paramount, I think, will actually just disappear, because people would carry on tinkering with it.
CDT: Right. Well, it must be art if they can't understand it.
DNA: [Laughs]
CDT: I actually noticed there was a warning on the H2G2 site for researchers not to imitate your style—
DNA: Well, it's true that, and this is not me making claims of myself, it tends to be true of any writer who's got a distinctive style, that imitations of it always just sort of ring very false… everybody who starts writing has somebody they'll admire, whose rhythms will infuse their writing, but very quickly, if you're any good, what will happen is that very quickly something will emerge from that. You've got to have something to start with, but—
CDT: Who were your heroes to begin with?
DNA: Well, yeah, I only identified one of them inadvertently a couple of years ago, and I hadn't—which was, I mentioned, I had a daughter, she's five, and I was only reading the Winnie the Pooh books and I suddenly thought, Woha!
CDT: [laughs]
DNA: The language rhythms there had obviously gone very deep into me, because I recognize a lot of that…
CDT: Right.
DNA: And it was my mother who said, well, of course, you know, Marvin is, is Eeyore.
CDT: Yes.
DNA: And she'd said that to me before, and I'd said no, no, no, nonsense. And then when I was reading Winnie the Pooh to Polly, I thought, well, "oooh, I see what she means!" [laughs]
CDT: Yes. And all that business of capitalizing certain phrases, you know, "Very Important Thing."
DNA: Hmm. Yeah, yeah. Yes, so that, I think that was of a period, because you come across that as well in 1066, you know, 1066—
CDT: —And All That.
DNA: Yeah, but otherwise, I mean, the— so, A.A. Milne was I think, a kind of a secret influence on me, because I really wasn't aware of it happening, but I can't deny it was there. But there were other more obvious ones. I mean, certainly, one that was very large in my mind was Python, which was, you know, what I grew up with. Another terribly obvious one was Kurt Vonnegut.
CDT: Right.
DNA: Something I came to rather late in life, actually, but once I started reading him completely sort of swamped me, was PG Wodehouse. But I can almost tell to the paragraph, looking back in my books, where I started reading Wodehouse. Erm, and of course it's interesting that Milne was such an early influence, because of course Wodehouse and Milne couldn't stand each other. Oh, another influence I guess would be —when I cite these as influences, I don't remotely presume to any comparison, only, you know, the things that have had influence on me. So, when I mention names like Dickens and Austen, nevertheless, they were a very important part of, when I was growing up, understanding how you can make words funny, actually. Oh, and the other great one is Evelyn Waugh.
CDT: Right. Of course. Yes. Okay, well let me go through a quick list of questions passed on by colleagues here. First one, "new technology has been good to you and your franchise. Discuss."
DNA: [laughs] "me and my franchise?" [laughs]
CDT: I presume, the Hitch-Hiker's franchise.
DNA: Erm, well, I don't even know where to take that question, actually.
CDT: [laughs]
DNA: It doesn't seem to be asking anything sufficiently specific to, erm—
CDT: Well, if technology had stood still since 1977, you know, you wouldn't be where you are now.
DNA: Er, well, you mean I wouldn't be in California? [laughs]
CDT: [laughs] No, well, certain things that you've done, the game, the, you know.
DNA: I suppose the answer to that would be if all this new technology hadn't arisen, I probably would have spent more time writing, which would have been good for me. [laughs]
CDT: Weren't you a great procrastinator, in the beginning?
DNA: Oh, yeah, always have been, I'm afraid.
CDT: Do you still procrastinate?
DNA: Oh, yeah, yeah.
CDT: What's the chosen method of procrastination?
DNA: Er, technology. [laughs] Surfing the web, doing e-mail. Oh, I must just sort of—I must look at this site very quickly before I get down to work. You know. Or kind of, see if I've got any replies, oh I have had a reply, oh I'd better answer that just before I get down to work, you know, all that kind of stuff.
CDT: I was wondering if you were a big gaming fan.
DNA: Oddly enough, no. I mean, there was a point when I was, but only a very, very brief point, and that was all the way back in the days of text only games, which I thought were great. And I did one, along with a company called Infocom, who were sort of the top dogs at doing text-only games. But I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed that. And then, of course, a couple of years ago, with the Digital Village, we did this game Starship Titanic. Which I thought was terrific, but it was very interesting for me having done one fifteen years earlier, discovering how much more unwieldy a kind of project it is making one of those things now. Because when we did the Hitch-Hiker's Guide as a text-only game, it was me and one other guy—an experienced game writer…
CDT: Hmm.
DNA: And he and I went for six months, and then suddenly there it was, and it was something you could play for 40 hours. And now Starship Titanic took a couple of dozen to thirty people two years. And er, I was just one of those guys. So it's become a different kind of medium. To be honest, I don't know if the medium's changed or if I've changed or I've just got older, but I'm not particularly interested in computer games these days.
CDT: You have always been a big Mac fan.
DNA: Ah, yes.
CDT: What do you think of the new iMacs?
DNA: Well, I think, I couldn't be more happy at what Steve Jobs has done coming back to Apple and reinvigorating it, with all these new ideas and new technologies, and also just making, it's funny, his other move, apart from technological innovations is to make everything more stylish, and he gets a lot of flack for that, but at the same time everyone's trying to copy it. But I think that concept of design actually infuses the whole thing … it is an integrated system of hardware and software, and the real hard creativity that goes into designing those objects … [tape ends]
CDT: What computer are you using right now?
DNA: I'm sitting in front of a Macintosh Powerbook G3, bronze keyboard version. Actually, I'm just seeing what the apple stock price is, because I've finally, finally after all these years followed my own advice and bought some Apple stock the other day, so — Done very nicely, thank you very much. [laughs]
CDT: Are you on two phone lines? Or do you have DSL, cable?
DNA: No, no. ADSL I think I'm finally getting next week.
CDT: Right. Erm, next question from a colleague: Don't we already have a Hitch-Hiker's hand-held guide to the galaxy in the shape of the Palm VII?
DNA: Erm, well, yes and no. And I think the Palms are very nice devices, but I just think we have a very long way to go yet. I think that it's going to be — we're going to end up with— I try to avoid "end up," because it suggests there's some end point in view, but in fact things just continually change and change and change way, way into the future. I think we're at the point where all sorts of things are converging and that, when you have those sort of convergences there's an opportunity for an awful lot of creative thinking about how exactly things should just fit together, and something a little bit like the Palm VII but with, first of all, much much faster, permanently on connection to all the information out there, and I almost don't want to use the word "Web," because the Web is one model and I think it'll be supplanted by one better as we move — and the thing is, the Web is almost based on — it has too much of its roots in desktop publishing, which of course has its own roots in paper. So the model we see on the Web is still much, much too much based on paper, and not yet on the free-flow and interconnection and live interconnection of information. I think the other thing that needs to come into this technology as soon as it possibly can is GPS, so that these devices know where we are in cyberspace and know where we are in the real world. The moderating of this connection is I think going to be a source of great power.
[Starship Titanic … those are still two things hard to reconcile… if you pre-render something it can look absolutely fabulous and gorgeous… there would be two different ways of moving through the ship, the matter side and the data side, and you could move seamlessly from one to the other… if you look at the real world, then the matter side is the real world and what Gibson called cyberspace… these devices form the thing that can navigate through both, share things continuously with each other and live]. It's not a guide as you traditionally think of Guides, like the good food guide or the restaurant guide or the rough guides… there's a certain quality to those that comes from the fact that it's on paper and there's a limited amount of information. Somebody else is filtering it, editing it. It's not their fault, it's just the nature of that medium, and we're now in a completely different medium, and what happens when you move from one medium to another is you accidently take the old constraints with you until you learn to do without them, just as the first films included the proscenium arch. So I think as we look as how guides work on the screen, we've got to go looking through the proscenium arches, and how we can get rid of them. I think what we'll end up with, and I hope H2G2 is sort of in the foremost of creating, is something where essentially people are continuously sharing information in real time, and the underlying—the software underneath it is the thing that provides structure to that in real time.
CDT: So what we're envisioning at the end of the day is much like H2G2, completely down to earth, non-fiction product…
DNA: Oh, yes, it's non-fiction, yes. It's trying to realize the real thing in real life rather than trying to create something that's going to be a vehicle for fiction. Which is not to say people can't put fiction in there, provided we know, we have a very clear way of telling the difference. [laughs]
CDT: So we're not going to have a guide that tells you where the nearest restaurant is and also how to avoid the Ravenous Bugblatter beast of Traal?
DNA: Exactly. Though if you think about it, we go back to my model of the matter side and the data side, stories and fiction always exist in our software space, in the data side, and there's no reason why that can't be there as well. Provided you're very clear which it is you're seeing. I mean, you might be, you know, at Stonehenge, and want information about that, then, I suppose you know a lot of fictional stuff has happened around Stonehenge, like Far from the Madding Crowd, and there's no reason not to use that physical point of departure as a key into all those fictional things as well. But you're not going to, I hope, mistake the one for the other, despite what journalists may try. [laughs]
CDT: Well it is sort of setting itself up for those expectations, I suppose, with calling it a hand-held hitch-hiker's guide, it's going to …
DNA: Well, if it confuses people a little bit, I don't mind. [laughs]
CDT: Well, it's got to be good for sales, right?
DNA: yeah, yeah.
CDT: How involved are you in the day-to-day workings—
DNA: Just at this very moment, not so much, because I'm on the end of a modem. Once I'm on a faster link, I will be more so again. There's something about using a modem after years of ISDN and ethernet and so on, it's a bit of a shock. [laughs] My involvement with H2G2 as such is first of all historical, having created the thing it's based on, and then it's brainstorming with the guys who are running it, saying how should we be doing this, what are the ideas here, where should we be heading. Erm, and generally shaking things up. And then also, and this is something I'll be doing more once it's easier, doing my own content, just to drive additions to it.
CDT: Digital village is still private, right?
DNA: Yes.
CDT: Do you see a massive sort of IPO cash-in in its future?
DNA: I wouldn't say no. [laughs]
CDT: It certainly seems to have helped a lot of other companies, who fund further projects by raising a quick couple of billion on Wall Street.
DNA: Yeah, well, you know I always think a quick couple of billion comes in handy. [laughs]
CDT: With that sort of money, you could buy Disney.
DNA: It is funny to see the eruptions of wealth, like airbags going off. There are one or two people I know slightly or have met who just sort of suddenly become mega-billionaires. These are just guys who are the same age or younger than me, walking around completely bewildered. [laughs]
CDT: Do you feel jealous of these Young Turks, who are just coming in and launching net companies?
DNA: well, I don't know. If I said " no, no, no, of course not," would you believe me? [laughs]
CDT: Probably not. [laughs]
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