UrbanLegendXV/SolomonVoice1 · Datasets at Hugging Face

audio_file audioduration (s) 5 14.3	transcript stringlengths 25 186
	Introduction, a guide to the guide, some unhelpful remarks from the author.
	The history of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is now so complicated that every time I tell it, I contradict myself, and whenever I do get it right, I misquote it.
	So the publication of the Zomnabis edition seemed like a good opportunity to set the record straight, or at least firmly crooked.
	Anything that is put down wrong here, as as far as I'm concerned, wrong for good. The idea for the title first cropped up while I was lying drunk in a field in Innsburg
	Austria in 1971. Not particularly drunk? Just the sort of drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff goasters after not having
	eaten for two days straight. On account of being a penniless Hitchhiker, we are talking of a mild inability to stand
	up. I was traveling with the copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe by Ken Walsh, a very
	battered copy that I had borrowed from someone. In fact, since this was 1971, and I still have the book, it must count as stolen by now.
	I didn't have a copy of Europe on $5 a day, as it then was, because I wasn't in that fine-antile league.
	That was beginning to fall on my field, as it spun lazily underneath me. I was wondering where I could go that was cheaper than Innsburg.
	Resolved less and didn't do the sort of things to me that Innsburg had done to me that afternoon.
	What had happened was this. I had been walking through the town trying to find a particular address, and being thoroughly
	lost, I stopped to ask for directions from a man in the street. I knew this might...
	...tend to be easy, because I don't speak German, but I was still surprised to discover just how much difficulty I was having communicating with this particular man.
	Gradually, the truth dawned on me as we struggled in vain to understand each other, that of all the people in Innsburg, I could have stopped to ask, the one I had picked did
	not speak English, and did not speak French, and was also deaf and dumb.
	With a series of sincerely apologetic hand movements, I disentangled myself in a few minutes later on another street, I stopped and asked another man who also turned out to
	be deaf and dumb, which was when I bought the beers.
	I ventured back onto the street, I tried again. When the third man I spoke to, turned out to be deaf and dumb and also blind, I began
	to fill a terrible weight settling on my shoulders. Wherever I looked, the trees and buildings took on dark and menacing aspects.
	I pulled my coat tightly around me and hurried, lurching down the street, whipped by a sudden gusting wind.
	I bumped into someone and stammered an apology, but he was deaf and dumb and unable to understand
	me. The sky lured. The pavement seemed to tip and spin.
	If I hadn't happened then to duck down a side street and pass a hotel where a convention
	for the deaf was being held, there is every chance that my mind would have cracked completely, and I would have spent the rest of my life writing the sort of books for which Kafka became
	famous and dribbling. As it is, I went to lie in a field, along with my hitchhike as guide to Europe, and when
	the stars came out and occurred to me that if only someone would write a hitchhike as guide to the galaxy as well, then I for one would be off like a shop.
	Having had this thought, I promptly fell asleep and forgot about it for 6 years.
	I went to Cambridge University. I took a number of bass and degree in English. I worried a lot about girls and what had happened to my bike.
	Later I became a writer and worked on a lot of things that were almost incredibly successful, but in fact just felt to see the light of day.
	Other writers will know what I mean. My pet project was to write something that would combine comedy and science fiction and
	it was this obsession that drove me into deep debt and despair. No one was interested, except finally one man, a BBC radio producer named Simon Brett
	who had had the same idea, comedy and science fiction.
	Although Simon only produced the first episode before leaving the BBC to concentrate on his own writing, his best known in the United States were his excellent Charles Paris detective
	novels. I owe him an immense debt of gratitude for simply getting the thing to happen in the
	first place. He was succeeded by the legendary Geofre Perkins.
	In his original form the show was going to be rather different.
	I was feeling a little disgruntled with the world at the time and it put together about six different plots.
	Each of which ended with the destruction of the world in a different way, and for a different
	reason. It was to be called the Ends of the Earth. While I was feeling in the details of the first plot in which the earth was demolished
	to make way for a new hyperspace express route, I realized that I needed to have someone
	from another planet around to tell the reader what was going on to give the story context
	to the context it needed.
	So I had to work out who he was and what he was doing on the earth. I decided to call him Ford Prefect.
	This was a joke that had missed American audiences entirely. Of course since they had never heard of the rather oddly named Little Car and many thought
	I was a typing error for perfect.
	I explained in the text that the minimal research my alien character had done before arriving on this planet had led him to think that this name would be nicely inconspicuous.
	He had simply mistaken the dominant life form. So how would such mistake arise?
	I remembered when I used to hitchhike through Europe and would often find that the information
	or advice that came my way was out of date or misleading in some way. Most of it of course just came from the stories of other peoples travel experiences.
	At that point the title the hitchhike was a guy to big galaxy suddenly popped back into my mind from wherever it had been hiding all this time.
	Ford I decided would be a researcher who collected data from the guide.
	As soon as I started to develop this particular notion it moved inexorably to the center of the story and the rest as the creator of the original Ford prefect would say is Bunk.
	The story grew in the most convoluted way as many people would be surprised to learn.
	Writing episodically meant that when I finished one episode I had no idea what the next
	one would contain. When in the twists and turns of the plot some event suddenly seemed to illuminate things
	that had gone before I was surprised as anyone else. I think that the BBC's attitude toward the show was in the production very similar
	to that which Mick Beth had toward murdering people. A national doubts followed by the cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm
	at the sheer scale of the undertaking and still no end in sight. Reports that Jaffery and I, the sound engineers were buried in a single subterranean studio
	for weeks on end taking as long to produce a single sound effect as other people took to produce an entire series and stealing everybody else's studio time in which to do so
	were all vigorously denied but absolutely true. The budget of the series escalated at the point that it could have practically paid for
	a few seconds of Dallas. Only a few seconds.
	If the show hadn't worked the first episode went on on BBC Radio 4 at 10.30pm on Wednesday
	March 8th 1978 and a huge blaze of no publicity at all.
	Bats heard it, the odd dog barked.
	After a couple weeks a letter or two trickled in so someone there had listened.
	People I talked to seemed like Marvin the Paranoid Android whom I had written and in as a
	one-scene joke and had only developed further at Jaffery's insistence.
	Then some publishers became interested and I was commissioned by Pan Books in England to write up the series in a book form.
	After a lot of procrastination and hiding and inventing excuses and having baths, I managed
	to get about two thirds of it done. At this point they said very pleasantly and politely that I had already passed ten deadlines
	so would I please just finish the page I was on and let them have the damn thing.
	Meanwhile, I was busy trying to write another series and was also writing and scripted editing the TV series, Dr.
	Fuckin' Who. Because well it was all very pleasant to have your own radio series, especially one that
	somebody had written in to say they had heard, it didn't exactly buy you lunch.
	So that was more or less the situation when the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was published in England in September 1979 and appeared on the Sunday Times mass market
	bestseller list as number one and just stayed there. Clearly, somebody had been listening.
	This is where things start getting complicated and this is what I was asked. In writing this introduction to explain, the guide has appeared in so many forms, books,
	radio, a television series, records and soon to be a major motion picture each time
	with a different storyline that even in its most acute followers have become baffled at times.
	Other than is a breakdown of the different versions, not including the various stage versions which have been seen in the states and only complicate the matter further.
	The radio series began in England in March 1978, the first series consisted of six programs
	or fits as they were called. Fits one through six, easy later than year. Later that year one more episode was recorded in broadcast commonly known as the Christmas
	episode. It contained no reference of any kind of Christmas. It was called the Christmas episode because it was first broadcast on December 24th, which
	is not Christmas day. After this, things began to increasingly get complicated.
	To get increasingly complicated, in the fall of 1979, the first Hitchhiker book was published
	in England called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was this substantially expanded version of the first four episodes of the radio series
	in which some of the characters behaved in entirely different ways and often behaved in exactly the same ways but for entirely different reasons.
	Which amounts to the same thing but saves you writing the dialogue. At roughly the same time a double record album was released, which was by contrast a slightly
	contradictory version of the first four episodes of the radio series. These were not the recordings that were originally broadcast but wholly new recordings of substantially
	the same scripts. This was done because we had used music off-gramophone records as incidental music for the series, which
	was fine on radio but makes commercial release impossible. In January 1980, five new episodes of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy were broadcast
	on BBC Radio all in one week bringing the total number to 12 episodes. Are you following?
	In the fall of 1980, the second Hitchhiker book was published in England around the same time that Harmony Books published the first book in the United States.
	It was a very substantially reworked, re-edited and contradicted, contracted version of the episodes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 5, and 6.
	In that order of the radio series, the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In that same two straight forward, in case that seemed two straight forward, the book was
	called the restaurant at the end of the universe because it included the material from the radio episode 5 of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which was sent in a restaurant
	called Millie Ways, otherwise known as the restaurant at the end of the universe.
	At roughly the same time a second record album was made featuring a heavily rewritten and expanded version of episode 5 and 6 of the radio series.
	This record album was also called the restaurant at the end of the universe. Meanwhile, in a series of six television episodes of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was

Introduction, a guide to the guide, some unhelpful remarks from the author.

The history of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is now so complicated that every time I tell it, I contradict myself, and whenever I do get it right, I misquote it.

So the publication of the Zomnabis edition seemed like a good opportunity to set the record straight, or at least firmly crooked.

Anything that is put down wrong here, as as far as I'm concerned, wrong for good. The idea for the title first cropped up while I was lying drunk in a field in Innsburg

Austria in 1971. Not particularly drunk? Just the sort of drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff goasters after not having

eaten for two days straight. On account of being a penniless Hitchhiker, we are talking of a mild inability to stand

up. I was traveling with the copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe by Ken Walsh, a very

battered copy that I had borrowed from someone. In fact, since this was 1971, and I still have the book, it must count as stolen by now.

I didn't have a copy of Europe on $5 a day, as it then was, because I wasn't in that fine-antile league.

That was beginning to fall on my field, as it spun lazily underneath me. I was wondering where I could go that was cheaper than Innsburg.

Resolved less and didn't do the sort of things to me that Innsburg had done to me that afternoon.

What had happened was this. I had been walking through the town trying to find a particular address, and being thoroughly

lost, I stopped to ask for directions from a man in the street. I knew this might...

...tend to be easy, because I don't speak German, but I was still surprised to discover just how much difficulty I was having communicating with this particular man.

Gradually, the truth dawned on me as we struggled in vain to understand each other, that of all the people in Innsburg, I could have stopped to ask, the one I had picked did

not speak English, and did not speak French, and was also deaf and dumb.

With a series of sincerely apologetic hand movements, I disentangled myself in a few minutes later on another street, I stopped and asked another man who also turned out to

be deaf and dumb, which was when I bought the beers.

I ventured back onto the street, I tried again. When the third man I spoke to, turned out to be deaf and dumb and also blind, I began

to fill a terrible weight settling on my shoulders. Wherever I looked, the trees and buildings took on dark and menacing aspects.

I pulled my coat tightly around me and hurried, lurching down the street, whipped by a sudden gusting wind.

I bumped into someone and stammered an apology, but he was deaf and dumb and unable to understand

me. The sky lured. The pavement seemed to tip and spin.

If I hadn't happened then to duck down a side street and pass a hotel where a convention

for the deaf was being held, there is every chance that my mind would have cracked completely, and I would have spent the rest of my life writing the sort of books for which Kafka became

famous and dribbling. As it is, I went to lie in a field, along with my hitchhike as guide to Europe, and when

the stars came out and occurred to me that if only someone would write a hitchhike as guide to the galaxy as well, then I for one would be off like a shop.

Having had this thought, I promptly fell asleep and forgot about it for 6 years.

I went to Cambridge University. I took a number of bass and degree in English. I worried a lot about girls and what had happened to my bike.

Later I became a writer and worked on a lot of things that were almost incredibly successful, but in fact just felt to see the light of day.

Other writers will know what I mean. My pet project was to write something that would combine comedy and science fiction and

it was this obsession that drove me into deep debt and despair. No one was interested, except finally one man, a BBC radio producer named Simon Brett

who had had the same idea, comedy and science fiction.

Although Simon only produced the first episode before leaving the BBC to concentrate on his own writing, his best known in the United States were his excellent Charles Paris detective

novels. I owe him an immense debt of gratitude for simply getting the thing to happen in the

first place. He was succeeded by the legendary Geofre Perkins.

In his original form the show was going to be rather different.

I was feeling a little disgruntled with the world at the time and it put together about six different plots.

Each of which ended with the destruction of the world in a different way, and for a different

reason. It was to be called the Ends of the Earth. While I was feeling in the details of the first plot in which the earth was demolished

to make way for a new hyperspace express route, I realized that I needed to have someone

from another planet around to tell the reader what was going on to give the story context

to the context it needed.

So I had to work out who he was and what he was doing on the earth. I decided to call him Ford Prefect.

This was a joke that had missed American audiences entirely. Of course since they had never heard of the rather oddly named Little Car and many thought

I was a typing error for perfect.

I explained in the text that the minimal research my alien character had done before arriving on this planet had led him to think that this name would be nicely inconspicuous.

He had simply mistaken the dominant life form. So how would such mistake arise?

I remembered when I used to hitchhike through Europe and would often find that the information

or advice that came my way was out of date or misleading in some way. Most of it of course just came from the stories of other peoples travel experiences.

At that point the title the hitchhike was a guy to big galaxy suddenly popped back into my mind from wherever it had been hiding all this time.

Ford I decided would be a researcher who collected data from the guide.

As soon as I started to develop this particular notion it moved inexorably to the center of the story and the rest as the creator of the original Ford prefect would say is Bunk.

The story grew in the most convoluted way as many people would be surprised to learn.

Writing episodically meant that when I finished one episode I had no idea what the next

one would contain. When in the twists and turns of the plot some event suddenly seemed to illuminate things

that had gone before I was surprised as anyone else. I think that the BBC's attitude toward the show was in the production very similar

to that which Mick Beth had toward murdering people. A national doubts followed by the cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm

at the sheer scale of the undertaking and still no end in sight. Reports that Jaffery and I, the sound engineers were buried in a single subterranean studio

for weeks on end taking as long to produce a single sound effect as other people took to produce an entire series and stealing everybody else's studio time in which to do so

were all vigorously denied but absolutely true. The budget of the series escalated at the point that it could have practically paid for

a few seconds of Dallas. Only a few seconds.

If the show hadn't worked the first episode went on on BBC Radio 4 at 10.30pm on Wednesday

March 8th 1978 and a huge blaze of no publicity at all.

Bats heard it, the odd dog barked.

After a couple weeks a letter or two trickled in so someone there had listened.

People I talked to seemed like Marvin the Paranoid Android whom I had written and in as a

one-scene joke and had only developed further at Jaffery's insistence.

Then some publishers became interested and I was commissioned by Pan Books in England to write up the series in a book form.

After a lot of procrastination and hiding and inventing excuses and having baths, I managed

to get about two thirds of it done. At this point they said very pleasantly and politely that I had already passed ten deadlines

so would I please just finish the page I was on and let them have the damn thing.

Meanwhile, I was busy trying to write another series and was also writing and scripted editing the TV series, Dr.

Fuckin' Who. Because well it was all very pleasant to have your own radio series, especially one that

somebody had written in to say they had heard, it didn't exactly buy you lunch.

So that was more or less the situation when the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was published in England in September 1979 and appeared on the Sunday Times mass market

bestseller list as number one and just stayed there. Clearly, somebody had been listening.

This is where things start getting complicated and this is what I was asked. In writing this introduction to explain, the guide has appeared in so many forms, books,

radio, a television series, records and soon to be a major motion picture each time

with a different storyline that even in its most acute followers have become baffled at times.

Other than is a breakdown of the different versions, not including the various stage versions which have been seen in the states and only complicate the matter further.

The radio series began in England in March 1978, the first series consisted of six programs

or fits as they were called. Fits one through six, easy later than year. Later that year one more episode was recorded in broadcast commonly known as the Christmas

episode. It contained no reference of any kind of Christmas. It was called the Christmas episode because it was first broadcast on December 24th, which

is not Christmas day. After this, things began to increasingly get complicated.

To get increasingly complicated, in the fall of 1979, the first Hitchhiker book was published

in England called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was this substantially expanded version of the first four episodes of the radio series

in which some of the characters behaved in entirely different ways and often behaved in exactly the same ways but for entirely different reasons.

Which amounts to the same thing but saves you writing the dialogue. At roughly the same time a double record album was released, which was by contrast a slightly

contradictory version of the first four episodes of the radio series. These were not the recordings that were originally broadcast but wholly new recordings of substantially

the same scripts. This was done because we had used music off-gramophone records as incidental music for the series, which

was fine on radio but makes commercial release impossible. In January 1980, five new episodes of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy were broadcast

on BBC Radio all in one week bringing the total number to 12 episodes. Are you following?

In the fall of 1980, the second Hitchhiker book was published in England around the same time that Harmony Books published the first book in the United States.

It was a very substantially reworked, re-edited and contradicted, contracted version of the episodes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 5, and 6.

In that order of the radio series, the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In that same two straight forward, in case that seemed two straight forward, the book was

called the restaurant at the end of the universe because it included the material from the radio episode 5 of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which was sent in a restaurant

called Millie Ways, otherwise known as the restaurant at the end of the universe.

At roughly the same time a second record album was made featuring a heavily rewritten and expanded version of episode 5 and 6 of the radio series.

This record album was also called the restaurant at the end of the universe. Meanwhile, in a series of six television episodes of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was