The Hitchhikers Guide to the New Economy

These tales of success are all the work of storytellers and fictioneers. For Adams, the lesson at the heart of science fiction is simple: There is chaos in life, but if you keep an open mind and entertain all kinds of possibilities - as storytellers know how to do - you will end up beyond any place or any goal that you could rationally see. Imagine a business plan that promises, "My cartoon mouse, named Mickey, will become a $75 billion business in 75 years." To make that kind of leap, you have to hitchhike.

Adams has always lived his dreams. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) is a book of fiction about a fictional guidebook called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and it features a fictional media company that produces the guidebook. What Adams dreamed, he's now creating: His title at TDV is, after all, chief fantasist. His own story - part dream, part science-fiction fantasy, part business success - serves as a hitchhiker's guide to a world where you can combine art with business and technology with dreams.

He was about thirty as well, tall, dark-haired and never quite at ease with himself. The thing that used to worry him most was the fact that people always used to ask him what he was looking so worried about. He worked in local radio which he always used to tell his friends was a lot more interesting than they probably thought. It was, too - most of his friends worked in advertising. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Every startup is a story, and every entrepreneur is a storyteller. A guy like Adams, who thinks no small thoughts, now finds himself living the biggest thoughts he's ever had.

"Before h2g2, I was basically just being born," says Adams, as if his previous life were a blur. "In the year I took off between high school and college, I traveled. I had a copy of a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe, which I got from someone and still have, and which probably counts as stolen by now. I was lying in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, and the stars came out, and I thought, 'Oh, it looks much more interesting up there.' A title fell out of the sky: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It seemed like a book that somebody ought to write, but it didn't occur to me that I should be the one to do it."

So instead Adams went to Cambridge to study English literature. He wanted to be John Cleese, but the job was taken. "One thing didn't lead to another, and I ended up being not a performer but just a writer," he says. He wrote for radio, much like Arthur Dent, the fictional hero in h2g2. But the work wasn't steady: "I got seriously broke and took a job as a bodyguard for an Arab royal family."

He sat outside the family's hotel room. The elevator cars came and went all night long: "At night, when they're not in regular use, it's bad for them just to stop, so they're programmed to go up and down at random. Every two or three minutes, an elevator would arrive, open its doors, spit out some Muzak, and go away. My job was to stay sane. This is why there is a lot in h2g2 about elevators."

He kept returning to the idea of science-fiction comedy, which had never been tried before. "I was told it couldn't possibly work, because if it could work, somebody would have done it by now. One day, I was tossing around sci-fi comedy ideas, and this title I had years ago turned out to be the missing link. I went to my mother's house in Dorset for Christmas, and I stayed there for a year to write h2g2."

It was 1977. He wrote the story as a radio script: "Radio is able to take risks that TV can't. Television has a tendency to supplant the imagination. In radio," he says pointedly, "the pictures are better."

A publisher heard the broadcasts in March 1978 and asked Adams to turn the script into a book.

"We knew the show had gone well. We'd had a couple of letters. The book came out on a Thursday, and on Saturday, I went to a book-signing in a little bookstore in London. As I drove up, I saw that the streets were full of people and that there were traffic jams. I thought, 'Oh no, how do I get around all this?' Then I realized it was for me. The store had expected 75 people, and 1,500 had showed up. The next day, h2g2 appeared as number one on the [London] Sunday Times best-seller list," Adams recalls. "In three days, my life changed completely. I felt slightly numb. It was like having an orgasm with no foreplay."

Adams became a global star, if not a galactic one. His reality became a dream. His books sold millions of copies. He wrote sequels - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), and Mostly Harmless (1992) - and a bunch of other books besides. He found himself playing guitar with Pink Floyd. He called up one of his heroes, Paul McCartney. He met his other hero, John Cleese, and collaborated with another Python, Graham Chapman. Scores of readers pored over his work as if it were by Shakespeare: They debated why, in h2g2, the meaning of life is determined to be "forty-two."