The Hitchhikers Guide to the New Economy

Adams found himself staying in swank hotel rooms where he had to open half a dozen doors just to find the bed. It was terrible. "One successful book demands that you write another to pay the taxes on income from the previous one," he says. "I was on a round of writing novels. I was more and more sitting in a room by myself. That's not something that I very much enjoy doing."

Ford Prefect was desperate that any flying saucer at all would arrive soon because fifteen years was a long time to get stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind- bogglingly dull as the Earth. Ford wished that a flying saucer would arrive soon because he knew how to flag flying saucers down and get lifts from them. ... In fact, Ford Prefect was a roving researcher for that wholly remarkable book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Adams became a fiction: Douglas Adams and his hero, Arthur Dent, traded places.

The story that Adams first conceived in 1977 begins innocuously enough. It starts on an ordinary morning, with Arthur Dent brushing his teeth. Looking into his shaving mirror, the hero sees the reflection of a yellow bulldozer driving along his garden path: Arthur's house is to be flattened to make room for a highway. A friend named Ford Prefect, an alien from the planet Betelgeuse, takes Arthur to a bar, knowing full well that in precisely 12 minutes, the Earth will suffer a fate similar to that of Arthur's house: It will be destroyed to clear a path for an intergalactic highway.

Blown sky high, hitching an improbable ride on a passing spacecraft, Arthur finds himself playing Tonto to Ford's Lone Ranger. Ford both writes for and totes an essential survival tool, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which offers such indispensable advice as "A towel has immense psychological value" - which is practical, perhaps, if you're not only homeless but also Earthless. As Arthur and Ford wander through the galaxy, they must be clever and, if possible, handsome. They must also avoid getting eaten by space ants, vaporized by fiends, and bored to death by bad poets.

Fifteen years after Arthur and Ford hitched up, Adams found himself at home, newly married, a first-time father, and comfortable - yet miserably so. He was chained by the demands of writing a new book. Then, all of a sudden, his life was bulldozed to make way for a new highway: the Internet.

And there, offering a hand, was his own Ford Prefect.

It is a truism among storytellers that the more explicitly they imagine a character, the more certain it is that a real-life replica will walk into their life. Robbie Stamp, 37, showed up in Adams's life exactly as Ford Prefect had shown up in Arthur's.

Stamp, then a television producer, met Adams on one of those miserably comfortable days. He wanted to discuss collaborating with Adams on a TV series about evolution. Instead of doing just a TV show, they decided to build TDV.

It wasn't love at first sight. Professionally speaking, it was better than that: It was life at first sight. For Adams, it was a rescue. For Stamp, it was a trip.

Just as Adams is obsessed by things galactic, Stamp is obsessed by things small and immediate. He wrote a definitive history of deception in World War II - a tale as bizarre as any of Adams's fictions, except that it's true. He described how the British floated fake bodies on the water to deceive German troops. He told of double agents, spurious maps, bogus marriage announcements, even exploding camel dung! Here was a realist after Adams's own heart. "Military deception," says Stamp, "is one of the biggest intellectual achievements in history. The attention to detail is awesome. The wrong color on a fake door hinge can give you away. And for me, the importance of detail isn't limited to wars. If I patronize a supermarket chain and once, just once, somebody is rude to me, that's it - I take my business somewhere else. The whole chain is totally vulnerable to the person you ask to direct you to the tomatoes. We're all vulnerable to the tiniest elements."

Stamp took everything that he had learned about the theaters of war and went into the theater of the imagination. He traveled to India to help mount plays in the open air. While there, he saw performances of The Mahabharata, one of India's great epic poems, and observed something that changed his view of this medium, or of any medium, for that matter: "The players hold candles, and people in the audience strike a light, they pay a bit of money, and they request the actors to enact a story or scene." For Stamp, the experience was proof positive that people want to receive information interactively - and as a story.

The right story will bring them to you in droves.