The Salmon of Doubt

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The front cover of the UK first hardcover edition of The Salmon of Doubt.

The Salmon of Doubt (full title: The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time) is a collection of previously unpublished material by Douglas Adams, published after the author's death in 2001. English editions of the book were published in the USA and UK in May 2002, exactly one year after the author's death. It consists largely of a compilation of essays, most of which have a technological edge, but its major selling point is the inclusion of the incomplete novel on which Adams was working when he died (and from which the collection gets its title).

1 The Book
2 Versions
3 Notes
4 Reference
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] The Book

In a 1998 interview with Matt Newsome ^[1], Adams commented as to whether "The Salmon of Doubt" was going to be a "Dirk Gently" book or a continuation of the "Hitchhiker's Guide" series:

Adams: The thing with Dirk was that I felt I had lost contact with that character, I couldn't make that book viable, which is why I said, "Okay, let's go off and do something else." Then looking back at all the ideas that were there in "Salmon of Doubt", I looked at it again about a year later and suddenly realised what it was that I'd been getting wrong, which was that these are essentially much more like Hitch-Hiker ideas and not like Dirk Gently ideas.

So, there will come a point I suspect at some point in the future where I will write a sixth Hitch-Hiker book. But I kind of want to do that in an odd kind of way because people have said, quite rightly, that "Mostly Harmless" is a very bleak book. And it was a bleak book. The reason for that is very simple—I was having a lousy year, for all sorts of personal reasons that I don't want to go into, I just had a thoroughly miserable year, and I was trying to write a book against that background. And, guess what, it was a rather bleak book!

I would love to finish Hitch-Hiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number. I think that a lot of the stuff which was originally in "Salmon of Doubt", was planned into "Salmon Doubt" and really wasn't working, I think could be yanked out and put together some new thoughts.

Newsome: Yes, because certainly some people have heard that "Salmon of Doubt" was now going to be a new Hitch-Hiker book.

Adams: Well, In a sense, because I shall be salvaging some of the ideas I couldn't make work within a Dirk Gently framework and putting them in a Hitch-Hiker framework, undergoing necessary changes on the way. And, for old time's sake, I may call it, "Salmon of Doubt", I may call it -- well who knows!

The actual manuscript of the proposed novel is extremely short and only gives a glimpse of what The Salmon of Doubt would have been. It is composed of the best content out of several drafts (as were many of Adams' books). The book is set a few weeks after the events in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. A faxed summary reprinted before the text mentions travelling "through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos". Although both a rhinoceros and "The Way of the Nostril" (in the mysterious "DaveLand") are mentioned, no such nostril-based time travel occurs in the existent text.

The existing plot involves Dirk Gently, the detective protagonist of two earlier Adams novels, refusing to help find the missing half of a cat, receiving large amounts of money from an unknown client, and then flying to the United States. After refusing the case about the missing half of a cat, Dirk pays a visit to Kate Schechter (who had first appeared in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul). Dirk tells Kate that prior to the potential client, he had been so bored that he had started a habit of dialing his own phone number, and discovered that he'd answered his own call. This may have been foreshadowing some sort of time travel later on.

The extract from Newsome's full interview reprinted in the book reveals that Adams did not like the ending he wrote to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy", and realised that the ideas he had been working on for Salmon of Doubt might work better as a sixth book in that series. In the book, Dirk follows around a ginger haired actor; Ford Prefect is described as having ginger-coloured hair, and his disguise during his stay on Earth includes his being an out-of-work actor. It is possible that this is him, and forms a link between the two series, or that the text was in a state of metamorphosis from one to the other – but no one will ever know.

There are slight differences in varying editions of the book. The UK edition includes a foreword by Stephen Fry, and the US edition, instead, has an introduction by Christopher Cerf. The audiobook edition consists of 7 CDs, mostly read by Simon Jones, but also includes both of the aforementioned introductions, read by their respective authors, as well as the tributes written and read by Professor Richard Dawkins. US paperback editions have yet another introduction, written by Terry Jones, and omit some material due to issues with copyright.

[edit] Versions

US Hardcover edition, published by Harmony: ISBN 1-4000-4508-8
UK Hardcover edition, published by Macmillan: ISBN 0-333-76657-1
US audiobook edition (CD), published by New Millennium Audio: ISBN 1-59007-151-4
US trade paperback edition, published by Ballantine: ISBN 0-345-46095-2
US mass paperback edition, published by Del Rey: ISBN 0-345-45529-0
UK paperback edition, published by Pan: ISBN 0-330-41956-0

[edit] Notes

Early editions of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, printed circa 1988, have a blurb on the cover reading, "The Dazzling Bestseller By the Author of The Salmon of Doubt".
An unsigned band, Men From Earth, used the title Salmon of Doubt as a title for a song. It was heavily downloaded during the time between Adams's death and the release of the book. The band removed it from their website when it became apparent that the unfinished book would get a release, but it does show up on some file-sharing networks.