Post-Coda to the Hitchhiker's Guide On-line Fanfiction Project

The decision to base our on-line literature project on Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came about unanimously from out shared admiration for the work and our familiarity with it.

Thus we unwittingly fulfilled one of the basic criteria of fanfiction: admiration for the work and a wish to continue with the story.

For the first part of our project, we decided to create a fake on-line encyclopaedia explaining some of the elements in Adams’ books, and to add some contemporary ones that we felt were relevant to the course. The thought of creating an encyclopaedia was inspired by existing online encyclopaedias, namely the Wikipedia and the UrbanDictionary. However, we decided to keep our entries in tone with the book and make them amusing but rather useless.

We decided to select the important terms from as well as a few completely irrelevant, in keeping with the Hitchhiker’s Guide logic, and also add a few contemporary ones. In defining the terms, we followed another rule of fanfiction: emulating the tone of the original. We attempted to keep to the tone Adams uses throughout the books: dry wit, irony, understatement, non-sequitur random jokes. From authorial point of view, this proved harder than expected as I found it very difficult to forego my personal tone and worldview and prevent it from slipping into the definitions.

For the second part of the project, we decided to create a fake blog where characters from the books would post their thoughts and diary entries. Deciding on who is going to write whose entries for the blog, we fulfilled another criterion of fanfiction: likeness for a character and a wish to continue his or her story beyond the scope of the book.

For the actual writing, it was necessary to identify with the character, to step into their shoes, so to speak. For instance, I wrote the part of Marvin. Although I immensely like his character and share his resigned attitude to life, I found thinking like Marvin unexpectedly hard. First, the blog entry was in the form of a monologue, and Marvin does not have any in the book. He is always engaged in conversations with other characters. So it would be easy to write a comment or two, but I found writing a consistent paragraph difficult. Chiefly because the very act of verbalising his thoughts for posterity contradicts Marvin’s outlook on existence: it is pointless, and there is not sense in trying to do anything about it. So Marvin is not very likely to keep a journal.

Secondly, I found it very hard to keep up the tone. Marvin is very depressed indeed, and trying to write in his style made me very depressed too, to the point that of failing to see the point of the whole exercise. Getting over the existential question, I found consistency the main problem. I tried very hard to stick to Adams’ British-English register and slightly quaint turn of the phrase and realised that his mastery lies in the understatement and the seeming simplicity of his style. Even though his style is not manifestly obvious, the harder it is to keep it up.
My first-hand experience with creating on-line fanfiction altered my view of it, although not too radically. I used to consider fanfiction as a slightly dubious activity motivated by the fan’s desire to bask in the author’s reflected glory. I still think that this is the case in the vast majority of fanfiction works. However, now I have a deeper appreciation of the effort that is necessary for creating quality fanfiction. Even with good knowledge of the original, a reasonable grasp on reality and the English language, it is not easy to try to bend one’s imagination along somebody else’s line and especially, be consistent in doing so.

I am aware that despite linking it to fanfiction websites, our project will most likely vanish into the depths of the internet, maybe to be discovered at some future date by internet-archaeologists, who perhaps will cherish it as a piece of amateur-art. More likely it will be forgotten, abandoned, unread and unrated, like the vast majority of online fanfiction. On the other hand, Virilio tells us that internet obliterates geography and makes the outside the new centre, so perhaps by some fluke in its improbability drive our website will be discovered and enjoyed by other Hitchhiker’s Guide fans and random passers-by.