You know those polished wooden egg puzzles that people buy for you, the kind that are beautiful when they’re an egg but that fall apart into shards that seem impossible for mortals to reassemble? Then maybe after a lot of trying suddenly all these impossible three dimensional jigsaw pieces suddenly slot together and you have a lovely fragile egg again?
Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency always reminds me of one of those.
I didn’t read it for ages. It wasn’t that I didn’t like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it was just that I thought the plot had rather fallen apart in the later books. Indeed, the “throw in everything including the kitchen sink and St Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of God” style of the Hitchhiker books had lent the series high initial energy but did not lead to continuous plot, or even necessarily making sense. They were inventive and amusing, but he seemed to be juggling too many balls and letting a lot of them drop. I wasn’t in a hurry for more Douglas Adams in 1987. I didn’t get around to picking Dirk Gently up until Emmet insisted on lending it to me in the mid-nineties.
I read it for the first time on the train, the long six hour (if nothing went wrong) train journey between Cambridge and Lancaster. I read it with a five year old Sasha reading Tintin and Asterix comic books beside me and asking (admirably rarely) if we were nearly at Crewe yet and (regrettably frequently) to explain a pun to him. (There’s nothing like discovering how much sheer context and world knowledge a pun requires like explaining the puns in Asterix to a five year old.) Despite the inauspicious circumstances, Dirk Gently kept making me giggle, whereupon I resolutely refused to read the funny bits aloud. “You’ll want to read this yourself one day,” I said, and time proved me right. When he read it, aged about twelve, he loved it.
I’m going to give you one example, the one that had me laughing so helplessly on the train that people were turning around to look and poor five year old Sasha was embarrassed to be seen with me. Dirk Gently has a holistic detective agency of the kind that you’d expect to find in a Sheckley novel. Earlier, his secretary has torn out the middle of the dictionary to fit it into a drawer.
“Luckily,” he said, “You have come to exactly the right place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as impossible in my dictionary. In fact,” he added, brandishing the abused book, “Everything between herring and marmalade appears to be missing.”
It’s the timing that’s so beautiful, and the unlikeliness of the words.
What brings me back to it isn’t the funny bits, though some of them remain funny long after they’ve stopped being surprising. (Dirk’s later offered a herring, and says there’s no such word in his dictionary… and all of this is build up and foreshadowing for something that is in our world but not in theirs, yet.) What’s beautiful about it is the way the plot looks as if it’s bumbling along tossing elements into the blender and making a big messy stew, just like Hitchhiker, and then suddenly it gives a glorp and assembles itself into a perfect precise layer cake. In retrospect, every element of the book makes perfect glorious sense and needs to be there. It all fits together, from the way the sofa won’t go either up or down the stairs to the appalling dinner conversation about music on Radio Three. Things that look like jokes and asides are actually all set up. Every piece fits with every other piece like a perfect machine. It’s almost impossible to summarise or synopsise because of this. If you wanted to tell someone about it you’d have to say “Well, there’s this time machine. And the person from Porlock. And ghosts. And Bach was written by aliens. And it’s SF and very funny and it all totally makes sense eventually.” I admire it no end.
There are very few other examples of books I re-read to glory in the way they’re put together. There’s Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds, and John James’s Not For All the Gold in Ireland and perhaps—another time travel story—Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates.
This article was originally published in July 2008.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published a collection of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections and thirteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula winning Among Others. Her most recent book is Necessity. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here from time to time. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
Speaking of uniform colors, this is a question that’s always bugged me: Does anyone know why Roddenberry switched the colors for the Operations and Command divisions when TNG got started? I’ve never been able to find a satisfactory explanation.
Prof. Farnsworth: What the hell have you done, Fry?Fry: Relax! She can’t be my grandmother. I figured it all out.Prof. Farnsworth: Of course she’s your grandmother, you perverted dope! Look!Mildred: Come back to bed, deary.Fry: It’s impossible! I mean, if she’s my grandmother, who’s my grandfather?Prof. Farnsworth: Isn’t it obvious?Prof. Farnsworth: You are! – Roswell that ends (futurama), it applies to bashir in this episode
Dax’s legs.
@2, I still crack up at how they later refered to the events of that episode as Fry doing the “Nasty in the Pasty.”
I hope it’s OK that I have nothing substantial to add except to say that I loved this episode.
— Michael A. Burstein
Just an incredible episode…
The number 1,771,561 is not just a random estimate. It happens to be 11 to the 6th power. (A litter of 11 over a period of time sufficient to produce 6 generations.) The space in the storage compartment and the amount of grain consumed might well have been irrelevant.
“Does anyone know why Roddenberry switched the colors for the Operations and Command divisions when TNG got started?”
One answer I heard was that when the cast was being fitted for their uniforms, it was decided that Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes looked better in red than yellow/gold.
I’m glad David Gerrold finally got on-screen. In the book made from his script of the TOS episode, he explains that he wrote the scene with Kirk dresssing down the barfighters just to provide an opportunity for him to be an extra. But the producers decided that he was too scrawny to be a convincing Starfleet ensign.
Sherman’s planet was named after Gerrold’s then-girlfriend.
That’s a wonderful book, by the way, an excellent introduction to the TV scriptwriting of the period.
Some other prose followups:
“The Tribbles’ Pagh” by Ryan M. Williams in Strange New Worlds 09 follows up on the tribble infestation on the station (which spreads to Bajor before a solution is found).
There have been two different novel references to Lt. Watley. A Choice of Catastrophes by Michael Schuster and Steve Mollman alluded to her as Elaine Watley, ship’s historian, though she didn’t appear “onscreen” in the book. However, by the time I read that book, I’d already written her into Forgotten History as science officer Dierdre Watley. So I reconciled things by assuming that Dierdre was the character we saw in “Tribble-ations,” and the unseen Elaine was her sister. (Anyway, both of the 23rd-century starship historians we’ve seen, McGivers and Erickson, wore red for some reason, while Watley was in blue.)
Lucsly and Dulmur also appeared in two stories in Strange New Worlds II, “Gods, Fate and Fractals” by William Leisner and “Almost . . . But Not Quite” by Dayton Ward. There’s also a chapter featuring a version of them in Star Trek Online: The Needs of the Many by Michael A. Martin. All of those works spelled Dulmur’s name “Dulmer,” and TNotM basically portrays the characters as an extended Mulder/Scully homage, even though that’s not how they were actually played onscreen. Bill Leisner correctly discerned that Lucsly and Dulmur are basically Joe Friday and Bill Gannon as time cops, and that strongly informed my own characterization.
This is a fun episode and all, but it does have some flaws. For one thing, there were only 430 people on the Enterprise, so the sudden arrival of four unfamiliar faces should’ve attracted suspicion right away. Also, it doesn’t make sense that Dax never met Spock in person before, considering that Curzon and Spock were in the Federation diplomatic corps together for decades. (Then again, this is the first time Jadzia Dax has met him, so maybe she just means that her memories of Spock filtered through Curzon’s point of view didn’t convey his attractiveness.)
Not to mention the casual treatment of the rather shocking revelation that the Bajorans have an Orb capable of time travel. I mean, TIME TRAVEL!!! That’s a huge, huge deal! And yet DS9 never uses the Orb of Time as anything more than a plot convenience.
And the final shot of Sisko meeting Kirk bugs me, since Avery Brooks is put in place of the rather shorter Barbara Luna, so he’s kind of unnaturally shrunken there.
I also kind of wish the change in the Klingon makeup hadn’t been made explicit. Up until this point, the official position pretty much seemed to be that Klingons had always been ridged despite what TOS depicted. Roddenberry even explicitly said on occasion that what we’d seen on TV had just been a rough approximation and it wasn’t until TMP that they were able to show us what Klingons “really” looked like. “Blood Oath” changing the makeup for Kor, Kang, and Koloth without explanation certainly supported that theory. But they couldn’t do this episode without showing old-style Klingons, so they had to canonize the change, and at that point things started to get kind of fanwanky.
Still, I’m grateful to this episode for introducing Lucsly, Dulmur, and the DTI, and to Jansen and Blessing for creating such memorably deadpan characterizations for me to build on in my DTI books.
Also, Charlie Brill was much, much more interesting here than he was in “The Trouble With Tribbles.” He was a standout among the cast this time. And the compositing FX and the recreations of the sets, costumes, and props were superb.