Was Douglas Adams Channeling Shakespeares Muse?
There are a number of websites containing – some dedicated to – compilations of sightings of 42 in literature and pop culture. To date, I’ve not seen this oddity posted anywhere. More than simple numerology, or equations with numbers in base 10 and base 13, the following seems to reverberate on several levels. In the 1970’s Douglas Adams wrote the radio-play series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” in which the answer to “Life, the Universe, Everything” was revealed by a computer to be ’42’, or, perhaps forty-two. This less-than-satisfactory answer led to the need for better definition of ‘The Question’ that was revealed at the end of the series through Scrabble tiles spelling out “What do you get if you multiply six by nine?” The radio-play, the BBC television series, the books and the movie version of H2G2 tend toward diminishing the significance of forty-two. Douglas Adams showed his disdain for those wishing to read significance into “42” and “6×9”. “It’s a joke! Move on!”, he
