Neil Gaiman Not Panicking

Neil Gaiman has given an interview to Kathie Huddleston for Science Fiction Weekly about Don’t Panic, his companion to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and his friendship with Douglas Adams.

What surprised you most about the experience of writing this book and the journey that it’s taken?

Gaiman: I think there have been several surprises. The biggest one when writing it was how many of the things in Hitchhiker one thought of being set in stone, when they were merely accidents. The biggest and most obvious one is Arthur Dent’s dressing gown, which may seem a silly and rather goofy thing. But in the first couple of Hitchhiker books on radio they never actually mention the dressing gown. The dressing gown only turns up on the TV series and, in fact, Douglas wrote a scene where Arthur gets to wear this silver space costume. And the director, who Douglas very much disliked, Alan J.W. Bell, took it out and kept him in the dressing gown the whole time. Which was something that Douglas actually liked enough to keep it in subsequent books. So, Arthur Dent and his dressing gown remained after that. I always like the strange accidental nature of that.

Later in the interview Gaiman notes that some of the stories Adams told in later years about the reception Hitchhiker’s received … um … grew in the telling. It’ll be more difficult for writers to pull that sort of trick now that so many of them have weblogs and online journals where they discuss that sort of thing more-or-less as it happens

[Edited to update URL for interview. jr 12 Dec 2003]