The Hitchhiker's Guide to Dimension of Miracles

As I move into the final stages of the final, (no really this time, final, I swear) draft of my latest novel, it occurred to me I should be reading more science fiction. I say this with a bemusement, since the latest novel is comedic science fiction, and it is as stated, all but completely finished. For the record, it is also a satire of the Carter administration, the worthlessness of government bureaucracy and the type of fundamentalism fomented by false prophets who masquerade as legitimate religious figures.

I don't know if other writers do this, but I make a conscientious decision to avoid reading works in a similar vein when I am writing. This is also true in my professional career in advertising. If I am working on, a video game or a car brand, I will look to see the previous brand's commercials, but I won't study the whole category as I don't want to be influenced by it, either directly or indirectly. My work has always been influenced by other medium, anyway. My love of music is how New Roman Times and A-Sides & B-Sides came to be, same with this novel and the next which I plan to continue in late spring.

Now that I am so near the novel's finish line, and it is only a matter of carving out what few moments I have every day to bring it to completion, I have some extra leisure time. As a result, I am getting back into reading. With my schedule being so erratic, and a rediscovered love of long hours in the gym or walking, I am finding this is best accomplished via audio books.

By the end of this weekend, I will have finished a 1968 sci-fi comedy classic called Dimension of Miracles by Robert Scheckley. I hadn't really encountered his writing before now, with the exception of the movie The Tenth Victim. I wasn't aware that Italian classic was an adaptation of one of his short stories until I read his bio.

The book was written in 1968. It is astonishing to me how many similarities it shares to The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Douglas Adams had apparently never read any of Sheckley's books until after his was published, and chalked it up to coincidence. I would say this is true. Thematically, they delve into the same philosophical questions. The satire is much the same, albeit one is with a British eye. While they share the same absurdist sense of humor, the worlds (as much as their words) are wholly unique.

I'm not sure if anyone has adapted or tried to adapt Dimension of Miracles into a film or miniseries even radio show (or even a video game) the way Hitchhiker's was, but they would run into the same challenges. Both works paint worlds so colorful, they demand to be visualized. But the concepts are so abstract and ponderous, and some of the dialogue so brainy, it demands to be kept to the written word.

The BBC miniseries of Hitchhiker's Guide is the closest anyone will get to making that a decent production. It was low-budget but acted more as a stage play adaptation, which allows for more concentration on the words. The movie adaptation fell quite flat. Whatever it got visually right, and as perfect as Alan Rickman was as Marvin the robot, the tone was too twee and camp to take on the earnestness that is at the heart of the book. For what is the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide but a stand-in for any other philosophical text such as the Bible? And what is the absurdity of calling the answer to Life The Universe and Everything a random number but an absurdity of trying to ponder the meaning of life in the first place? The humor makes the philosophical digestible on one hand, and completely undermines it with the other hand. And that's why it's genius.

Dimension of Miracles works in much the same way. Carmody, the novel's protagonist wins a prize that acts as both Greek chorus, straight man, and comedic foil as his misadventures take him back home, another tenant that is shared with Hitchiker's Guide. Sheckley plays with narrative conventions and skewers the tropes with ease. Fantastic worlds and absurdist environments are visited, in some cases only for a chapter. The book drives home the importance of science over faith even as each new chapter causes Carmody to question the natural law and order he thought he understood before. Reality slips away but there is always a sliver of ground on which one can still stand. Talking dinosaurs, talking flutes, a "predator," after Carmody that shapeshifts into science fiction movie tropes are all accepted as the ways things are, because the writing allows for the way things are.

Carmody, like Arthur Dent, is violently shaken out of his humdrum middle class sleep walking existence into worlds that are completely foreign. But every encounter with each person is oddly familiar enough, and each chapter serves as somewhat of a teachable moment or at least as a way of propelling the action forward. Sheckley's teachable moments veer into more heavy-handed territory than Adams ever did. Even so, the book is still enjoyable. It shares the same problem of adapting it to film.

To put another way: the first Star Wars worked because it was one realized world with a simple, one-dimensional message. Hitchhiker's Guide and Dimension of Miracles don't work for the opposite reasons. Their worlds are rich and multi-dimensional as the messages. The novels ask more questions than they answer. And that's not really what the majority of the movie-going public wants. Unless you count 2001 and Solaris. Those are still the greatest exceptions to the rule.