Douglas Adams, for the "Who?" group, was the master author of the niche genre that can only be described as science fiction comedy. His most famous novels, the five-book "trilogy" The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy; The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe; Life, The Universe, And Everything; So Long And Thanks For All The Fish; and Mostly Harmless, are, to Adams fans...well, what?

Classics? Most certainly. Brilliant? Without a doubt. Silly as all getout? Absolutely. And that's what makes them memorable...and favorites of the British-comedy-a-la-Monty-Python-in-space crowd.

Every Hitchhiker fan knows the legend of how the stories started--Adams, wandering in Europe one night with a few too many drinks under his belt and carrying the book A Hitchhiker's Guide To Europe, lay down in a field and looked up at the stars, and the idea of hitchhiking across the galaxy came to him. The rest is intergalactic history.

The books spawned a radio series, a television show that can only be described as cheesy (but fun), one of the very first computer games (green words on a black screen!), a stage show, and two decades' worth of ongoing negotiations to make a movie.

The movie hasn't happened yet, although at last word Ben Stiller was the latest mover and shaker to spearhead the campaign, taking up the standard that Douglas Adams often tired of carrying against the hesitancy of a Hollywood that just didn't "get" the unique brand of humor in the novel.

Besides the Hitchhiker series, Adams also wrote offbeat detective novels starring hero Dirk Gently, created the computer game Starship Titanic, and traveled the globe in search of endangered species for the television show and book Last Chance To See. And even taking on such a serious topic as the extinction of exotic species, Douglas Adams managed to make us laugh. (Head for the chapter where he and his traveling companions get shuttled from one desk to another in an airport in Africa.)

But now Douglas Adams is gone, at only 49--too soon for such a hoopy frood. (For those in the dark, "hoopy frood" is intergalactic "hip" language for what we on Earth would call "one cool guy".) And now I feel old, because I still remember when Adams came to Rochester to give a reading.

It was about 20 years ago, at the University of Rochester. My friends and I, still in high school and without a driver's license among us, moved heaven and earth to attend the reading. I got into an incredible row with my mother, also my boss, who insisted I work the nursing home switchboard shift I had been assigned, even though it was the very night of the reading. I ranted; I raved; we fought; I won. Nothing was going to keep me from seeing Douglas Adams.

Then there was a snowstorm.

Still, we managed to convince one of our parents to drive us to the U of R and another to pick us up. A decent number of Adams' fans attended, considering the weather, and we hunkered down in the auditorium to listen to the tall, stoop-shouldered author with the hairstyle that was listing to starboard read from his then-trilogy...and, on occasion, crack himself up.

After the reading he signed our books and towels. (All intergalactic hitchhikers know the most essential item to take along when you travel the galaxy is a towel.) He chatted politely for longer than we thought a famous author would, and then we hurried out into the storm before the parent picking us up got really, really mad. What a great guy, we thought.

Several years later, in 1986, I went to England with my college theater class. On one occasion we were set to see a courtroom drama in the back room of a pub. We didn't know where we were going; all we knew was that we had to take the Tube to the Angel stop. It was a very long ride, but when we emerged from the Tube station, we found that the Angel stop was smack in the middle of Islington, and we were overjoyed.

Islington is well known to any Hitchhiker fan as not only the home of a young, pre-fame Douglas Adams, but also the place where hero Arthur Dent tried to pick up a girl named Tricia (a.k.a. "Trillian") at a party; instead, she left with intergalactic traveler Zaphod Beeblebrox, who "had only two arms and one head at the time and called himself Phil".

So we went in search of Zaphod...and found that the bartender of the pub looked suspiciously like him. We went in search of a party and overheard two girls working in a second-hand clothing store talk about one going on that night. If we didn't have another play to attend back in the heart of London, I think we would have crashed it, looking for Arthur and Trillian and the alien who called himself Phil.

What we did find was a character from The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe...sort of. Hotblack Desiato was the rock star "spending a year dead for tax purposes"...right? In Islington, however, Hotblack Desiato & Co. is a real estate firm. It just made us admire the man even more, for turning the everyday into the absurd in his novels.

Fans hadn't heard much from Douglas Adams recently. There hadn't been a new Hitchhiker or Dirk Gently book in a number of years. But we always trusted that this master of the absurd mixed with a good dose of the silly was out there somewhere, concocting the next batch of humorous science fiction that we could thoroughly enjoy. But now there won't be any more adventures of Hitchhiker heroes Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, and paranoid android Marvin, and that hurts the most.

Bon voyage, Mr. Adams. We hope that you have your towel and your electronic "thumb" with you, and that your version of heaven is just like The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe--good food and a great floor show. Enjoy; you are definitely one hoopy frood.