Douglas Adams, creator of the cult classic science fiction comedy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy died of an apparent heart attack in California last Friday.  The Hitchhiker's Guide began as a BBC radio series, which Adams crafted into a book that sold over 14 million copies around the world.  The Hitchhiker's Guide went on to become a television series, and Adams wrote several sequels including The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, The Universe and Everything, and So Long, and Thanks For all the Fish.

A master of satire and understated wit, Adams also created a number of amusing characters for his outer space saga with wonderful monickers like 'Zaphod Beeblebrox,' 'Marvin the Paranoid Android,' and the banal, but mildly-menacing 'Ford Prefect.'  In recent years the technically savvy Adams founded a multimedia company, Digital Village, which created an online Hitchhiker's Guide as well as the 'Starship Titanic' computer game.  For the past decade Adams labored without success to turn the Hitchhiker's Guide into a feature film, but the material, which made for one of the funniest radio comedy series of all time and a great quartet of humorous science fiction novels, proved intractable when he tried to mold it into a conventional screenplay format.

Adams has been quite the force for product sales in his time.  Given the wave of nostalgia that typically accompanies the death of such an important creator, retailers are probably moving their Adams paperbacks to the front of the store even as this is written.