Whilst wasting another 20 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back, scrolling idly, I came across an interesting ad. promoting a pair of earbuds which offer instant translation from another language to the wearers preferred lingo. Fantastic technology, I thought, and what immediately sprang to mind was the Babel fish.
The year is 1978 and I’m sitting with a bunch of friends in The Railway, which at that point was a tiny pub in West Didsbury. One of the crowd was about to buy a round when Dick said ‘No thanks. I’m going to head off home as there’s a play on the radio I want to hear.’ Now for anyone under the age of maybe 40 the very idea of listening to a radio let alone, a play on the radio is probably a weird enough concept in itself, but to have to leave the pub to listen to it is must make it even more bizarre. No iPlayer - just real time! However Dick‘s brief description of the plot made it seem worthwhile so we headed off to his flat, and that was my introduction to Douglas Adams’ masterpiece, of absurdist science-fiction ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’
The plot revolves around the hapless Arthur Dent who ends up in the company of an alien named Ford Prefect who writes for The Hitchhiker’s Guide. The tale begins with the Earth being destroyed in order to build an intergalactic bypass, a must for improving hyperspace travel, I’m sure you’d agree. The two heroes end up in a stolen starship piloted by the wonderfully named Zaphod Beeblebrox, from Betelgeuse, who incidentally has two heads and three arms as well as three mothers. This means that because of ‘an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine’, his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather are actually his direct descendants. And so it goes on into wild and absurdly funny fantasy.
It is a brilliant book and involves truly fantastic ideas and many strange creatures, such as the Amiglian Major Cow in Milliways, the ‘restaurant at the end of the universe’ which invites diners to ‘meet the meat’ and suggests which parts of its body are the best and most succulent adding some serving suggestions such as braising his shoulder in a white wine sauce. Among the many other weird and wonderful ideas, we meet the Babel fish – a small yellow leech-like fish which is inserted into the ear, allowing the wearer to understand any language, by translating any language into the wearer’s lingo. ‘Absurd!’ we thought at the time and certainly the thought that it was a fish is brilliantly absurd but we never dreamt that less than fifty years later this technology would be available from several different manufacturers though sadly none of the available options seem to have fins, scales or tails.