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As early as the second episode of the original radio series of Hitchhiker's, Douglas Adams wrote himself into a corner. He had arranged for Arthur and Ford to escape the destruction of the Earth on board one of the Vogon ships responsible for that destruction. There they were 'safe", as Arthur observes, only in a usage of that word he "wasn't previously aware of" (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, chapter 5). They are duly expelled from the Vogon ship into the vacuum of space with no form of life support, a predicament from which any escape seems utterly improbable. That left Adams in a bind: all the solutions he could come up with seemed like cheating, and, as he wrote in notes accompanying the published radio scripts, "[t]here's no point making a big song and dance about what a terrible predicament your characters are in if you just cheat your way out of it". But, watching a documentary on judo, he had a breakthrough: "If you have a problem … the trick is to use this problem to solve itself" (Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts, p. 51). Let us call this trick the Judo Principle.

DOI: 10.1007/978-0-230-39265-6_9

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