- Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams
The LORD’S Media Centre does resemble a spaceship but has anybody seen an UFO hovering above the iconic cricket ground in its 229-year long history? Not even in the wildest dreams. Fiction on the other hand, has always had an abode for such queer thoughts. Douglas Adams in his ‘’Life, the Universe and Everything’’ (1982) explores the adventures of Arthur Dent and Ford Perfect as they traverse through the space time continuum and end up reaching LORD’S where the Ashes trophy gets stolen by burglars. The thieves are not Homo-Sapiens though but a group of robber robots from the planet Krikkit (is this how robots will spell/pronounce the game in the future?). In this humorously allusive science-fiction story, Adams describes cricket as a product gushing out of ‘’interspecies collective unconscious memory’’ and it is the humans who have shamelessly given it the status of a sport. There is one instance in the novel where we find Dent bowling at a Krikkit robot in an intriguing duel. Are we really in for such days?
