Oolon Colluphid is the author of the "trilogy of philosophical blockbusters" entitled Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?. He later used the Babel Fish argument as a basis for a fourth book, titled Well, That About Wraps It Up For God. He is also said to have written two additional books entitled Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Guilt But Were Too Ashamed To Ask and Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Sex But Have Been Forced to Find Out.
Appearances
Oolon Colluphid is mentioned in:
- The Douglas Adams book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
- The first episode of the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy television series.
- The 2005 film.
Outside the Hitchhikerverse
In the first part of the Doctor Who serial Destiny of the Daleks, Oolon Colluphid is shown as author to the book The Origins of the Universe. The Doctor scoffed at the book, saying Colluphid had "got it wrong on the first line". At the time this episode was released, Douglas Adams was working as the script editor for Doctor Who.
Inspiration
There is speculation that Adams based the character on friend and well-renowned atheist, Richard Dawkins. However, they only met after Dawkins wrote a fan-letter to Adams, after reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. That was published in 1987, whereas Colluphid was mentioned as early as the first radio-script for Hitchhikers in 1978, and the book in 1979. Of course, Adams might have known who Dawkins was from The Selfish Gene (1976), but it seems unlikely he knew the extent of Dawkins vehemence against religion from the few mentions in The Selfish Gene.
However, the radical theologian Don Cupitt claims, in his book "The Great Questions of Life" that he was the template for this heretical theologian. Cupitt is famous for leaving orthodox Anglican theology for "non-realism", which is to say ... that God is not real. He has founded the Sea of Faith to propagate a Christianity without belief.