Trillian mcmillan series#

All through high school and college, my favorite books – my formative books – were the kind of works that might show up in Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky. Here is my feminist origin story: I sprang fully-formed as a twentysomething feminist from inside the head of a teenage boy.

Trillian mcmillan series#

The one woman in my favorite sci-fi series of all time, and I just didn’t really care. My feelings about Trillian were as they always have been: fairly indifferent.

I was sorry to hear about Sheridan’s passing because she was comparatively young and enormously talented, and because I am a human who’s capable of empathy, but not specifically because she was the voice of a character I loved. I did have thoughts about Trillian, a character who the Guardian notes was “not especially well written” but to whom Sheridan’s interpretation gave “an intelligence and likeability that removed any suggestion of her being a token space bimbo.” But I didn’t have a lot of feelings about her. This turned out to be true, but incomplete. I hadn’t, I answered, but oh gosh did I have thoughts. After Sheridan’s obituary was published, my friend Louise tweeted at me to ask if I’d written anything about Trillian. Sheridan played Tricia McMillan, known as Trillian (because, according to writer Douglas Adams, “it was a nickname that also sounded like an alien name”) – one of two surviving humans on the show, who is also an astrophysicist and the girlfriend of Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox. Sheridan was an accomplished voice artist, but for me (and, it seems, for a lot of news writers), her defining work was in the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show. Late last month, British actress Susan Sheridan died of cancer at the age of 68. Jess Zimmerman’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.