Is the answer to life, the universe and everything hidden in Adams' newly uncovered archive?

We all know that the, er, "bad guys are Vogons". Douglas Adams explained as much in his cracking 1979 sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But what if there are new baddies to be unearthed and nerdish gags to marvel at – well, nerdishly – from the words of the great man himself?

Wait no longer: a new biography – penned by writer Jem Roberts, and given the official blessing from Adams' family – is set to contain extracts from a draft version of the seminal book as well as other "lost" material.

Roberts' book The Frood is due out in the autumn and, besides from chronicling the writerly life and times of Adams, there will be new delights in store for Arthur Dent fans.

According to the Guardian, Roberts was granted special access to the author's papers that were collecting dust in St John's College, Cambridge.

During his extensive sift through the material, Roberts uncovered abandoned draft extracts of Life, the Universe and Everything. He also encountered a forlorn script for the second TV series of Hitchhiker and scraps of unused fiction.

The Register asked Roberts to tell us roughly how many boxes of Adams' paperwork he had meticulously searched through.

"Roughly? Um, a dozen a day for six days? Means nothing, though, a box could be anything from one stack of waste paper to 10 amazing notebooks," he said, before adding: "Not quantifiable, basically."

"I took two trips to Cambridge, three days each time, and there was so much material I had 1000s of iPhone snaps to transcribe. It's a huge undertaking."

For those fans worried about anyone meddling with Adams' unfinished material, Roberts explained to the Graun:

It's very important to contextualise this material properly … and I understand people thinking that this is raw material and he didn't want it to be seen. I spend part of the book asking what Douglas would have wanted … but there are so many great Douglas Adams jokes which have been completely air-sealed for the last 20 years. [And] I think it's wonderful that we finally get to read some of this stuff.

Adams died of a heart attack in May 2001 at the age of 49. ®