Bibliofreakblog

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

This book, the whole series, in fact, but particularly this book, is very near and dear to me.  I spent months lying on library floors, contemplating how its genre, vision, and style hold up a mirror to the time in which it was written.  When most people chose classics for our A.P. English term-paper, I chose H2G2.  

You would be surprised just how little lit crit there is out there on Douglas Adams’ increasinlgy inaccurately named trilogy.  I used a lot of sources on absurdism and science fiction and the like, and made up the rest.  No, I didn’t really make up the rest, but I did have to stretch my brain with so little resources available.  Hence the time I spent lying on library floors (my local public, my high schools’ [that's right, high schools', as in two schools on one campus], and the Grad Library at the University of Michigan), wherein I would occasionally look over and say, hey, maybe that book on atheism has something useful…

My point is I once knew a great deal about this book, but like most things have forgotten them.  The basic history, however, is that the late great Douglas Adams was lying in a field in…Hungary (?)…as an 18-yr-old, some time in the lat sixties, totally drunk and thinking about those books that are guides to backpacking in Europe for however ungodly cheap it was way back then.  The idea came to him that what was really needed was a guide to the whole galaxy.  He then forgot about it for a few years.  Then he remembered again and made it into a radio show.  The radio show rocked, and so he was offered a book deal.  He couldn’t meet his dead-line and so that’s why the first in the five-book-trilogy ends where it does.  

This first book–and I promise the rest of this review will be dedicated to said book, as I have a brilliant idea to review one of the five a week, possibly even in order, for the next five weeks, er, four weeks, if you aren’t counting this one–introduces the main characters and whisks them away into space upon the destruction of Earth.  

Our protagonist is Arthur Dent (wearing his bathrobe, but NOT carrying his towel), his BFF Ford Prefect (an alien who named himself rather unwisely after a car and has been trying to get off of Earth for some time), Ford’s cousin, Zaphod Beeblebrox (the president of the Galaxy and ultimate party guy), Zaphod’s GF, Trillian (the only other survivor of Earth), and their robot, Marvin (the most depressing character in any written language, who you don’t feel so bad for you can’t laugh at).  The five-some meet Slartibartfast, award-winning fjord designer, who tells them of the supercomputer Deep Thought (see the mirror reflecting the time in which it was written?), which came up with the answer 42 when asked for the answer to life, the universe, and everything.  

I don’t mind telling you all of this, as it’s really the writing and the jokes that make this book so good.  

And now I’m going to quote the beginning, which will probably give you a better introduction than I can: 

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
     Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
     This planet has–or rather had–a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.  Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned witht he movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
     And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
     Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place.  And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
     And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place.  This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
     Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
     This is not her story.
     But it is the story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.
     It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy–not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthman.
     Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
     In fact, it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor–of which no Earthman had ever heard either.
      Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one–more popular the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Coluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes, and Who Is This God Person Anyway?
     In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older more pedestrian work in two important respects.
     First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words  DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
     But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.
     It begins with a house.

 
Buy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

Lamb by Christopher Moore
Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Slaughterhouse-Five  by Kurt Vonnegut
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Good Fairies of New York  by Martin Millar
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Discworld Novels by Terry Pratchett
A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman
Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams  by Nick Webb
Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Neil Gaiman

Other works by Douglas Adams:

(my reviews are in blue)

The Increasingly Inaccurately Named Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy 
     The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
     Life, the Universe, and Everything
     So Long and Thanks for All the Fish 
     Mostly Harmless

The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
 Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

With John Lloyd:

The Meaning of Liff
The Deeper Meaning of Liff: A Dictionary of Things There Aren’t Any Words for Yet–But There Ought to Be

With Mark Carwardine:

Last Chance to See