Bibliofreakblog

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams

The fourth installment of Douglas Adam’s Increasingly Inaccurately Named Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, So Long and Thanks for all the fish, gets its name from the long debate of who is smarter, humans or dolphins.  Humans believe they are smarter because they came out of the sea and onto land and don’t spend all of their time swimming and mucking about.  Dolphins believe they are superior for just the opposite.

Score one for the dolphins though, because just before Earth was destroyed, every single dolphin got off, leaving the message, So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Of course, what neither realize, is that it turns out that the real geniuses of planet Earth are mice.

Oh, and the Earth is a computer, built to find the question to answer 42, which has something to do with Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Except that the Earth was destroyed to make way for a super highway.

Or was it?

Yes, the Earth is back.  The dolphins are still gone, but the Earth is back.  

Depending on how you look at this book, it is either more bizarre or less bizarre than the previous three.  There seems to be more loopy time travel, more wry philosophy, and it centers almost entirely on romance.

And the chick is not Trillian.

Arthur Dent is still questing to figure out what Earth mean…what Life, the Universe, and Everything, mean…and he sort of finds it.  

Maybe.

Meanwhile, this book includes some of my favorite characters in the trilogy.  Particulary, Wonko the Sane, who, no matter what you say about him, you have to admit knows more than anyone about dolphins, and Blart Versenwald III who is a genius but almost lets his planet be destroyed due to his severe ADD, and Rob McKenna, the Rain God.

Poor Rob McKenna.  He doesn’t know he is a rain God.  He just knows that anywhere he ever goes, it rains.  If only he knew it was because he was a Rain God, he’d see that it was because they clouds are worshipping him.  However, there may be a lucrative career in this.

Because the Earth has been reinstated, a longer entry is needed in the Hitchhiker’s Guide, and mysteriously Ford Prefect’s original article appears, which I will now quote, because, well, I wanted to leave you with a quote about California:

The Guide describes the beaches around LA as:

“‘Junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what’s that other word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo…being like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth.  Plus the air is, for some reason, yellow.’”

And San Francisco:

“A ‘good place to go.  It’s very easy to believe that everyone you meet there is also a space traveler.  Starting a new religion for you is just their way of saying ‘hi’.  Until you’ve settled in and get the hang of the place it is best to say ‘no’ to three questions out of any given four that anyone may ask you, because there are some very strange things going on there, some of which an unsuspecting alien could die of.’  The hundreds of curling miles of cliffs and sand, palm trees, breakers, and sunsets are described in the Guide as ‘boffo.  A good one.’”

 
Buy So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish at 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 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
     The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
     Life, the Universe, and Everything
     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