The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams.

Pocket Books (Simon & Schuster, Inc.)

ISBN 0-671-52721-5

Re-read: week of 1993 17 March.

On loan from Vicki Salmon of Lamppost’s at Pasadena Covenant.

This book can be a great relief when you start to take life, yourself, and everything too seriously. What is the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything anyway? Well, that’s the subject of this romp through improbability. You don’t know it until well into the middle of the book, but Deep Thought, after working on it for 7.5 million years, found the answer to be “42.” But what was the question again? The Malgretheans were in the business of building planets for the biggest computer ever, one with biological components, one that would run a ten million year program to find just that question. The name of the computer was “earth” and a little girl on earth was having an ah-hah experience. The program was five minutes to completion when the Vogons, clearing the way for a hyper-expressway, demolished the earth and everything on it, with a few exceptions. All the dolphins got off, and a couple of mice, and a roving reporter for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Don’t Panic!) named “Ford Prefect (so that he’d fit right in with the current culture on earth … ?) and his companion, an earthling, Arthur Dent, whose home had been similarly destroyed for a normal terrestrial freeway bypass that very morning.

The whole book is a series of senseless and wildly hilarious vignettes such as this one:

“A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave our hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.”

And these stories connect to one another – surprisingly and unexpectedly.

If you want to know what Heart of Gold and Zaphod are, you’ve just got to read the book. Pick a time when you’re particularly depressed and see if you can out-do the robot Marvin.

“Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.”