Life, The Universe, and Everything

Douglas Adams.

ISBN 0-671-60107-5

Read in three weeks ending May 1, 1993, on loan from Vicki Salmon of Lamppost’s at Pasadena Covenant. This was also the last three weeks of Random Processes, EE-562a, and a three-day bout with serious hives. Generally fitting all around.

Picking up where we left off, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are stuck five million years in earth prehistory, suddenly they ride a couch to Lord’s Downs and arrive in the midst of a cricket game two days before the end of the world. (A complete cross reference between all four books in the trilogy would surely yield some subtleties starting about now, but it’s not worth it to me to be such an Adams groupie.) Suddenly, a spaceship full of white Krikkit robots lands and steals “the ashes.” It’s a long story. Startiblatfast lands surreptitiously, using his SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem) field that makes things invisible (for all practical purposes). Sounds useful. Actually, I think I have one.

So, we review the history of the Krikkit wars, the bomb that nearly ended the universe, and why it didn’t, twice, maybe more than twice. We meet the creature that Arthur has killed in incarnation every time he has ever killed anything, ants to lunch. Arthur learns to fly, and we pick Trillian back up at the longest cocktail party ever. (Somebody looked at their watch eleven years ago and since then no one has shown any indication of leaving.)

Maybe it was the state of mind and body I was in these three weeks, but this book seems to cross from bizarre to sick, at least in places. Some of the spontaneous fun seems to be gone and the house of horrors more open than before.

On the other hand, destroying the earth in one swell foop, well….

So we end with a fellow named Prack who, given too much truth drug and, under oath, is given to tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth. He begins to do so. Realizing what is happening, they have to wall off the courtroom and nobody sees Prack again until the Heart of Gold shows up with our crew and finds out that he has finished talking, maybe years ago. “There’s a lot less of it [truth] than generally believed.” Now he can’t remember much of The Truth except funny parts about frogs, and the hilarity of Arthur Dent, whatever that’s hilarious for.

Maybe in “So Long and Thanks for all the Fish…”