The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Douglas Adams’s Comic Odyssey After the End of the Earth
From one day to the next, the Earth ceases to exist. Arthur Dent and his friend Ford Prefect set off on an intergalactic journey, taking with them The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It turns out Arthur’s friend is not human at all: he comes from outer space and has spent fifteen long years on Earth studying it in depth. His main conclusion: "Mostly harmless".
Author: Douglas Adams (1952–2001)
Title: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Format: English paperback (Pan Macmillan, 2024), illustrated by Chris Riddell, 320 pages
Scope: Comic science fiction
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/1529046130 (ASIN 1529046130)
Don’t Panic
The Guide contains all the new vocabulary and definitions the reader needs about the extraterrestrial world. Terms such as the Babel fish, which you put in your ear to understand any language, are explained so the reader can follow the plot.
The Big Questions
A book full of sarcasm that tries, through humour and fiction, to answer the most important existential questions: What are we? Why do we exist? Where are we going? (The answer, famously, may be 42.)
It Began on the Radio
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began life as a BBC radio comedy in 1978, before Douglas Adams turned it into this novel, published in 1979. It went on to become a television series, a stage show, a computer game, a comic and, in 2005, a Hollywood film. Few stories have travelled across so many media, and each version differs slightly, which Adams, characteristically, found perfectly reasonable.
Vogons, Marvin and Zaphod
The Earth is demolished by the Vogons, bureaucratic aliens who write the third worst poetry in the universe, to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur, still in his dressing gown, is rescued by Ford and soon finds himself aboard a stolen spaceship with Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed President of the Galaxy, Trillian, a young woman Arthur once met at a party, and Marvin, a robot so intelligent that he is permanently depressed. It is one of the most memorable comic casts in fiction.
Life, the Universe and Everything
The famous answer, 42, comes from Deep Thought, a supercomputer built to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. After seven and a half million years of thought, it delivers the number, and points out that the problem is that nobody really knows what the Question is. The joke has become part of popular culture, as has the Guide’s advice, printed in large friendly letters on its cover: Don’t Panic.
Douglas Adams
Adams (1952–2001) studied at Cambridge and worked as a writer for radio and television, including a period as script editor of Doctor Who. He was also a passionate defender of endangered species and an early enthusiast of computers. His death at 49 was mourned by fans worldwide, who still celebrate Towel Day every 25 May in his memory, carrying a towel, the most useful thing a hitchhiker can have.
The Rest of the "Trilogy"
The series continued with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless. In 2009 Eoin Colfer added a sixth book, And Another Thing...
A Book to Reread
Much of the pleasure lies in Adams’s sentences, full of absurd comparisons and unexpected logic, which reward rereading. Many fans can quote whole passages.
Don’t forget your towel.
Why Read It
Short, anarchic and endlessly quotable, it is one of the funniest novels ever written and the start of a five-book "trilogy". This edition is illustrated throughout by Chris Riddell, which makes it a lovely gift.
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