he Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a remarkable book that has
inspired four sequels and provided almost as many quotable lines as Star
Wars. It begins simply enough on a backwater world known as Earth. One of its
pathetic citizens, Arthur Dent, is about to have the worst Thursday ever
known to man. He wakes up suffering from a hangover, which is made worse by
the government appearing--with bulldozers--to knock down his house so it
can build a bypass.
Events continue to degrade when his friend Ford Prefect--apparently from
Guildford but actually from a planet orbiting Betelgeuse--arrives. Prefect,
after pumping Arthur full of beer and making cryptic remarks about the end
of the world, teleports the two of them off-planet just before it is
destroyed by vile aliens known as the Vogons. Like Arthur’s daft elected
officials, the Vogons were bureaucrats just trying to do their job,
which--in this case--was disintegrating the Earth to make way for a
hyperspace bypass.
Throughout the rest of the book poor Arthur, still dressed in his sleeping
gown, has his atoms shaken and stirred from one end of the galaxy to
the other. He listens to Vogon poetry, which is just as ugly and vile as the
Vogons who wrote it, joins up with the three-armed, two-headed fugitive
president of the galaxy, meets (and then tries to avoid) a paranoid android
named Marvin, and learns that humans were only the third most intelligent
species living on the late planet Earth.
Most importantly, though, Arthur learns of the existence of a book that
promises to make sense of the chaos into which he’s been plunged. On its cover are
the most reassuring words ever written: Don’t Panic. The book’s name:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Laugh, but please don't panic
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is comedic science fiction that
nonetheless touches on all the Big Questions of modern life, like--Why are we
here? What is the meaning of life? Where do all the lost pens go? What are
the consequences of a large sperm whale materializing miles above the
surface of a deserted world?
The book originated as a radio show on England’s BBC Radio, and Douglas
Adams, the writer behind the show, penned the novel of the same name in
1979. It’s British humor through and through, focusing on wordplay
and situations rather than slapstick and pratfalls. It’s the kind of humor
Terry Pratchett uses in his Discworld series and the Monty Python crew used
in its movies and television show.
The book has held up remarkably well. There’s very little that’s
dated, with the possible exception of Arthur’s obsession with digital
watches. Much of the book is still as funny as it was 20 years ago--there
are more than a few people nowadays who share presidential fugitive Zaphod
Bebblebrox’s frustration with over-smart, know-it-all computers.
Adams’ classic spawned a trilogy in five parts, a television show, a
computer game and even--if the rumors are to believed--the possibility of a
feature film. Not surprisingly, references to Guide have percolated
through geekdom and even into popular culture. The Guide has been
brought to life as an Earth-bound edition on the World Wide Web and the
Babel fish--a sort of universal translator-meets-guppy--has lent its name to
a real-world translation program on the Altavista search engine.
