This book is the first in Douglas Adams' trilogy (of which there are actually five) of novels based around the radio show of the same name. As I am currently endeavouring to embark upon my own writing of several comedic sci-fi books it seemed prudent to revisit some of my core influences, and well, this is one of those - I read all five when I was nine, and again when I was thirteen and seventeen, and frankly it's been quite a while so they seem pretty fresh to me upon new readings (guess I've read quite a lot of other stuff since), and so it's safe to say I will finish the whole series pretty soon, and I'll save up my more typical reflective passages for the post about the final instalment (as though actual happenings of each book vary wildly, the characters and general themes are the same and should be fairly straightforward to track across all five), instead just summarising the book here.
And now the point where I realise how difficult of a book this is to summarise.*
Okay.
So there's a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is basically a pan-galactic form of wikipedia, and a roving researcher for it, after adopting the name Ford Prefect and visiting Earth to find out what's going on here, gets stranded here because it's the bum-end of nowhere. He befriends a human called Arthur Dent, but one days picks up a signal that Vogons are on their way to destroy the Earth completely - which they do, but Ford and Arthur escape, only to be caught, thrown into space, and rescued at the last second by Ford's cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox (who is also the president of the galaxy), Marvin the manically-depressed robot, and Tricia MacMillan, a very nice intelligent young woman whom Arthur once met at a fancy-dress party in Islington and totally failed to get off with. Together, they then go off in pursuit of both the people who made the Earth and an answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.**
If any of these arrangements of character and plot sound somewhat improbable - don't panic, that's just how the story works. And it does work. This whole series is to my mind among the cleverest science-fiction and outright funniest most inventive popular fiction out there, and utterly indisputably deserving of its massive cult classic status - if this series is alien to you, well, it starts here, and unless you're secretly a Vogon or something you'll probably find a lot to like about it.
* I'm gonna do the summaries for the first four all as spoiler-free as I can reasonably make them, but in the post about the last book, since I'll be doing some more in-depth stuff on the series' overall themes and arcs and things there will probably be a lot of whole-series spoilers in that. Fair warning.
** To which the answer is, of course, forty-two.***
*** It would have helped to know what the actual Question was.
And now the point where I realise how difficult of a book this is to summarise.*
Okay.
So there's a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is basically a pan-galactic form of wikipedia, and a roving researcher for it, after adopting the name Ford Prefect and visiting Earth to find out what's going on here, gets stranded here because it's the bum-end of nowhere. He befriends a human called Arthur Dent, but one days picks up a signal that Vogons are on their way to destroy the Earth completely - which they do, but Ford and Arthur escape, only to be caught, thrown into space, and rescued at the last second by Ford's cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox (who is also the president of the galaxy), Marvin the manically-depressed robot, and Tricia MacMillan, a very nice intelligent young woman whom Arthur once met at a fancy-dress party in Islington and totally failed to get off with. Together, they then go off in pursuit of both the people who made the Earth and an answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.**
If any of these arrangements of character and plot sound somewhat improbable - don't panic, that's just how the story works. And it does work. This whole series is to my mind among the cleverest science-fiction and outright funniest most inventive popular fiction out there, and utterly indisputably deserving of its massive cult classic status - if this series is alien to you, well, it starts here, and unless you're secretly a Vogon or something you'll probably find a lot to like about it.
* I'm gonna do the summaries for the first four all as spoiler-free as I can reasonably make them, but in the post about the last book, since I'll be doing some more in-depth stuff on the series' overall themes and arcs and things there will probably be a lot of whole-series spoilers in that. Fair warning.
** To which the answer is, of course, forty-two.***
*** It would have helped to know what the actual Question was.
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