Douglas Adams is perhaps one of the most famous science-fiction authors in the modern era. What first started out as a radio show, turned out to be no less than five books in a series, a movie adaption and television series. So what is this all about? A few years ago, I started to read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but put it back on the shelf just a few pages in. Because really, it’s nothing logical about it all. In some way I’m not surprised that it sprung out of a radio show in the way it is written.

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Introductive passage:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat thing.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is really the first out of five books telling the story of an Arthur Dent, resident of Earth, and his travels together with Ford Prefect, resident of Betelgeuse star system, and their journey through the galaxy after Earth got destroyed to make way for a new hyperspatial express route. They meet up with the Zaphod Beeblebrox, president of the Galaxy, who, stole Arthur’s chance of getting together with a really nice girl, Trillian at a fancy dress-up party some weeks before the Earth was demolished. That is not, however, everything Saphod Beeblebrox stole…

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I found this book difficult to grasp. Like the first time I tried reading this, the books’ events are so ”out there” that I really had to tell myself that there must be something beneath it all. The book is filled, from start to end, of relatively improbably events coincidently chained together in the unlikliest of ways. And this is also, I’d say, the theme of the book: improbability and chain reactions of events. It got me thinking about the so called butterfly effect where one small event in one place, may cause great events to occur far off – seemingly not, in any way, connected. In that way it is quite an amusing book, but at the same time it is hard to keep track of what is happening. To me, the way Douglas Adams writes is similar to Terry Pratchett, because in either way – it is an art to make something illogical seem perfectly plausible. One of the more profound ideas of the story, is probably that we humans are note as smart as we think we are. And that is really something that most science-fiction stories agree about; that there are other life forms more intelligent and more advanced than ourselves, we are just too naïve to notice.

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In the end, I couldn’t get myself to get really connected with the story. On the other hand, I don’t think that Douglas Adams wrote it for the purpose of getting emotionally involved readers, but rather for the same reason he wrote the radio shows: for comical amusement.

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Notable passages

  • This planet [Earth] has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
  • One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious [...]. At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep excercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on excercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.
  • Out of the utter blackness stabbed a sudden point of blinding light. It crept up by slight degrees and spread sideways in a thin crescent blade, and within seconds two suns were visible, furnaces of light, searing the black edge of the horizon with white fire.
  • He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.
  • ”Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

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Final thoughts…

Probably not a book I would read again, perhaps I will finish the series sometime though. Seeing me reading this book, had my fiance put on a movie night with the film adaption a few nights ago. Except for a kidnap & rescue operation thrown in, the story was much the same… but I found the movie partly more intruiging than the book I’m afraid.