So Long, Douglas ... and Thanks for all the Books (The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams)

Member Name: mcrouch

Product:	The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Date:	11/08/01 (201 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: easy to read, philosophical, very amusing

Disadvantages: none

FIT THE FIRST

This is my opinion of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of the most remarkable books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of the Milky Way. It was written by a 6 foot 5 ape descendant named Douglas Adams, although originally he no more knew that his book was going to be a publishing sensation than a lemming realises that its’ future is not in the financial sector but does in fact lie just over the edge of a large fjord somewhere in Norway.

The book of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy did not actually start its life as a book at all. It did in fact begin life on a small, unregarded, non-commercial radio station that the inhabitants of Earth in their usual unimaginative way had decided to call 4. This is a fact that many humans, even those who read the book, often failed to realise. Indeed many humans even thought it had all begun as a short-lived, low-budget television series but that is largely due to the fact that most humans prefer to watch television than to read books. Television is less demanding and doesn’t require the viewer to turn pages every couple of minutes or so, although some people have compensated for this lack of an interactive element by their use of remote controls. It is widely believed that printed media is in decline simply because it has failed to capitalise on utilising any form of remote control. Some learned academics have even suggested that if books had employed a remotely controlled method of turning the pages during television’s infancy, then television may never have become a major media at all. This is of course largely speculative and out of the realm of this op.


FIT THE SECOND

The book itself is a trilogy told in five parts. The five parts are each published under their own heading and are titled, in chronological order:

The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Uni
verse
Life, the Universe and Everything
So Long…And Thanks For All The Fish
and
Mostly Harmless.

Some readers of this op might have noticed that there are six books listed above. That is because the word “and” was inserted as a link to close off the list and not actually a book in its own right. Douglas Adams wrote a number of books, not all of them Hitchhiker based, but he never wrote one called And. Had he done so, it would undoubtedly have become an international best seller.


FIT THE THIRD

The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy then tells the story of an earthman named Arthur Dent whose house is about to be demolished to make way for a bypass. Before he has too much time in which to get worked up about this point, the point in question becomes moot as the Earth itself is demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. Mention of Arthur Dent’s house is not referred to again after this incident. Any further references to his home refer in fact to the now-demolished planet Earth and not to his house.

Moments before the demolition (the planet, not the house), Arthur hitches a lift aboard one of the Vogon Constructor ships. He is aided in this apparently implausible feat by his best friend, Ford Prefect. Ford Prefect, it turns out, does not actually come from Guildford at all, but originates from a planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. He is a journalist compiling entries for a new edition of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and has spent fifteen years on Earth updating the old entry. It now says, Mostly Harmless.

From this point on the galaxy becomes a kind of playground for our two travellers as they journey from one place to another, or in some cases, one time to another. They meet a lot of very strange and sometimes familiar people along the way, always aided by the aforementioned Hitchhikers’ Guide.

The Earth it turns out was a
giant computer, built some time after a seven and a half million year old program run by a super computer called Deep Thought to work out the answer to life, the universe and everything, to which the answer was forty two. The earth was programmed to calculate what the question is but was destroyed five minutes before drawing its conclusion. It is this question around which much of the books’ stories are generated.


FIT THE FOURTH

I don’t know how many times I have read / listened or watched this book / radio / TV show but I do know that I never tire of it. The ape descendant Douglas Adams had a very easy, natural and amusing turn of phrase. It may come as no surprise to some earth people that he was in fact a writer and part-time member of the Monty Python team in its’ later yeares and it shows in his humour that takes an often bizarre twist on life. It says a lot about his style that no radio show in the 1970’s could find a way to accomodate his singular style into their routines, and so the only alternative was to give him his own radio show.

Douglas Adams was an amazing individual who produced some amazing work. As well as the Hitchhikers’ trilogy, he also authored two books about a rather unusual detective named Dirk Gently (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul). With producer John Lloyd he penned The Meaning of Liff, a new kind of dictionary, one which took place names and ascribed to them meanings for things which previously had no words to describe them (thus Addis Ababa is the incomprehensible noise emanating from the loudspeakers of cars with lots of stickers on them). And he wrote one of the best environmental/ecological awareness books ever, Last Chance To See – read it and weep.

It is never too late to discover this work for yourself and hopefully this op has given you some flavour of his style. He may be gone (died May 11
th, 2001) but he will never be forgotten.


FIT THE LAST

And finally I leave you with this.

Listed under the books of Douglas Adams on the Amazon web site is a book entitled “The Prostitute in the Family Tree: Discovering Humor and Irony in the Bible”. A browse down the readers’ reviews finds this reply:

It isn't by me! 6 April, 1998
Reviewer: from London
Please note - if you've come here looking for other books by me, this isn't one of them!
I'm the Douglas Adams who wrote the Hitchhiker books, the Dirk Gently books, and co-wrote Last Chance to See, the Meaning of Liff and Starship Titanic. I did not write The Prostitute in the Family Tree.

Summary: