Review: Hitch Hikers Trilogy (The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams)

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Product:	The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Date:	20/06/02 (10 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: V.V.V.Funny

Disadvantages: Laughed so much it hurt

There are funny books and there are science fiction books, but rarely has any author managed to write a successful comic science fiction novel that has been as widely read as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It has been adapted as a radio series, a TV series, numerous cassettes and CDs, and even a computer game, all the while growing ever more popular as readers old and young travel through the exciting worlds and planet systems of Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect. This review is therefore a fitting memorial to the author Douglas Adams who, as some readers will have heard, died of a heart attack six days ago, aged 49. The news will surely be a huge disappointment to the vast and loyal readership that the book has gained ever since it was first published in 1979.

The series of four books – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything and So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish chronicle the adventures and travels of earthman Arthur Dent who inexplicably finds himself the only survivor when one Thursday morning, the earth is demolished by a fleet of Vogon Constructor ships to make way for an intergalactic hyperspace bypass. The unsuspecting Dent is rescued from this rather odd calamity when it turns out that his friend of five years, Ford Prefect, is not actually an out-of-work actor from Guildford, but an intergalactic hitchhiker who has been stuck on Earth and is desperately trying to get off it.

And so they depart on a most incredible expedition during which they encounter Ford’s cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox, the publicity-hungry and fraudulent President of the Galaxy and his companion Trillian who turns out to be the second surviving ape-descendant from Earth merely because Zaphod had picked her up at a party on Earth that he had decided to visit incognito six months before the fateful Thursday. Zaphod and Trillian are in illegal possession of the Heart of Gol
d, a fantastic breakthrough in hyperspace travel that uses something called the ‘Improbability Drive’ to get from one end of the galaxy to the other in no time at all. And so, the four of them travel all over the galaxy, saving the Universe on more than two occasions! On the way Arthur discovers startling secrets about the creation of the Earth, the end of the Universe, the position of the erstwhile human race in the entire scheme of things, and the distinct lack of a good cup of tea anywhere in the Galaxy.

The book contains many endearing characters: Marvin the terminally depressed Paranoid Android who has “a brain the size of a planet” and yet is reduced to doing menial jobs for incompetent life forms, and Slartibartfast (yes, that is his name!) who works for a race who manufacture made-to-order planets for those who can afford them. Ultimately, Arthur goes in search of God’s final message to his Creation, and in a dramatic break from tradition, actually finds it.

This book is a must read for anyone who enjoys a good laugh at the expense of the human race who are, to Arthur’s dismay, the most insulted life forms in the galaxy. The humour is subtle and satirical and more often than not there are very interesting ideas and messages behind the book’s comic sci-fi perspective. It makes for great nighttime reading, although, once you get into the story, you might find yourself redefining on a few occasions what ‘late night’ actually means.

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