Ezra's Bookshelf

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

by Douglas Adams · 228 pages · ~4 hrs

FictionScience & Technology

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Douglas Adams's 1979 comic novel, which began life as a BBC radio series, is a landmark of science-fiction humor. It opens on an ordinary Thursday as Arthur Dent, a hapless Englishman, discovers that his house is about to be demolished to make way for a bypass—minutes before the entire Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace express route. Arthur is rescued by his friend Ford Prefect, who turns out to be an alien and a roving researcher for the titular guidebook, and the two hitch a ride aboard a passing spaceship, launching Arthur on a series of absurd misadventures across the universe. Along the way he falls in with a memorable cast: Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed former galactic president who has stolen a ship powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive; Trillian, the one other human survivor; and Marvin, a brilliant and terminally depressed robot. Adams uses the framework of space opera as a vehicle for deadpan satire of bureaucracy, technology, philosophy, and the human craving for meaning, dispensing running jokes that have entered the culture—the supercomputer Deep Thought and its answer to life, the universe, and everything (the number 42); the importance of never being without one's towel; the reassurance "Don't Panic" emblazoned on the Guide's cover. Beneath the whimsy runs a genuinely cosmic sensibility, a delight in the sheer scale and indifference of the universe played for comedy rather than dread. Endlessly quotable and joyfully inventive, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy launched a beloved series and remains one of the funniest and most influential works of modern science fiction.

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