The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

Written By: Douglas Adams
Published By: Ballantine Books (5-Volume Ultimate set)
ISBN: 0-345-45374-3

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a zany whacky sci-fi satire about a perfectly average in every way with the exception of being English guy whose home planet of Earth is destroyed to make way for a galactic hyperspace bypass. He is serendipitously, if not a tad reluctantly, transported by his intergalactic hitchhiker buddy at the very last second to the destroyer’s ship. What follows is a zany whacky series of sci-fi adventures of four companions and one paranoid android as they pave their way across the galaxy in search of the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and maybe throw back a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster or two.

On its face, grasping bizarre and pointed observations about our world and its people is what satire does best, and Douglas Adams is aggressive in taking the reader up on this task. He presents this quirky and colorful universe of ours with remarkable cynicism, drawing nifty little parallels between the humdrum primitivity of our Earthen station and worlds beyond worlds beyond worlds, all while pushing the boundaries of the absurdities of human behavior to their absolute limits.

Personally, I like my humor to be simple. Science Fiction is not very simple at all, what with its myriad of whose-its and whats-its galore. Mr. Adams does a fine job in bringing everything down to a primitive everyman level that even a primitive everyman like Arthur Dent could understand. His writing is easy to follow, easy to imagine, and easy to experience. Whether there are intergalactic demolition ships “hanging in the sky the same way that bricks don’t” or that a ship’s improbability drive might make a hitchhiker turn into a penguin for no reason at all, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is simply a joy to read as it quests to skewer everything that the human species holds near and dear to its dubious heart, especially itself.

B+

Choice Passages

“Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put into service. Very few have ever come to life again.”

“‘Hey, have you any idea what these strange symbols are?’ ‘I think they’re just strange symbols of some kind,’ said Zaphod, hardly glancing back.”

“‘It would be sacrilege to go skiing on high art!’”