The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams, 1979 ★★★★

The Lighter Side of Global Annihilation

Never underestimate the creative resourcefulness of a human being utterly out of options.

Douglas Adams was a struggling writer low on cash. One evening far from home, drunk in a field after a day of hitchhiking, he found himself looking up at the twinkling sky, thinking deeply. What would it be like if there was a guidebook for people wandering across the stars?

Several years later, that idea became a BBC Radio series, and eventually a five-volume science-fiction “trilogy.” In it, we meet one Arthur Dent, adrift in an uncaring cosmos, bouncing from absurdity to absurdity after everything he knew and loved has been utterly destroyed.

Somehow Adams found the funny in that, and with this novel, launched an enduring comedy franchise that lives on after his death.

In the beginning, we meet an Englishman named Arthur Dent. He thinks he is having a bad day when a bulldozer shows up to knock his house down. But that’s nothing. Far out in space, a Vogon Constructor Fleet is settling into place, minutes away from demolishing Earth.

"We'll see who rusts first!" Arthur Dent (Simon Jones) in a tense standoff with a bulldozer in an opening scene of the BBC-TV series, which came after the radio series and first two novels. Alert readers may detect a parallel to the Vogon situation.
Image from https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1113227/mediaviewer/rm4231579137/?ref_=ttch_ph_2

Mercy is in short supply with these Vogons, as the oft-quoted guidebook which gives this novel its name explains:

They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy – not actually evil, but bad tempered, bureaucratic, officious, and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.

Adams’s way with words, his “cosmic whimsy” as I remember Time describing it back when, was a unique gift. In the case of this first novel, it goes a long way to engaging a reader on what begins as a bumpy ride. When you open with the deaths of 4.36 billion people, not to mention countless trees and other living things, bouncing back is hard.

The secret is not taking any of this seriously. Adams certainly didn’t:

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.

Douglas Adams looked exactly like the kind of guy you would have expected to write lines like "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet." His first novel, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy took many forms over the course of his not-too-long life.
Image from https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/documentaries/douglas-adams-documentary/

Also getting off Earth just before it explodes, Arthur and his closet-alien companion Ford Prefect are saved by a couple of utterly improbable chance encounters. The first sticks them inside the Vogon ship. The second puts them aboard the Heart of Gold, a stolen spaceship occupied by the novel’s three other main characters: Marvin the Paranoid Android, Tricia McMillan, a. k. a. Trillian, and the two-headed President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Zaphod picked up Trillian on a brief jaunt on Earth, where she was at a party and just happened to be in mid-conversation with Arthur Dent. Another coincidence! Adams piles these up so high you know he’s having fun with any reader who gets bothered by this sort of thing.

Series fans never were. They ate up such wacky ideas as the need to know where your towel is wherever you venture in space, the mind-ripping qualities of a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, and the cosmic answer to life’s ultimate question being “42.”

Asked about the last thing, a scientist replies: “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

"There was something very slightly odd about him, but it was difficult to say what it was." Ford Prefect as described by Adams bears more than a little resemblance to Tom Baker as Dr. Who, seen above in "The Pirate Planet," a four-episode story arc also written by Adams.
Image from https://www.tombakerofficial.com/series/the-pirate-planet/

A lot of wonderfully wry, wise moments are liberally scattered across the book. Adams, who before launching the “Hitchhiker” series on radio wrote for “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and later did a run of episodes for “Dr. Who,” was a sharp comic writer with a talent for stretching believability using inventive science-fiction concepts and a willingness to poke gentle holes in conventional thinking.

The book gets off to a strong running start, establishing the Vogons as fine comic foils, though not carrying that idea very far. The introduction of Zaphod and Trillian sets up the real plot, though I find a little of Zaphod goes a long way. He’s by far the most exaggerated character in the book, which is saying something. (Ford Prefect, the other main alien, is an intriguing if underwritten figure, at least in this first book.)

More memorable for me, and I suspect many others, is Marvin, who has many of the best one-liners despite his cybernetic nature. The fact he is many, many times more intelligent than any humanoid makes him deeply depressed, and thus a whiny drag to anyone he encounters. That he knows this only adds to his depression and his laugh quotient.

The Internet of Things apparatus scattered about the ship set Marvin off with their cheerful eagerness to serve: “You watch this door,” he muttered, “it’s about to open again. I can tell by the intolerable air of smugness it suddenly generates.”

The brief, inaptly happy life of a spontaneously created sperm whale is one of many cruel but hard-to-stifle laughs to be had in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Its fate generates more pathos than that of the entire population of Earth.
Image from https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/12/12/climate-video-series-are-we-like-the-whale-in-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/

The story really takes off when the Heart of Gold crew finds themselves on a mysterious lost planet which did big business creating other planets for the ridiculously rich, before a recession hit.

A sign on the now-desolate planetscape reads: Whatever your tastes, Magrathea can cater for you. We are not proud.

The Magrathea section is where the writing gets particularly sharp. We meet another important series character, Slartibartfast, who takes Arthur on a tour of the planet’s interior, namely a single room from which other planets are made. So big is it, Adams explains, that it dwarves Arthur’s very concept of infinity as he races through it like a rollercoaster.

Meanwhile, Zaphod is trying to figure out why he does the things he’s been doing since before we met him in the novel. Strange forces seem at work somehow, perhaps tied into “a small random group of atoms” that come together from time to time to form “most extraordinarily unlikely patterns” and from which sprang life in the Universe. Perhaps it is meaning out of chaos, or just chaotic meaning. Certainly not a believer in intelligent design, or any other mindset short of blithe nihilism, Adams is just having fun. So is this reader every time I read this.

A 2005 Hollywood movie adaptation was not commercially or critically successful, mostly because it wasn't that good. It did boast two terrific things, Zooey Deschanel as the usually overlooked Trillian, and a wonderfully realized Marvin, voiced by Alan Rickman.
Image from https://robsmovievault.wordpress.com/2005/04/29/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/ 

Much of the pleasure of the book comes from its sheer Englishness. Arthur’s first request aboard The Heart of Gold is for a nice cup of tea. Classic British understatement is a common language wherever he goes.

One reason The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy succeeds as well as it does is because it was, like the last novel I posted on, originally written as a script. As the basic structure was already in place, Adams could focus more on laying in wacky linking material and a refined, mordant narration.

Even the rare lull is suddenly broken by a laugh line that really delivers, and delivers again if you haven’t read it in a few months.

When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for this planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.

I don’t love the entire “Hitchhiker” series, but this novel is one of the best debuts out there, a trip worth taking with or without a towel.