Mostly Harmless – Douglas Adams, 1992 ★★

Going Out with a Bang and a Whimper

Parallel universes and alternate timelines get quite a workout in this final installment of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” comedic sci-fi saga. It begs a question: Can a series that always leaned hard on the utter randomness of the universe get too random?

Short answer: Yes.

Mostly Harmless is the most frenetic, depressing, and conceptually catawampus entry in the series. It delivers that boldly anarchic flavor “Hitchhiker” faithful have savored for decades. Where it falls short is tone; an uncharacteristic despairing heaviness pervades the text. For the first time, Adams’s universe is suffused not with whimsy but dread.

“Something was wrong somewhere…” Main series protagonist Arthur Dent has this realization after consulting his handy volume of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe” only to discover a lot of new gibberish in the text. Something ain’t right in the cosmos.

He has already lost Fenchurch, the woman he fell in love during prior novel So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish. She vanished on a jump through hyperspace, leaving behind an empty seat and a broken heart.

Now, once again, Dent can’t return to the Earth he calls home:

He so much wanted to take the newspaper down to the pub and read it over a pint of bitter. He so much wanted to do the crossword. He so much wanted to be able to get completely stuck on 17 across.

Mostly Harmless opens on an alien spaceship being struck by an asteroid, wiping out the memories of surviving crew: "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair," Adams writes.
Image from https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Unidentified_Imperial-class_Star_Destroyer_(asteroid_collision)

Also at loose ends in another part of the universe is Arthur’s old friend Ford Prefect, trying to figure out what alien entity has taken control of his employer. Back on Earth, television reporter Tricia McMillan is visited by aliens she can’t quite believe are real, which is funny since readers will remember her dating a two-headed alien in the first book.

This raises one of the big wrinkles in Mostly Harmless, the concept of alternative realities and how they sneak up on people or planets unaware. Multidimensional universes unfold endlessly upon each other, we are told, inevitably negating concepts of selfhood and progress. What one learns in one timeline can be destroyed by what an alternate version of oneself uncovers in another, and so on.

Subjectivity, it seems, is non-negotiable. A seer tells Arthur:

“You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.” 

For a time, Arthur finds a measure of quiet happiness making sandwiches on the planet Lamuella which otherwise lacks this important skill. "There were those in the village who were happy chopping wood, those who were content carrying water, but to be the Sandwich Maker was very heaven," Adams explains.
Image from https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/articles/5-sandwich-making-tips

Mostly Harmless is known as the downer in the “Hitchhiker” series, the book fans often recommend skipping. Even Douglas Adams said he was dissatisfied with how it came out, explaining too much of his ongoing unhappiness bled into the writing.

It is certainly downbeat, if also quite funny for long stretches. If like me you were frustrated by how Earth-centered So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish turned out, and wished for some of the sci-fi send-up humor of the earlier books, what you get here is something of a happy return.

Adams’s ability to weave satire and fantasy in high Lewis Carroll style returns with more bite than ever:

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn’t work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn’t really any point in being there…

The main trade that was carried out was in the skins of the NowWhattian boghog but it wasn’t a very successful one because no one in their right minds would want to buy a NowWhattian boghog skin. The trade only hung on by its fingernails because there was always a significant number of people in the Galaxy who were not in their right minds…

Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.

Another early crisis in Mostly Harmless is the discovery of Rupert, tenth planet in the solar system. As Adams notes, this is especially alarming for astrologers: "We all knew (apparently) what happened when Neptune was in Virgo, and so on, but what about when Rupert was rising?"
Image from https://www.space.com/37295-possible-planet-10.html

The fact Adams could craft prose so engagingly is more remarkable when you realize how uninterested he had become. He was tired of writing Hitchhiker novels, and had actually stopped doing so by the mid-1980s. His last installment, the slight 1986 short story “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe,” revealed his waning interest in the material. The rest of the decade was spent on another series, based on a comic private detective named Dirk Gently. Alas, that didn’t sell as well.

Zaphod Beeblebrox is absent from Mostly Harmless, so is Marvin the Paranoid Android, who got killed off in So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish. You might think the alternate timeline idea would give Marvin an opening to return, but it seems Adams was sick enough already of the other series regulars he left alive thus far. Zaphod seems too cartoonish for the series by this point, given how the other main characters sort through real feelings about connectedness and missing home.

This is brought home by the introduction of a new character, Random, whom Arthur learns is his daughter, the product of him selling off his sperm for space travel money. Random is an angry girl of indeterminate age who was dumped on Arthur by her mother and tends to lash out in her confusion. Arthur tells Ford: “You have to get to know her.”

“She eases up, does she?”

“No,” said Arthur, “but you get a better sense of when to duck.”

Adding to the kitchen-sink atmosphere of Mostly Harmless is a cameo appearance by Elvis Presley, who it turns out has a bitchin' spacecraft he is willing to give Ford in a time of need. It turns out he wasn't abducted by aliens but "went of his own accord."
Image from https://www.imdb.com/fr/title/tt12444960/

Random lives up to her name and proves thoroughly irritating, particularly as her behavior winds up endangering everyone around her. She’s another strange plot choice for Adams; I kept expecting her to be redeemed somehow and become a rooting interest, instead of a selfish brat. Alas, she amasses quite a body count while Arthur plays Daddy.

The novel’s strangest detour is the disappearance of Fenchurch, Arthur’s love interest in So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish. I expected her to return somehow, given how invested Adams had been in developing her, but he tosses her away instead with little more than a one-liner.

That actually is a trend in the series; intriguing ideas and characters get introduced in one book to be wholly jettisoned by the next. This often happens within individual books. At one point here, Ford is joined in his travels by a charmingly friendly robot, Colin; a few chapters later Ford blithely sends Colin off to its doom to divert pursuers.

Douglas Adams in paradise. For five novels, he ran his characters through the gauntlet, and in the end, made clear they are at peace with their doom: "He knew that at last, for once and forever, it was now all, finally, over."
Portrait by Dan Callister from https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/new-douglas-adams-bio-to-include-unseen-hitchhikers-guide-material-70597/

Adams seemed reluctant to allow any emotional attachments to creep into his stories; not a problem back in The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe when anything-goes silliness prevailed. But once Adams went all-in to present characters with more depth, it’s annoying to have them sent off with a weak joke.

That is how the book resolves its big finale, except it is more of a sigh. “Just let it all go,” Ford sighs. “What does it matter? Let it all go.”

And that is exactly what Douglas Adams did. Though he lived nine more years after Mostly Harmless was published, Adams never returned to the series. If he had more time, perhaps “Hitchhiker” fans would have gotten a more satisfying ending. Yet all in all, this book is true to his uncompromisingly bleak vision while still giving fans plenty to laugh about on their way to oblivion. Perhaps that is accomplishment enough.