"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams

I know that most people have read, or at least seen the movie, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I am not one of those people, or at least I wasn't until this past week. I had heard about several particulars from the book such as "42" or the usefulness of a towel, but even all the inside jokes about it passed right over my head. My suitemate at college received the entire series for her birthday, and immediately gave me the first book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I had thought that it was just one book, but there is a series of six novels that are based off of the original BBC radio broadcast. As such, I'll review all available to me week by week.

~~WARNING: SPOILERS~~

The book itself is somewhat more abbreviated than I had originally anticipated, but that may be because I had possibly only seen it as one volume of all the books. The focus of the book mainly rests on one Arthur Dent, a human that becomes an unwilling "hitchhiker" of the galaxy through of the untimely destruction of Earth. It was apparently destroyed to make a "hyperspatial express route" that ironically becomes unnecessary within moments of the demolition of Earth. Moments before Earth becomes dust, Arthur escapes thanks to his old friend, Ford Prefect, who was in fact an alien himself who had been stranded on Earth for fifteen years. Eventually those two find their way to the ship that put the express route out of business, the Heart of Gold that contained the Infinite Improbability Drive. On this ship is Ford's cousin Zaphod- who happens to be the President of the Galaxy- and Trillian (or Tricia McMillan if you prefer) who left earth with Zaphod a few months prior and, coincidentally, knew Arthur. The four of them set off and find a desolate planet, Magrathea, the creator of planets. They find out that mice had actually commissioned the production of Earth because they had built a super-computer to find out that 42 is actually THE ULTIMATE ANSWER but being confused, they had to make another, better super-computer to find out THE ULTIMATE QUESTION and that was Earth. As I mentioned, the destruction of Earth was untimely. That was because Earth, which was designed solely to find out THE ULTIMATE QUESTION, had a mere five minutes left before it had calculated the question. As such, they tried to hold Arthur and Trillian captive because they were part of the computer and had THE ULTIMATE QUESTION buried in their brains. All four escape before anything gruesome can happen to them and the book trails off to the next part, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe".

I really liked this book, although there were a few things that I didn't enjoy as much. Of course, part of this has to be attributed to the fact that the first books were published in 1979, over thirty years ago. Obviously, the generation gap is going to cause some dissonance from my preferences and what was popular over thirty years ago. I wasn't particularly fond of the random, totally-off-the-storyline chapters. It made confused me in what was relevant and what was just fluff. Also, some of the things that Arthur and Trillian said didn't seem "normal". By that, I mean that it seemed that their reactions to situations seemed unnatural and not realistic. The other characters I understand are aliens and are open to interpretation, and perhaps that it's the space travel that caused them to think and react irrationally. However, I really loved the characters. Even though I feel there wasn't a lot of development, they were interesting, active, and humorous. Some of the humor I can attach to several references to tea in the book, sometimes at the most interesting or inopportune times and the knowledge of what a Babel fish is. Like most people, I know about the translating website, babelfish.com, but I had no idea that it was something that is in this book. The Babel fish is a tiny, yellow fish that you stick in your ear and it essentially translates all language straight to your brain in your language. The things you learn by reading.

Wyrm's Recommendation: 7/10