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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Published 1980
I ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Douglas Adams was born March 11, 1952, the son of Christopher Douglas, a management consultant, and Jane Donovan, a nurse. Adams was a recipient of an honors degree in English Literature from St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1974. He began his writing career as a scriptwriter for radio and television comedies. For a time, he supported himself with odd jobs ranging from cleaning chicken houses to guarding the royal family of Qatar. “I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck and gazing up at the stars,” he says of the inspiration for his most famous story. “It occurred to me that somebody ought to write a hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy.” His idea, first conceived as a radio series, was developed for the British Broadcasting Company. The 1978 series gradually won an enthusiastic following. Pan Books approached Adams to novelize his scripts. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sold one hundred thousand copies the first month and eventually sold two million copies in England alone. Across the Atlantic Ocean, similar success followed with a radio series on National Public Radio and a television version of the book.
Adams added four books to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything, (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), and Mostly Harmless (1992). Tired of the series, Adams coauthored Last Chance to See with zoologist Mark Carwardine in 1990. In a departure from the “Hitchhiker” books, it recounts their journey to see seven endangered species. He also developed a detective series which includes Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988).

II OVERVIEW

Moments before the earth is demolished to make way for a “hyperspacial express route,” Arthur Dent is rescued by Ford Prefect, an alien who is disguised as an out-of-work actor. Prefect, who has become Dent’s friend of several years, has been stranded on Earth while researching the planet for the revised version of the electronic book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The pair’s misadventures as they ricochet from a Vogon spaceship, to the Heart of Gold state-of-the-art spaceship, to the planet factory, Magrathea, form the book’s prime focus: satire.

III SETTING

Though initially set in England, the majority of the story takes place in space, either in spaceships or on the planet Magrathea. Adams creates his own worlds, cultures, creatures, and vocabularies in satire that fillets science fiction cliches and the human condition.

Dent and Prefect find themselves in two ships very unlike the usual spare and futuristic spaceship of science fiction genre. Just as the earth is vaporized, they use a “transformational beam” to board the spaceship of a Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. In the ship’s galley, Dent first sees dirty dishes and dirty alien underwear scattered about. Sitting on mattresses that have been grown and dried from the Sqornshellous Zeta swamps, Dent is not comforted by Prefect’s reassurance that “very few have ever come to life again.”

The Heart of Gold is the second ship to pick up the pair. In Adams’s world, this ultimate space-age transportation is shaped like a running shoe and has its own sales brochure. Giving it an Improbability Drive, which powers the ship through every point in the universe, Adams creates scenes within the ship that combine elements of an Andy Warhol painting with Walt Disney’s “Fantasia.”

Finding Magrathea had been a high priority of many previous space explorations. When the characters accidentally discover it, Prefect ranks its drab and desolate exterior somewhere below “cat litter.” They learn its interior is three million miles across and that Magrathea’s inhabitants used to make planets inside it.

IV THEMES AND CHARACTERS

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy includes five characters: Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Trillian (Tricia MacMillan), Slartibartfast, and Marvin, the robot. Though all are likable enough, they are one-dimensional creations who merely react to circumstances rather than handle them.
Arthur Dent is hardly the customary space hero. He has no answers, no solutions, and exhibits no bravery. The only thing he actually does is lie down in the mud in front of bulldozers intent on demolishing his home. During crises in space, he curls up in the fetal position, screeches “Huhhhhgggnnnnn,” falls asleep, or asks for a cup of tea.

Adams has said, “Arthur Dent is to a certain extent autobiographical. He moves from one astonishing event to another without fully comprehending what’s going on. He’s the Everyman Character—an ordinary person caught up in some extraordinary events.”

Zaphod Beeblebox sums Arthur up quite well when other aliens propose to replace Arthur’s brain with an electronic one. “You’d just have to program it to say ‘What?’ and ‘I don’t understand’ and ‘Where’s the tea?’” he responds.

Arthur’s sardonic one-liners in the face of the catastrophe provide much of the humor in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For example, after being told by Ford Prefect that they are safe in a Vogon Constructor Fleet spaceship, Arthur says, “This is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn’t previously aware of.”

Ford Prefect accepts Dent for what he is, and the two are good friends. Prefect is a roving researcher for the electronic book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. After being stranded for fifteen years on Earth, he expands its guidebook description from “harmless” to “mostly harmless.” He spends his time crashing university parties, drinking, or trying to pick up girls. As Arthur mourns the loss of Earth and its inhabitants, Prefect tries to reassure him by saying, “You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy’s a fun place.”

Prefect does not get very upset about any kind of peril, including his impending demise in the vacuum of space. As trouble appears, his first defense is to simply talk his way out of it. Ironically, Prefect cannot understand why humans talk so much, but decides if they do not continually exercise their lips, their brains start working. Zaphod Beeblebrox should be, as a space creature with three arms and two heads, a villain. Instead he turns out to be Ford Prefect’s semi-cousin, President of the Imperial Galactic Government, and mostly harmless himself. He is an adventurer, but is barely capable of piloting the spaceship he has stolen.

Trillian is an attractive human who Dent once tried to pick up at a party. As Zaphod Beeblebrox’s companion, she does little but fiddle with the spaceship’s controls and stand behind someone, anyone, during dangerous situations. Her most important contribution in the book is to bring two white mice (actually “hyperintelligent pandimensional beings” who first commissioned the creation of Earth) into the
Heart of Gold spaceship.

Marvin is a prototype robot. Zaphod Beeblebrox calls him “the Paranoid Android,” and Dent labels him “an electronic sulking machine.” The first thing he says is, “I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed.” Marvin is depressed, despairing, hopeless, abject, and wretched throughout the novel. Some reviewers credit him to be a satiric statement against the “me-first generation.”
Slartibartfast functions in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to give information. An award-winning fjord designer, he fills in missing information for Arthur and the readers. He explains Magrathea’s history and also explains that space travelers commissioned the creation of the Earth in order to find the Ultimate Question for the Ultimate Answer.

Adams has said, “I’m not a science fiction writer, but a comedy writer who happens to be using the conventions of science fiction for this particular thing.” Adams quickly deflates the arrogant notion that Earth and human kind are somehow pivotal to the universe. Earth is so obscure in the largeness of space, its entry in Ford Prefect’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is just barely discernible, listed above “Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6.”

The computer in science fiction is always in control by virtue of its unerring logic. On the other hand, the Heart of Gold’s computer is merely brash and cheery, and completely defenseless in protecting its ship. It can only sing “When You Walk through the Storm” as nuclear warheads approach. It wants a relationship with its programmers, and it possesses a matriarchal back-up personality which cautions Arthur and his companions to stay “all wrapped up snug and warm, and no playing with any naughty bug-eyed monsters.”
As a comedy writer, he turns the laugh toward religion, nonviolence, alcohol, dollar-a-day guide books, philosophy, science, and poetry in seeming random fashion.

source: Microsoft Encarta

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