The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Published by Del Rey Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
I have the pleasure of being able to say that I've heard Douglas Adams read from this novel in person. Back in 2000, I attended a presentation by Ray Bradbury, and Doug Adams was the opening act. At the time, Ray Bradbury was still recovering from a stroke, and was so frail that we thought he would not be with us for much longer. By contrast, Doug Adams was the very picture of health, hale and hearty, doing all the characters' lines in funny voices while he prowled back and forth across the stage. Imagine my surprise the next year when I heard the news that Doug Adams had been stricken with a heart attack and died at the tender age of 49.
It left me really feeling that we'd just lost a giant -- and quite possibly an under-appreciated one, since comedy tends to be treated as a "lesser" form of art when compared to drama. We need only look at the winners of various awards to see a pattern: no doubt Men in Black should've been a real contender for the Best Dramatic Production Hugo, but was passed over in favor of Contact, quite possibly because the latter was drama rather than comedy. And as a perusal of the history of the Hugo balloting reveals, the original BBC Radio series of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a contender in 1979, but lost to Superman (again, a drama rather than a comedy).
And while we're talking about that, it's a good time to discuss the complex history of the development of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As it turns out, the book wasn't the original form of the storyline. Instead, the radio series started it off, and only when it became a hit did Doug Adams adapt it into a book. From there it was adapted into a TV series, and later into a movie. There have also been audiobooks, comic books, and games set in the Hitchhiker 'verse.
The novel begins with Arthur Dent, a man so ordinary as to effectively be an Everyman figure, getting up to begin his day and seeing a giant bulldozer through his bathroom window. Surprised, he goes out to confront it and discovers that it's there to clear the area for a bypass. Furthermore, the plans for the bypass had been properly filed and the opportunity offered to object to it, and Mr. Dent has missed that opportunity, so his house is going to be demolished whether he likes it or not.
Just as we're thinking this is going to be a satire on bureaucracy, albeit through the lens of an alien narrator (disproving the assertion of one of my undergraduate professors that one cannot use the literary technique of estrangement in science fiction, given how well Doug Adams makes it work), we discover that one of Arthur Dent's closest friends is not in fact a human, but an alien who'd come to Earth while hitchhiking about the galaxy. Oh, and by the way, a Vogon constructor-ship is on its way to demolish the entire Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
Suddenly we've gone from ordinary political satire to science fiction absurdism, as all of Earth and its creatures are blasted into nothingness, with the exception of the dolphins, a pot of petunias, and a few other odds and ends. And amidst that absurdity, Arthur Dent's friend Ford Prefect (a joke that went right over the head of this American reader on the first reading) manages to hitch a ride on the Vogon flagship, using a signaling device commonly called a "thumb." This is described along with the titular Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an electronic book which has proven fascinatingly prescient of the Kindle and other electronic reading devices that developed in the twenty-first century.
But it's not exactly a rescue. Arthur Dent has no more than been given a Babel Fish, that biological universal translator that would give its name to an early web-based translation service, than the two of them are summoned to the Vogon ship's bridge. We get a little information on the sheer nastiness of the Vogons before we learn that they are also the third worst poets in the galaxy -- and this one is about to inflict his hideous verse on the protagonists.
Oh, and that's after an interlude in which we meet Zaphod Beeblebrox, the Imperial President, and learned how the Emperor has been encased in a stasis field as he lay dying, so that he is literally Emperor forever. When Doug Adams wrote that, he was probably aiming at absurdity, but since then the creators of Warhammer 40K have had their God Emperor encased in the Golden Throne as a life-support system for untold ages -- and here in the Primary World, North Korea considers their Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung, to be President in Perpetuity, such that ambassadors have to go to his tomb and present their credentials to him. Here we have an inversion of the old saying "first as tragedy and then as farce."
As it turns out, Zaphod Beeblebrox is of the utmost importance, because he's acquired the one and only ship with the Infinite Improbability Drive, the one ship that can pluck Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect to safety when they are tossed out the airlock of the Vogon ship for the crime of failing to appreciate Vogon poetry. And then our heroes are on their way to the discovery of the world of planet-builders, and the story of the computer Deep Thought and the quest to discover the Meaning of Life, and how that ties with the destruction of Earth by the Vogon constructor fleet.
Throughout it all, we get excerpts from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, from comments on how the human mind simply can't grasp the scale of the universe to the comment about the world of Bethselamin, which was so beautiful that its inhabitants began to fear the effects of so many tourists visiting the world. Their solution was to require that everyone be able to demonstrate that they had excreted as much or more than the amount they ate, or the excess would be surgically removed upon departure. The bit about being sure you got a receipt every time you used the restroom is humorous (although the TV show makes it more disturbing), but it's proved oddly prophetic of the problem of over-tourism, and of the degradation of particularly popular destinations by the sheer number of people putting wear and tear on historic buildings, streets and the like. It's also echoed in a more darkly humorous way in Vladimir Voinovich's satirical novel Moscow 2042, published shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union, of a future where food, known as "primary matter," is free so long as you can provide a receipt for having deposited "secondary matter" at the public restrooms.
The novel ends with a lead-in to the sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which was also included in the 1981 TV adaptation.
Buy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from Amazon.com
Review posted March 12, 2021
