Ich habe den Anhalter schon sehr oft gelesen und bestimmt es das am häufigsten von mir gelesene Werk. Insofern kann ich mich wohl als eingefleischter Fan sehen, der dazu beiträgt, diese Satire zum Kult hervorzuheben. Ich habe es nun zuletzt in einer Leserunde hier auf Goodreads wieder mal mitgelesen und das war eine neue Erfahrung, denn ein Großteil der oft deutlich jüngeren und ausnahmslos weiblichen Mitlesenden stand di Lieblingswerk viel kritischer bis enttäuscht gegenüber. Ist es das Schicksal eines humoristischen Buchs, dass es bei sich wandelnder Gesellschaft und Humorempfinden seine Zeitlosigkeit und damit seinen Kultstatus verliert? Wird Douglas Adams in 20 Jahren nur noch von einem versprengten Haufen von Nerds gelesen? Gehöre ich jetzt auch schon zu den Alten, die von früher schwärmen, als Ende der 70er Jahre mit Monthy Python und Douglas Adams endlich mal eine andere Art von Humor über Film und Buch in Deutschland einzog, welches zu der Zeit noch von Otto und Mike Krüger geprägt war?

Ich habe auch diesmal beim lesen wieder oft gelacht. Das Buch hat über die Jahre nichts an Freude bei mir eingebüßt. Manche Anspielungen können die Jüngeren wahrscheinlich einfach nicht mehr verstehen, ob es sich um Digitaluhren oder um Bob Dylan-Songtexte handelt. Für mich ist das Buch auch kein Sci-Fi im eigentlichen Sinne. Es ist eine Satire mit jeder Menge genial verpackter Gesellschaftskritik an vernunftorientierten Homo Oeconomicus, der sich für die Perle der Schöpfung auf der Erde und damit auch im Universum hält. Douglas Adams zeigt Arthur Dent, dem einzigen Überlebenden der Menschheit auf, dass die Erdlinge nur kleine Staubkörner, die den falschen Idealen nachgerannt sind. Er dreht den Spieß um, macht die Mäuse zu den Herrschern über den Menschen und uns zu Versuchsobjekten. Er zieht das Streben nach der Wahrheit und dem Forscherdrang durch den Kakao, in dem er uns eine Zahl als Antwort auf die Frage nach dem Sinn des Lebens gibt. Da kann ich mich als Volkswirt herrlich darüber amüsieren, da ich oft genug die Welt in mathematische Modelle packen musste und froh war, wenn die Lambda-Gleichungen am Ende aufgingen. Trotz allem Klamauk und Slapsticks über Handtücher und Umgehungsstraßen steckt in dem Buch für mich viel mehr dahinter. Ich liebe es.

Probably should have smoked something before and/or during the reading of this.

Awarding one star for each of the following:

Digital Watches
Babel Fish
Marvin

A work that showed humanity its insignificance and that madness is a general, entertaining trait in the universe.

One of the greatest milestones of the rare Sci-Fi comedy hybrids, although it´s losing quality after the first 3 parts. Fantasy seems to be more prone to comedy than Sci-Fi, I don´t know why that´s the fact. I would tend to call it kind of Terry Pratchett in space, because of the unique wit, just without the stamina for so many parts. Adams dying in a fitness center of a heart attack comes in here too, although he already stopped continuing the series years before.

More sheer fun than the rest of the serious
It´s just hilarious and very clever, using different comedy tropes in space, not for science! One of these ideas one has once in a lifetime, in Adam's case mixed with talent. It´s mostly constructed by

Running gags, some sci-fi elements, and comedy characters.
Thereby, the wacky protagonists construct the laughs with slapstick, some deeper stuff, and general strangeness. The underlying criticism level isn´t very high in the first part, which can mostly be seen as pure entertainment.

So successful because it´s so easy to read
There is better, more ironic, and more complex sci-fi out there, but nothing as pleasant as Adam's work. No need to think too hard or get depressed about human nature, no info dump and worldbuilding overkills, just characters, puns, and gags mixed with some dept and

The second and third part of the series include some of the best indirect social criticism too.
But it sadly doesn´t improve after that, I´ve read until the fifth one and Adams just can´t live up to the expectations anymore, starts recycling his schemes, and just isn´t as compelling as in the original trilogy. Maybe he had already enough money, wasn´t really motivated, or lost his muse, but it´s quite a shame because there would have been potential as endless as space for more, really good parts.

Useless fandom trivia
The author, as the story goes, had the idea while watching the sky completely wasted, some might say poisoned, by Gösser beer in my home country Austria. I don´t believe this, because Stiegl beer is just much better than this bitter concoction. Whip me with a towel if you have a problem with that, I can easily handle a little intergalactic spanking.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

اولین بار بود که تو ژانر پست مدرن، کتابی نیمه فانتزی نیمه علمی تخیل�� می‌خوندم، اونم با چاشنی طنز!
کتاب راهنمای کهکشان برای اتواستاپ‌زن‌ها با استفاده از طنز موقعیت و گاه اغراق‌های قابل توجه، به انتقاد و زیر سوال بردن مسائل عادی انسانی می‌پردازه.
بعضی بخش‌های کتاب رو واقعا دوست داشتم، طنزش به دل می‌نشست و آدم رو به فکر فرو می‌برد. با این حال بعضی جاها هم برام خسته‌کننده می‌شد.
تصویرسازی و شخصیت‌پردازی متوسط و گاه دم دستی بود. خلاقیت نویسنده ستودنی به نظر می‌رسید و همین‌طور فکر می‌کنم اگر کتاب رو زبان اصلی می‌خوندم بیشتر با طنزش ارتباط برقرار می‌کردم.
کتاب پایان‌بندی نداره و به جلد بعدیش وصله. یعنی انتهای کتاب وصل می‌شه به ابتدای جلد بعد که خب نظر دادن در موردش رو سخت می‌کنه. فصل‌بندی‌هاشم برای من عجیب بود چون اگر شماره‌ی فصل‌ها رو برمی‌داشتیم کل کتاب به هم متصل بود و لزوم شماره زدن رو متوجه نشدم.
من ترجمه‌ی آرش سرکوهی رو خوندم ولی گویا ترجمه فرزاد فربد بهتره.
----------
بخش‌های ماندگار کتاب:
آقای پروسر آرزو می‌کرد که الان در نقطه‌ی ت می‌بود. نقطه‌ی ت جای خاصی نبود فقط جایی بود که از نقطه‌های الف و ب و پ خیلی دور بود.
...
یکی از خصوصیات آدم‌ها که فورد هیچ وقت از اون سر در نیاورده بود، عادت عجیب و غریب اون‌ها بود به اینکه چیزهای پیش پا افتاده و بدیهیات مثل روز روشن رو دوباره و دوباره تکرار کنند.
...
اگر آدم‌ها بدون توقف، زبون و لب‌هاشون رو تکون ندن، مغزشون شروع می‌کنه به کار کردن.
...
زمان فقط یه توهمه.
...
میشه فقط برای یه لحظه هم که شده تو مهمترین چیز دنیا نباشی؟
...
دقیقا همون موقعی که آدم فکر می‌کنه زندگی از این بدتر نمی‌شه، یک اتفاقی می‌افته و آدم می‌بینه که خیلی بدتر از این هم هست.
...
خیلی دوست داشت بدونه که این چیه که تمام وقت سعی می‌کنه بهش فکر نکنه.

If you want to know the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, this is the place to go!

Douglas Adams has been writing radio scripts for the BBC in the same vein as the Monthy Python's Flying Circus, or Rowan Atkinson's sitcom Blackadder, or even Mel Brook's Spaceballs. This cult novel is no different and quite obviously a surreal parody of the space-opera science-fiction genre. It mostly juggles with logic and wordplays, like Lewis Carroll, and quite a few episodes seem to be inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

On the whole, many dialogues include hilarious schoolboy pranks and punchlines, and the plot (the zany adventures of the last surviving human and his bizarre sidekicks across the galaxy) is quite dizzying. Not much else to take away from all that though, except that the answer to said Ultimate Question is indeed probably  forty-two .

What a unique book, truly one of a kind. Science fiction? Well kind of. Humor? Yes, that to. And who knows what else was going through Adams mind when he wrote this. It's almost like "stream of consciousness" science fiction/humor/satire. But whatever you call it, it was entertaining and fun to read. 4.5 stars.

It's not you, it's me... well maybe it's also you.

Unfortunately this book wasn't for me. Some of the humor I liked but it was too absurd for me and it was too slow to really start.

I wish I had liked it as much as everyone else but it definitely didn't make it to my "favorite books of all time" list!

UPDATE: I finally figured out what was my issue with this book. There's a French movie called "Rrrrrrr" (similar humour to Monty Pyton) and I've had way more fun using the jokes out of context with friends than I did actually watching the movie. Recommending it was always a bit weird because it's just an okay movie but... the jokes are funny afterwards.

This summarizes exactly how I feel about this book!

No soy de leer este género, pero tengo que admitir que este libro en particular me gustó mucho. Desde la primera página fui totalmente suyo.

Uno de los atractivos más llamativos son los personajes y sus maneras de ser. Son sutilmente diferentes, pero esa sutileza, paradójicamente, los hace contrastar mucho.

El final me gustó muchísimo.

Es un hecho importante y conocido que las cosas no siempre son lo que parecen. Por ejemplo, en el planeta Tierra el hombre siempre supuso que era más inteligente que los delfines porque había producido muchas cosas -la rueda, Nueva York, las guerras, etcétera-, mientras que los delfines lo único que habían hecho consistía en juguetear en el agua y divertirse. Pero a la inversa, los delfines siempre creyeron que eran mucho más inteligentes que el hombre, precisamente por las mismas razones.

I love this … and can quote great swathes of it—yet until this year I had never read the book. Weird? Not really.

It started out in ... (was it really that long ago?) as a late-night radio comedy series. OK then, full disclosure, it was on BBC Radio 4 at 10:30 pm on Wednesday, 8th March … 1978. I distinctly remember thinking this is really quirky and odd, but I love it! Anyone else I knew who had been listening thought the same, and we weren’t quite sure what to make of it. Low budget and decidedly different, what was it supposed to be? The term “space opera” had been coined in 1941, but this was not space opera. It was unlike any Science Fiction we knew, and anyway SF (the acronym used at the time) was hardly ever humorous. It was very British, at a time when more and more producers were giving an eye to overseas broadcasts. What would those overseas listeners make of this programme? Americans in particular would not be likely to “get” it. The closest we could get in nailing the type of surreal humour was as a sort of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus in Space”—except that it clearly had an ongoing storyline. (In fact Douglas Adams was very briefly in a couple of episodes of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”.) We fervently hoped that it would last the whole six episodes, and not be taken off the air by the then rather staid BBC…

We need not have worried. Despite the BBC’s cautious approach, the audience’s reaction was tremendously enthusiastic, even though this was radio, and it had hardly been broadcast at prime time. But people talked: friends, family, fellow students, and workmates. More and more tuned in for the next week’s episode—and we all hoped there would not be too much atmospheric interference—or one of the power cuts which plagued the late 1970s. These six episodes even received good reviews, and the BBC boldly commissioned a “Christmas special”: a one-off episode for the most popular British comedy series.

I have a memory of an interview from the time, or perhaps a little later, revealing that Douglas Adams would be writing, and making script changes, right up until just before the broadcast. He seemed excessively shy about his writing, although he had been on the outskirts of radio comedy for years and even written sketches for some, for example “The Burkiss Way (to Dynamic Living)”—a personal favourite of mine. I was in the live audience once; a very strange experience. I kept thinking: “It’s no use enjoying it and smiling broadly, I have to laugh out loud!” But none of this had come easily. Although Douglas Adams had eventually become a member of “Footlights”, the invitation-only student comedy club which has acted as a hothouse for British comic talent for many years, that had taken a while too. Douglas Adams’s humour was different, and none of us could have anticipated where it would lead. Anyway, back to the first series …

It quickly took the UK by storm, and was repeated twice in 1978 alone and many more times in the next few years. This led to an LP re-recording, (long playing vinyl records, now confined to history—or enthusiasts) and I was lucky enough to have this set bought for me for my birthday by my brother. It was the first comedy series to be produced in stereo, and Douglas Adams said that he wanted the programme’s production to be comparable to that of a modern rock album. In fact much of their budget was spent on sound effects produced by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. There was just one problem for me. The postman left it out in the rain while everyone was at work, and the result was a corrugated mess. So I never played it.

The BBC soon realised they had a success on their hands, and commissioned a second radio series. This consisted of a further five episodes, bringing the total number of episodes to 12, to be broadcast in 1980. Meanwhile Douglas Adams had been persuaded to reformulate the series as a novel, an idea he was not at all happy about to start with, feeling that his talent lay in revues and writing radio comedy. But he agreed to adapt the series as a book—this novel in fact—which was then published in 1979.

Those of us who had been in at the start as it were, were initially resistant to reading a book (and I have stayed resistant for far too many years) feeling that it could not possibly be as good. And indeed, it isn’t as sparky and with that sense of the ridiculous that radio comedy can have, although the novel of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (one word, no hyphen is the author’s preference) does include a few more details. If anything these slow the panic-filled action down, and seem to add very little.

The next step was to “graduate” to TV. In Britain, this usually signals a commercial success, but sometimes in the conversion, a lot of the spontaneity and characterisations which have marked the radio series are lost. However the BBC were very canny in casting the comedy actor Peter Jones as “The Book”, both for the radio series, and the TV versions. Peter Jones was cast after a three-month long casting search and after at least three actors (including Michael Palin) had turned the role down!

We grudgingly agreed that the TV version was not too bad an attempt, and to be honest, we were pretty gobsmacked at the time by the “new” type of graphics. This was before CGI, but the onscreen graphics more than made up for any loss of the listeners’ imagination, which is such an essential feature of slightly surreal radio comedy. It was just different again. So a six-episode television series aired on BBC 2 in January and February 1981. Many of the actors from the radio series were in it, and it was based mainly on the radio versions of the first six episodes. A second series was at one point planned, with a different storyline from the second radio series, but it was sadly never made, because Douglas Adams had various disputes with the BBC.

So the TV series fizzled out, but the radio series went on and on, and so did the books. There was a film too, but the less said about that the better. Made many years later, it premiered on 20th April 2005. Douglas Adams had died during the film’s production, although he had still helped with the early screenplays, and new concepts introduced with the film. The script was completely different, and the film was a modest success, commercially. In the film, Stephen Fry was the voice of the Guide/Narrator, which led to him recording the version of the novel most often listened to as an audio book.

I actually listened to the audio book on this occasion, which seems a little odd, but it was the only way I could access it easily, as the library e-book was out on loan. The edition I listened to was an RNIB disc, read by the excellent actor Gordon Dulieu, using his panoply of voices. The narration was superb. It did of course continually remind me of the radio series, which was perhaps inevitable.

The radio scripts are prescient and priceless. I ordered the CD set for a Christmas present, and the young guy on the phone said, quoting the pack: “The best-selling audio CD of all time? That’s quite a claim isn’t it? Perhaps I should listen to it…!”

You can imagine my reply.

What surprised me about this novel is that it just seemed to stop randomly. How this reads to someone approaching it for the first time, I have no idea, but the first radio series continues going straight into “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”. There are then 4 subsequent novels in the series: “Life, the Universe and Everything”, “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”, “Mostly Harmless” and the final “And Another Thing” (most written by Eoin Colfer with additional unpublished material by Douglas Adams) as well as some short stories.

What’s with the title? Well, Douglas Adams had at times claimed that the title came from a 1971 incident while he was hitchhiking around Europe as a young man with a copy of the “Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe”. He said that while he was lying drunk in a field near Innsbruck, and looking up at the stars, he thought it would be a good idea for someone to write a hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy as well. But this could be apocryphal.

What is it about? Oh, that’s what you want from a review … well the main character is a sort of Everyman called Arthur Dent. We learn very quickly that he is the last surviving man, following the demolition of the Earth by a Vogon constructor fleet to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

He has a friend called by the unlikely name “Ford Prefect”, after a misreading of an electronic travel guide The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Unbeknownst to Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect is a human-like alien writer for the aforenamed eccentric reference book, and he proceeds to rescue Arthur Dent from Earth’s imminent destruction, by hitching a lift on a passing Vogon spacecraft.

Following this rescue, the pair explore the galaxy, meeting Trillian, another human who had been taken from Earth (and whom Arthur Dent had met at a party in South London —this is easily explained by the Improbability Drive)—and also the two-headed and self-centred President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox, and the terminally depressed Marvin, the Paranoid Android with his “brain the size of a planet” ... surely he must be based on A.A. Milne’s perennially depressed donkey “Eeyore” in “Winnie the Pooh”?

This all sounds far lamer and less absurd than it really is! You’re just going to have to read it—or even better, track down the radio series—for yourself. And just for those who already know and love this gem, here are a few quotations which quickly became catchphrases:

“Don’t Panic!”

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

“Ford … you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it!”

“A towel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have …”

“So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

“Ford!” he said, “there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.”

And of course we can’t leave without remembering that Answer to the Great Question … Of Life, the Universe and Everything:

“Forty-two”.

It's a sort of electronic book. It tells you eveything you need to know about anything. That's its job. [...] Which is exactly the sort of thing you need to know if you are an impoverished hitchhiker trying to see the marvels of the Universe for less than thirty Altairan dollars a day.

Anybody can have a brilliant idea for a good story, but it takes hard work and dedication to transform it into a magnum opus of satirical science-fiction. According to legend, Adams was lying on his back, pennyless and with a beer in his hand, somewhere down Innsbruck valley, gazing up at the starry night, thinking how great it would be to keep on hitchhiking all the way up there among the stars. The story may even be true, I don't give a hoot one way or another. I'm just grateful for the result of this flight of fancy that was first put together as a BBC radio show and later written down in a series of novels.

This here is a revisit, after almost thirty years, from my own hitchhiking youth to the current soft middle age comfortable armchair. I was afraid I would find the text silly, and there is enough inside that is chaotic and playful and improvisational, but there is also the "Heart of Gold" of the artist captured for eternity and beyond - the exuberant energy, the sense of wonder and the acid observations of human folly (making us understand we are not at the top of the evolution ladder is sort of the point if the exercise). In the introduction, Neil Gaiman refers to the author as : "tall, affable, smiling gently at a world that baffled and delighted him.", and it is this image that I see as I picture myself the hero of the journey, the Earthman Arthur Dent, who is send tumbling out into the universe one fine morning, as bulldozers gather around his modest home while up in the sky Vogonian spaceships are waiting to obliterate the Earth.

Arthur Dent finds himself marooned in space, with only an electronic guide book for wisdom and solace, but that is after all the human condition, and without a sense of humour we would have probably have slit our common throats before now. So listen to the words of wisdom printed on the good book, and get ready for the adventure of a lifetime:

... he also had a device that looked rather like a large electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON'T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters.

The plot is absurd and episodic, relying on word games, dramatic developments and wacky characters. The Brits have transformed this type of satire into an art form, starting with P G Wodehouse, who is cited as an influence by Adams, and continuing with Blackadder, Monty Python Flying Circus, Fawlty Towers and more recent shows like Red Dwarf. The Hitchhiker's Guide belongs in this Hall of Fame of intelligent and subversive entertainment, indeed it could be said to be one of the foundation stones of the whole edifice. Any attempt to explain and to describe the characters out of context is doomed for failure on my part, you simply have to be there to understand the importance of the towel in the career of Ford Perfect, the researcher-editor of the Guide; to be crushed by the ego of Zaphod Beeblebrox, president of the Galactic Council ("adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publisher, terrible bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.") ; to design fjords with Slartibartfast or to sigh at the pointlessness of existence with Marvin the Paranoid Android:

Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God, I'm so depressed. Here's another of those self-satisfied doors. Life! Don't talk to me about life.

Suffice to say I had a great time revisiting the novel, and that I even found some interesting actual sci-fi concepts among the jokes and the satirical sketches. The Guide is very much like a smartphone with acces to Wikipedia, and The Infinite Probability Drive is a cool plot device, allowing the adveturers to travel from one corner of the universe to the other in a blink of an eye ("... we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway."), but it was the description of motion detectors in entertainment devices that really rang a bell:

For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriantingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

The first book in the series ends on a cliffhanger, so I guess I have to hold on to the "a nicely chilled Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in my hand." and hitchhike in the Heart of Gold to the next destination for Arthur Dent and his friends. Until we get to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

... we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere ... and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

I hated this book. It was required in one of my English Lit. classes in college. The time spent reading this book is time that I will never get back. I think this book may have shortened my life; it was such a waste of time.

n  Watch my video review by clicking here.n

3.5 stars rounded up for goodreads. Was fun and silly, but ultimately felt like a poor mans Discworld that I would have enjoyed far more when I was younger.