The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

4.5/5

DON’T PANIC

Always great to have a good tidbit of life advice thrown into a book.

well I see why this series has such a following. Wow I can’t wait to read the rest of it. It’s always fun to read a book that you can tell an author had fun writing. Each scene just brought so much joy to my life.

Something crazy would happen then the digital guide would bring it all together and fill me in on why a species acts a certain way. It was a really great way to fit exposition into a story while still pushing the plot forward because I was learning about the universe along with Arthur and as he read the guide I got to read it too.

Though I loved all the characters (particularly interactions between Ford and Zaphod) I have to tip my hat to Marvin. His ability to bring a room down in mere seconds is hilarious. He had the ability to make a ship commit suicide.

Anyway, I’m excited to read the remaining books and until then at least I can rest easy knowing the meaning of life is 42.

این کتاب ترکیبی از استعاره‌های ناب برای اتفاقاتیه که در اطرافمون زیاد میفته و گاهی شاید حتی بهشون توجه نکنیم، در کنارش با فلسفه‌ی زندگی و این سوال بنیادی درباره‌ی زندگی جهان و همه‌چی روبه‌رو میشیم که دلیل پیدایش ماجراهای این کتاب بود.
طنز کتاب خاصه، من یه جاهایی باهاش قهقهه میزدم اما نمی‌شه گفت که هر کسی با این سبک کنار میاد و می‌تونه ازش لذت ببره.

یک ۵ ستاره‌ی واقعی.

طنز قوی‌ش رو خیلی دوست داشتم. جنسی از بی‌در و پیکری ای که بهش می‌گن ادبیات پست‌مدرنیستی. شلوغی و قاطی‌پاتی بودن‌اش، اتفاقات‌اش و روابط علی معلولی‌ش، شخصیت‌پردازی و گیردادن‌هاش، همه و همه طوری بود که می‌خواستم من هم همینطوری بنویسم. عده‌ای نویسنده هستند که آرزو می‌کنم من هم می‌تونستم مثل اونا بنویسم و داگلاس آدامز شد یکی از همین نویسنده‌ها.

قصه خیلی خوب جلو می‌رفت و اتفاقات خیییلی بالای مرز تخیل‌ام حرکت می‌کرد. طوری که نمی‌شد حدس زد. تئوری‌هاش و بینش‌اش به هستی و جهان. دیدگاه جدیدی که بهت می‌داد. و وقتی یکم مکث می‌کردی، عمقی که توی نوشته‌ها می‌دیدی.
شاید این کتاب باعث شد بیشتر بخندم و بیشتر به سخره بگیرم چیزهایی که دور و برم هست و مهم می‌پندارم. یادآوری‌ای بر کوچیک بودن و ناچیز بودن و هیچ نبودن‌مون. خیلی وقتا نیاز به اینجور تلنگر‌هایی داریم. هی بهمون یادآوری بشه که هیچی نیستیم.

به‌زودی بپرم برای قسمت بعدی، یعنی رستورانِ آخر دنیا!

Es el primer libro de humor con el que de verdad me he reído.

Es una historia disparatada en la que todo encaja perfectamente y hace que tenga sentido.

Al principio me costó entrar en la historia porque tenía que estar muy atenta al haber tantas palabras inventadas, pero poco a poco te acostumbras y la lectura se hace más ligera.

Todos los personajes tienen algo que los hace especiales. Marvin es genial, cada vez que aparecía a mí me daba la risa. Y el pobre Arthur, que no entiende nada de lo que está pasando... La escena con los ratones ha sido hilarante.

Y por último hay que destacar el trabajo del traductor/traductora/traductores (no he encontrado quién fue). Tuvo que ser dificilísimo sacar adelante este trabajo y que todo quedase tan bien. Sin duda, se merece/merecen un premio.
*Ya los he encontrado, no había mirado aquí en Goodreads

I had such a great time reading this book. If I wasn't laughing out loud, I was grinning from ear to ear. xD
After planet Earth is demolished to build a hyperspatial express route, Arthur Dent is rescued by his friend Ford Prefect and together they travel through space.

“How did we get here?” he asked, shivering slightly.
“We hitched a lift,” said Ford.
“Excuse me?” said Arthur. “Are you trying to tell me that we just stuck out our thumbs and some green bug-eyed monster stuck his head out and said, Hi fellas, hop right in. I can take you as far as the Basingstoke roundabout?”
“Well,” said Ford, “the Thumb’s an electronic sub-Etha signaling device, the roundabout’s at Barnard’s Star six light years away, but otherwise, that’s more or less right.”
“And the bug-eyed monster?”
“Is green, yes.”
“Fine,” said Arthur, “when can I get home?”

This review describes my feelings much more coherently  J.G. Keely's review

Best part of the book:  
“We are the ones who will hear,” said Phouchg, “the answer to the great question of Life…!”
“The Universe…!” said Loonquawl.
“And Everything…!”
“Shhh,” said Loonquawl with a slight gesture, “I think Deep Thought is preparing to speak!”
There was a moment’s expectant pause whilst panels slowly came to life on the front of the console. Lights flashed on and off experimentally and settled down into a businesslike pattern. A soft low hum came from the communication channel.
“Good morning,” said Deep Thought at last.
“Er… Good morning, O Deep Thought,” said Loonquawl nervously, “do you have…er, that is…”
“An answer for you?” interrupted Deep Thought majestically. “Yes. I have.”
The two men shivered with expectancy. Their waiting had not been in vain.
“There really is one?” breathed Phouchg.
“There really is one,” confirmed Deep Thought.
“To Everything? To the great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything?”
“Yes.”
Both of the men had been trained for this moment, their lives had been a preparation for it, they had been selected at birth as those who would witness the answer, but even so they found themselves gasping and squirming like excited children.
“And you’re ready to give it to us?” urged Loonquawl.
“I am.”
“Now?”
“Now,” said Deep Thought.
They both licked their dry lips.
“Though I don’t think,” added Deep Thought, “that you’re going to like it.”
“Doesn’t matter!” said Phouchg. “We must know it! Now!”
“Now?” inquired Deep Thought.
“Yes! Now…”
“Alright,” said the computer and settled into silence again. The two men fidgeted. The tension was unbearable.
“You’re really not going to like it,” observed Deep Thought.
“Tell us!”
“Alright,” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to the Great Question…”
“Yes…!”
“Of Life, the Universe and Everything…” said Deep Thought.
“Yes…!”
“Is…” said Deep Thought, and paused.
“Yes…!”
“Is…”
“Yes…!!!…?”
“Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
  

I would definitely be reading more of Douglas Adams's work! This was light, fun, and yet so very memorable.

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”.

3.5 Stars

I checked out the audio and I loved Stephen Fry’s narration. I love him anyway. I also checked out the book digitally so I could see Chris Riddell’s artwork which I loved of course and seriously, Stephen Fry makes it great with his voices.

Don’t forget your towel!!!

Mel

I can't remember laughing at a book so much!

Loved, loved, loved(!!) everything about it.

The delivery by Stephen Fry is outstanding also.

Hugely recommend! There aren't enough superlatives to throw at this!