n  "He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."n

The world has gone mad. No, the entire universe has. And by reading this, we get to laugh about it. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a little bit of a mad ride, but what a joyous one!



Arthur Dent, a regular, averagely intelligent guy from Earth one day finds himself entangled in a very improbable chain of events that lead him to finding out that his best friend is an alien. Everything goes downhill from there. There is no point in summarizing the story, as it's not the story that makes this book special.

n  "For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen."n

It's how the story is made up. Everything is reversed and the narrative takes the most surprising and unexpected twists and turns, always resulting in something humorous. It's more than a space opera, however, because in its absurdity it manages to be highly relevant, even over three decades after its publication.



Its puts us into our place. Humans have this tendency to think of themselves as the most developed species, but little did we know that the universe is in fact run by mice. And the aliens in this book are all just as clueless about where they belong and what kind of world they live in. Which is comforting, because isn't this was life is essentially like? Confusing, sometimes seemingly pointless.

The Hitchhiker's Guide is a kind reminder that that's okay, that it is enough to remember that we're just part of something that is so much bigger than the perspective we have on it. And while we never will fully understand what is happening around us, we might as well just try, gathering as much knowledge as we can in order to find our way in a world that is full of chance and coincidence.

I absolutely HATED this book. I usually read books before seeing the movie when it's released in theaters, and so I read this book. If there was a point in all his rambling disguised as prose, I missed it. Don't waste your time reading this book. And if possible, the movie was worse.

I had forgotten how frigging frood
This book is which I read
When I was still a hip young dude
With nothing in my head

Not that there is much more today
Inside this ageing brain
—Six poems two novels and a play
Is all it doth retain

But if a Vogon constructor fleet
Came down to smash the Earth
Steamrolling houses into jeet
And streets into gallurph

And I could salvage but one book
Before I hitched a ride
Away from our big crumbling rock
I think I’d pick this Guide

For face to face with the extent
Of Time and Space and Void
I’d need to laugh with Arthur Dent
And cry with Marvin Droid

***3 Stars***

This book was... weird.
But not bad weird.
Weirdly funny, weirdly entertaining and weirdly delightful.

Yet it had a certain ridiculousness to it, which is what made give it only 3 stars. But I also enjoyed reading it.
Will see if I'll ever feel like reading the other books in the series.

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!

I was quite afraid I wouldn't take to the book considering how many people close to me -- as well as at parties -- would rage, rage, RAGE at my never having read Hitchhiker's Guide. What would the fallout be? Would I be shanked at the next party I went to if, when asked about my liking of the book, I were to shrug? Oh, the anxiety!

But I'm happy to report I did like it.

A lot, too, once the sperm whale and petunia chapter came up, and then all the more when the old world builder (or award-winning fjord artist) wandered in. And then I felt as if I might come to possibly have a crush on the book after Zaphod gave his monologue about how he thinks.

The absurdity in the story and its world was of the specific kind I care about -- an absurdity that manages to parallel this world's absurdity but tinged with mystery, whimsy, and wonder, of course. It's the kind of absurdity that exists in the stupendous Doctor Who, which makes sense, and exists somewhat in Dead Like Me. I don't find much purpose for the other kind of absurdity. You know the kind, that ragged, empty, cold, fraught, and menacing absurdity that lives in the Batman's Joker and performance art projects by people with bold, asymmetrical hair cuts. Shudder.

It's all right. I've found my way back.

I'll now take joy in reading Chris's hefty and timeworn Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, rather than approach it with the dread of potentially being shanked. Which is a good thing, no?

I honestly fail to understand the appeal of this book. Can't bear to listen to it any more...

Okay, I can understand how somebody might not absolutely love The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It does after all combine a few things—such as scifi and screwball comedy, for instance—that not everyone can deal with. In other words, the nerd quotient is high here, and people who aren't wired that way might end up perplexed.

BUT--and this is a big ol' BUT: I don't understand how anybody can HATE this book. In fact, if I weren't such a saintly, even-keel, kittenish kind of guy, I might say that I'm tempted to hate haters of this book. How can you hate such a genial, well-meaning book? I mean, Douglas Adams just saunters in, gives his readers the glad hand, rolls up his sleeves, and gets down to business—summoning every gag in his repertoire just to keep you curmudgeons entertained. And does he succeed? In my opinion, yes. Most definitely.

I should probably tell you, by way of disclaimer, that I have some hardcore nostalgia invested in the Hitchhiker books. (There are five in all, but I never read the fifth Mostly Harmless.) This may be the first non-film novelization full-length book that wasn't strictly intended for kids that I ever read. That's an accomplishment for a kid who was raised on reruns and talking to himself in the tool shed in the backyard. I kind of hated reading for the most part before I got out of college. (I know! I was one of those people! Endlessly grasping for the channel changer and being ruined by the media.)

Since I was maybe twelve or thirteen when I read this, I'm sure some of the dry humor flew right over head, but the slapstick, sight gags, and ridiculous plotting sure didn't. There are so many absurdist details in this ricocheting narrative that presenting you with a thorough summary would be tough. Suffice it to say that it centers on an Earthling named Arthur Dent who narrowly escapes the destruction of the planet when it is destroyed to build a galactic superhighway. He ends up hitching a ride on a stolen spaceship with the (two-headed, three-armed) president of the galaxy.

If you're rolling your eyes, you are (1) a killjoy and (2) not the intended audience for this book. Go read Jane Austen or one of those books about cats that live in libraries. If you're smart and have good taste, read this book. It's kind of like a slightly lowerbrow Woody Allenesque scifi farce, if you can imagine such a thing. (Well, there was Sleeper, so I guess maybe you can.) The plot, like those in Allen's earliest films, is a little flimsy and haphazard, but the Child Version of Me insists that you will enjoy it anyway unless you're a complete asshole.

Re-Read 4/2/22:

Read this book for the first time with my daughter. I figured it is a piece of culture and I'm nothing if not a man of culture. Plus, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

Out of almost all of the hilarious things in this book, my daughter was supremely taken by:

"You want me," said Prosser, spelling out this new thought to himself, "to come and lie over there..."
"Yes."
"In front of the bulldozer?"
"Yes."
"Instead of Mr. Dent?"
"Yes."
"In the mud."
"In, as you say, the mud."


We have, in point of fact, put towels on our heads and acted out the scene more than a few times. Not 42 times, however. There are only so many hours in the day.

I think it was a hit. But we must always remember... Don't Panic.


Original Review:

I'm a firm believer that every budding reader ought to read this book first so they can be utterly and completely ruined for literature for the rest of their lives.

Of course, if you're an older reader, with experience and verve when it comes to words, you might also be completely ruined for literature for the rest of your life, too, but I'm not counting you. In fact, I don't care about you.

I have a towel.

And I know how to USE IT. It's almost, but not quite entirely unlike having a clue.


Fortunately, I, myself had been totally ruined for literature early on in my life and I think I might have read this book around seven or eight times before I got the idea that nothing else I would ever read would quite stack up to it, and afterward, I just decided to become Marvin and assume that the whole world was not quite worth living.

But, again, fortunately, I remembered that I was an Earthling and I could replace most of my cognitive centers with "What?" and get along quite nicely. So that's what I did and ever since I've been reading normal books and saying "What?" quite happily.

You SEE? Happy endings DO happen. As long as you're not a pot of Petunias. Of course, that story would take WAY too long to tell.

I think I want to grab a bite to eat. Maybe I ought to meet the meat.

-«آرزو می کنم که ای کاش در بچگی حرف مادرم رو گوش کرده بودم.»
+«مگه مادرت چی بهت گفت؟»
- «نمیدونم. اون موقع ها به حرفش گوش ندادم.»

چند ساعته دارم فکر میکنم در مورد این کتاب چی بگم که شاهکار بودنش رو توصیف کنه ولی هیچی به ذهنم نرسید. فقد میتونم بگم بهترین و ناب ترین چرت و پرتی بود که تا به حال خونده بودم . اگر دوست دارید از این کتاب چیز خاصی یاد بگیرین بهتره اصلا سمت این کتاب نرید. یک طنز خاص خودشو داره که کمتر جایی دیدین.و اصلا سعی نکنید همه چیز رو بفهمید . فقد از خوندنش لذت ببرید.

رمان اینجوری شروع میشه که همون روزی که خانه ی آرتور به دستور شورای شهر برای احداث یک بزرگ راه بین شهری تخریب میشه. یک نژاد از آدم فضایی ها برای احداث یک بزرگ راه بین کهکشانی سیاره زمین رو نابود می کنن و...

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.

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”.