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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy #5

Mostly Harmless

douglas adams

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It’s easy to get disheartened when your planet has been blown up, the woman you love has vanished in a misunderstanding about space/time, the spaceship you are on crashes on a remote and Bob-fearing planet, and all you have to fall back on is a few simple sandwich-making skills. However, instead of being disheartened, Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life a bit and, immediately, all hell breaks loose.

Hell takes a number of forms: there’s the usual Ford Prefect form of hell, fresh hell in the form of an all-new version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and a totally unexpected hell in the form of a teenage girl who startles Arthur Dent by being his daughter when he didn’t even know he had one.

Can Arthur save the Earth from total multidimensional obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter, Random, from herself?

Of course not. He never works out what is going on, exactly. Will you?

240 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 12,1992
Series
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This edition

Format
240 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published
February 1, 2000 by Ballantine / Del Rey / Fawcett / Ivy
ISBN
ASIN
Language
English
Characters More characters
  • Arthur Dent

    Arthur Dent

    Arthur Philip Dent is a fictional character and the hapless protagonist of the comic science fiction series The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.In the radio, LP and television versions of the story, Arthur is played by Simon Jones (...

  • Ford Prefect

    Ford Prefect

    Ford Prefect is a fictional character in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by the British author Douglas Adams. His role as Arthur Dents friend – and rescuer, when the Earth is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass at t...

  • Trillian

    Trillian

    Trillian Astra is a fictional character from Douglas Adams series The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. She is most commonly referred to simply as "Trillian", a modification of her birth name, which she adopted because it sounded more "space-li...

  • Thrashbarg

    Thrashbarg

    Old Thrashbarg first appears in the novel Mostly Harmless, as a sort of priest on Lamuella, the planet on which Arthur becomes the Sandwich-Maker. He worships "Bob" and is often ignored by his villagers. Whenever he is questioned about Almighty Bob he mer...

  • Random Frequent Flyer Dent

    Random Frequent Flyer Dent

    Daughter of Trillian from semen donated to a DNA bank by Arthur Dent. It was the only homo sapiens sperm she could find. As Trillians journalism career took her to an expected war zone, she left Random with Arthur. Random steals the new Vogon versio...

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About the author

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douglas adams

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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Douglas Noel Adams was an English author, humourist, and screenwriter, best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG). Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy developed into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime. It was further developed into a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and a 2005 feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.
Adams also wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983), The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990) and Last Chance to See (1990). He wrote two stories for the television series Doctor Who, co-wrote City of Death (1979), and served as script editor for its seventeenth season. He co-wrote the sketch "Patient Abuse" for the final episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. A posthumous collection of his selected works, including the first publication of his final (unfinished) novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.
Adams was a self-proclaimed "radical atheist", an advocate for environmentalism and conservation, and a lover of fast cars, technological innovation, and the Apple Macintosh.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 99 votes)
5 stars
26(26%)
4 stars
41(41%)
3 stars
32(32%)
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99 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
amelia_weeb
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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I combined my review for all of the Hitchhiker books in to one post. It just felt easier that way.

You can read the review here:

*****Darling & Co.*****
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kevinking16
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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This is Douglas Adam's final episode of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and it's as funny and clever as ever.
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Oixo
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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Great finish to an original sci-fi classic series.
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quantum11
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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This starts really well: Ford Prefect deals a cynical blow to insurance companies, revenue & income, and other generally annoying institutions such as fools and bad news, when gradually the plot itself gets caught in a slow-motion time warp - or so it felt.

My eye-lids got unusually heavy despite a leisurely catch-up with Arthur Dent, and the introduction of infinite possibilities (or was it probabilities?), and various programming teasers. The middle of the book was tedious. I may, of course, have missed some mind-blowing references which would explain this not-so-positive perception.

The pace picks up at the end of the book (a Good Thing for Bob's sake!), and everything goes back to being as it always was or should have been – the perfect ending for this utterly bonkers trilogy of five.
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mononokke
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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I did it! I finished an actual series of more than four books in slightly over a year. I call that a win.

I do know that "finished" is debatable because of And Another Thing..., the official sixth book by Eoin Colfer and published 8 years after Douglas Adams's death, but I'm not sure how to approach that one right now. I feel like I just want to sit with this one for a bit. And there's definitely a lot to sit with.

For starters, there's the whole Trillian/Tricia thing. That wasn't at all what I expected, especially with Random. The alternating parallel universe genre is interesting to me, and I hadn't really realized it even was a (subgenre of a sub-) genre until recently. I'm very interested in seeing how far different authors can take the "what if" but keep the character. I don't know how I feel about the way Adams does this, exactly. If there's a parallel Tricia, shouldn't there be a parallel Arthur as well? Is that important?

I'm not sure if I'm a fan of how much the later two books derailed from the plot of the first three, especially in trying to find the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. However, I did appreciate the return to space travel and full-on randomness that we returned to in this one. I also liked how much of the story was from Ford's perspective. Learning about the inner workings of the Guide was interesting, and having his narration was a lot of fun. I also appreciated that we had Tricia and Ford's narration for about a quarter of the book before meeting Arthur again. The almost full omniscience of the narration one thing I've enjoyed a lot with this series. And Ford definitely stepped up in this one. Actually, I don't remember if there's been a lot of Ford POV in previous books. But honestly, I feel like this is kind of similar to why I liked The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, because there was a lot of Zaphod POV on a similar discovery.

I do think that Mostly Harmless is my second favorite in the series after The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It was a lot of fun to just roll with. I am unsure about continuing with And Another Thing... for a few different reasons. The biggest one is that, even though it is considered the official sixth book, it was not written by the original author, and I don't know how to feel about that. It seems like a sort of fanfiction gimmick, especially in light of things like Cursed Child. At the same time, Douglas Adams also may not have meant to end the series where he did (I looked up some stuff about Colfer's addition to the series). And I'm not sure how I feel about that ending. In some ways, I kind of like the ambiguity of it, and it feels like continuing the series at this point is kind of forced, as in a video game where you can just keep regenerating without consequences. On the other hand, I still feel as if there are a few things that do need to be wrapped up, especially in terms of Ford and the Vogons. I would hope that Colfer does address these things in a way that does finalize the story, but again I'm honestly not sure whether I want to know.
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Altared
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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Douglas Adams has always had such a massive influence on my writing. I don’t think there’s any other author out there who does madcap, irreverent and downright silly as well as he does.

This book, the fifth in the series, continues the craziness of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and Trillion, but with the usual unexpected twists and turns, ranging from random daughters (literally called Random) to multi-universes and holy sandwich makers. Blissfully bonkers stuff.
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