Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams > Reviews > Funny. Very, very funny.

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Funny, imaginative and surprising .
Disadvantages:	The last two books failed to live up to expectations .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Ah yes, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. One of the strangest books I’ve ever read, but also one of the best. The characters and their adventures are good enough, but the most amazing thing about the book, and the whole series, is the way that Douglas Adams adds background to the scenes by going off on tangents to tell you different stories.

The basic plot is that an alien race wanted to find out the answer to life, the universe and everything, so they built a computer to find it out. The computer spent millions of years calculating and computing before telling the descendants of its creators that the answer was, indeed, 42.

They were obviously enough annoyed, so they asked the computer what the question was. The computer said that it didn’t know, but it could build a computer called “Earth” to find out. That computer would also have to spend millions of years working the answer out.

A few minutes before Earth managed to find an answer, it was destroyed by an alien race, who wanted to build a by-pass through the area which Earth happened to be occupying.

The series looks at the adventures of Arthur Dent, who only just managed to escape from Earth before it was destroyed with the help of an alien researcher who had happened to befriend him. The researcher was trying to do a report on Earth for a book called the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a tourist’s guide to the best places to visit in the galaxy and a mine of knowledge on practically everything you could ever want to know. The researcher, who had assumed the name Ford Prefect, had succeeded in changing the book’s entry on Earth from “Harmless” to “Mostly Harmless”.

There are a lot of points in the books that will make you laugh out loud. Adams is satirical, but never snide or nasty. There is a lot of irony in the books, but never the sneering sort. When he describes a group of inept service people who were tricked into leaving their planet by those who actually served some sort of function in society, he manages to make the characters real and spend a long time laughing at them, but without making us feel contempt or hatred for them.

After finding out the truth about his planet in Book 1, the second book (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) deals with his group’s attempt to go for lunch, and then joyride a time machine away. They get lost and end up on prehistoric Earth, which he manages to get away from in Book 3 (Life, the Universe and Everything).

The first three books are exceptional, but the series goes downhill after that in my opinion. Once the fascination of time travel and the craziness of space wears off, the last two books are less interesting (though still worth the read). So Long and Thanks for all the Fish finds Arthur back on Earth, wondering why it hasn’t been destroyed. Everyone’s noticed that he’s been gone for a few months but only one other person on Earth remembers the day the world was destroyed. His love affair with her is an enjoyable read, but lacks the imagination of the first three books.

Mostly Harmless is the final book in the trilogy (no, that’s not a mistake, it’s what Adams called the series). Arthur finds himself in space again, trying to work out what’s going on. Most of the readers know how he feels as random plot strands come and go in a book that’s far more complex than the previous four.

As I said earlier, what makes the books (even the last two) great is the way that Adams goes off on tangents. At one point, he stops the action to point out that something one of the characters just said travelled into a wormhole and was heard by an alien race. As it was an insult in their language, they became angry and launched an attack fleet against Earth. They were very small aliens, though, and the fleet was eaten by a dog.

The way that these little stories interrupt the plot means that even if you’re not enjoying the plot of a certain chapter, there’s still going to be a lot to make you laugh.

There are also running plots that carry on throughout the series, such as Marvin, the permanently depressed android who is older than the universe itself due to time travel.

The series is a classic, and is littered with conversation pieces. So many of the stories are relevant to so many different arguments or conversations that if you don’t read the books as soon as possible, you’re going to feel left out when talking to people who have.

It’s not even just for Science Fiction nuts, there’s plenty in here that will appeal to people who aren’t interested in the space travel and time travel aspects of the plot, they are a means to the end of making the reader laugh. And believe me, the books achieve this end.