"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy": Panic, You Shall Not.
Adams's exploration into a surreal and whimsical universe.
[First Published: July 1, 2022]
A “trilogy of five books.” That is how author Douglas Adams described The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. With the posthumous publication of And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer in 2009, the six-book series is an epic hybrid of comedy and science-fiction. Initially published in 1979, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was an instant international best seller. In the subsequent decades, the book’s fame and fandom have grown into a literary cult of personality.
I have always been willing to suspend my disbelief and immerse myself in the experience of science fiction. This suspension is dependent upon an author’s ability to create an engaging set of characters, a unique yet understandable world, and a curiously crafted plot. Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian, Zaphod Beeblebrox, and of course, Marvin were my companions and watch-overers during my transition from the limited reality of an earthbound human to familiarity with Adams’s fictional galaxy-expanding adventure.
To read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is to step into the mind of a genius at his most enlightened. But it is also as though Adams is speaking to you personally, as he guides you through a perplexing world, assuring you, “Don’t panic.”
This is the story of the two human beings who survive the Earth’s senseless destruction. Their adventures in space and time after Earth attempt to discover the meaning of life or, in Arthur Dent, the protagonist’s case, simply find a decent cup of tea (which can sometimes constitute the same thing).
Unlike my first space operatic love, Star Wars, there is no evil Empire in this story – the main villains, the Vogons, are bureaucratic and mean-spirited, but not actually on any Dark Side, as it were.
Adams is obsessed with the technology of his world, such as the telepathic Babel Fish, which can translate all languages, and the Infinite Improbability Drive, which powers the spaceship Heart of Gold. The explanations are bonkers. Yet, Adams slyly shows that he knows his stuff through expert knowledge of the English language. Could anyone else have put words together in such a way as to create the sentence “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t” or the phrase “having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick”? Who else could have assembled the syllables in ‘Slartibartfast’ in such a way? Dare you to find another, I have.
Although this book is famous as a cutting satire on philosophy and religion, it contains some insightful reflections on the human condition. One thing which pretty much everyone knows about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is that the ‘meaning of life (actually the Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything) is ‘42’, but there is also a much subtler answer to perhaps this very question tucked inside.
When Slartibartfast, a planetary architect, tells Arthur he is particularly fond of the Norwegian fjords he designed; there is an almost Buddhist suggestion of taking mindful enjoyment of the present and a Bertrand Russellesque view of fulfilling work and self-improving leisure. The dark side of scientific materialism is also illuminated by an almost throwaway line about the uncanny feeling that “relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules.”
Adams also has plenty to rail against; humanity’s endless foibles and failings are lampooned tirelessly, from the suggestion that human unhappiness cannot be solved by the movement of “small green pieces of paper” to the two trigger-happy intergalactic police. Pretty much everyone’s famous character, Marvin, the chronically depressed robot, is the product of almost unimaginable cruelty – not actual malevolence, just banality – whose creators chose to give him a Genuine People Personality.
It is surprising to think how this book, read first at the impressionable age of thirteen, primed me with a nearly perfect example of how the English language could be made to do amazing things and defy all rules while still making hilarious sense.
While many seek the world of fiction for escape, others, like myself, choose to venture into the imaginary to explore unique mediums of problem-solving. Detaching the known knowns from the unknown unknowns can become more feasible through new venues.