And Another Thing...(Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #6)

by Eoin Colfer

Let us say, for example, that you are on an eight-hour layover in Port Brasta without enough credit for a Gargle Blaster on your implant, and if upon realizing that you know almost nothing about this supposedly wonderful book you hold in your hands, you decide out of sheer brain-fogging boredom to type the words ‘the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy’ into the search bar on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, what results will this flippant tappery yield? Firstly, an animated icon appears in a flash of pixels and informs you that there are three results, which is confusing as there are obviously five listed below, numbered in the usual order.

And the moral of the story is? There are a few actually: some people are bastards and should never be left in charge.

This was one of the many deaths of Arthur Dent, now that one Arthur had managed to break the cosmic pattern and skip dimensions to be rescued. The pattern unravelled for the rest and they were picked off one by one, by improbable accidents hurriedly cobbled together by a ticked-off Fate. One Arthur was electrocuted by malfunctioning headphones as he produced a local radio show discussing recent UFO sightings in the area (cosmic black humour). A second Arthur woke up one morning convinced that he could fly, and no amount of persuasion could prevent him from scaling a radio tower and hurling himself off. A third was crushed by a buffadozer during a protest to save his house. The buffadozer did not suffer any physical damage but was traumatized by the event and went on to sue the council, specifically naming a certain Mr Prosser in the suit. Prosser was subsequently given the axe. Yet another Arthur was drowned in a freak rainstorm shortly after giving the two fingers to a truck driver who had cut him off on the motorway.

A Striteraxian equivalent would be: ‘You display inordinate pride for someone who has completed a task which could have been performed by a lesser primate in a shorter time.’ The Armorfiends were never very good at references, but they were quite excellent at getting to the point. Usually the point would be made of toughened steel and coated with venom.

The porthole frame made the whole event look like it was happening on TV; an early episode of Doctor Who, perhaps, when the special effects were charming but not so sophisticated.

Could be worse, he thought. Could be short trousers.

Arthur recognized the Solar System and the ten planets in elliptical orbit around Sol. The deep blue of Saturn, Jupiter like a giant malachite pebble.

You'd think someone during the proof reading would've realised that he's thinking about Uranus and Neptune here

Guide Note: In this case the word ‘literally’ is not simply a misrepresentation of the word ‘figuratively’.

A note written with @Rushie74 in mind!

Wowbagger could not hold her eyes. ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.’

Mega-lightning froody, thought Ford, who knew nothing about holograms apart from the fact that they were sparkly and you should never lick one.

Thank you, Doxy Ribonu-Clegg, he thought. Thank you for inventing the Sub-Etha. Guide Note: Technically speaking, Doxy Ribonu-Clegg did not invent the Sub-Etha, rather he discovered its existence. The Sub-Etha waves had been around for at least as long as the gods, just waiting for someone to pump some data into them. The legend goes that Ribonu-Clegg had been lying on his back in a field on his home planet. As he gazed blearily up through the wedge of space suspended above him it occurred to the renowned professor that all this space was loaded with information and that perhaps it would be possible to transport some information of his own through the cosmic conduits if only he could make it small enough. So Ribonu-Clegg hurried back to his rudimentary lab and constructed the first ever set of Sub-Etha transmitters using pepper grinders, several live pinky rats, various cannibalized lab machines and some professional-standard hairdressing scissors. Once these components were connected, Ribonu-Clegg fed in the phot-o-pix from his wedding album and prayed they would be reassembled on the other side of the room. They were not, but the national lottery numbers for the following evening did show up, which encouraged the professor to patent his invention. Ribonu-Clegg used his winnings to hire a team of shark lawyers who successfully sued eighty-nine companies that invented actual working Sub-Etha transmitters, making the professor the richest man on the planet until he fell int...

There was a storm brewing. And in Thor’s case this was not just a figure of speech; there was an actual miniature thundercloud boiling above his head, lightning bolts poking their heads from the vapour like lizards’ tongues.

‘Oh, yes. I may be tiny, but I’ve got a certain je ne sais quoi.’ ‘A certain what?’ ‘I don’t know what,’ admitted Zaphod. ‘But that’s never stopped me before.’

when a god put in a line on page two about taking a sabbatical for divine contemplation, that actually meant that he had been unemployed for the past ten thousand years. When a god claimed to have gradual meteorological influence, it simply meant that he looked up the forecast and then claimed to be responsible for whatever weather happened. And if a god was making a big deal out of his omnipresence, there was a very good chance that he had a twin brother floating around somewhere.

‘Agreed. If we win, then you will join our happy group; if you win, then we keep coming back until we win.’

‘And how would sirs like their steak?’ ‘Rare,’ said Ford. ‘So rare a vet with shock paddles could revive it.’

‘Pigs?’ said the cow. ‘Don’t talk to me about pigs.’

‘We are back, baby. Religion is the new atheism. Once we have united all the colonists in faith, there’s a whole Universe out there. Imagine how many tiny hammers we could sell.’

There is no such thing as a happy ending. Every culture has a maxim that makes this point, while nowhere in the Universe is there a single gravestone that reads ‘He Loved Everything About His Life, Especially the Dying Bit at the End’.