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February 14 - October 19, 2025
I sat in the car in the driveway, getting cold, listening to Vogon poetry, and then the ideal radio line “Ford, you’re turning into an infinite number of penguins,” and I was happy; perfectly, unutterably happy.)
My pet project was to write something that would combine comedy and science fiction, and it was this obsession that drove me into deep debt and despair.
a Hooloovoo (a Hooloovoo is a superintelligent shade of the color blue).
there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy,
Old school!
The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, in the destruction of the planet Earth.
The highest prime number coalesced quietly in a corner and hid itself away for ever.
You remember I was always superstitious about the color green when I was a kid?
It has been said that Vogons are not above a little bribery and corruption in the same way that the sea is not above the clouds,
Trin Tragula—for that was his name—was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
“It’s not so much an afterlife,” said Arthur, “more a sort of après vie.”
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with.
The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
This, many claim, is not merely impossible but clearly insane, which is why the advertising executives of the star system of Bastablon came up with this slogan: “If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”
Ford had another Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the drink which has been described as the alcoholic equivalent of a mugging—expensive and bad for the head.
“Hey, er, hand me the raprod, Plate Captain.” The little waiter’s eyebrows wandered about his forehead in confusion. “I beg your pardon, sir?” he said. “The phone, waiter,” said Zaphod, grabbing it off him. “Shee, you guys are so unhip it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off.” “Indeed, sir.”
“But what about the End of the Universe? We’ll miss the big moment.” “I’ve seen it. It’s rubbish,” said Zaphod, “nothing but a gnab gib.” “A what?” “Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let’s get zappy.”
“Look, property is theft, right? Therefore theft is property. Therefore this ship is mine, okay?”
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
“Well, you’re obviously being totally naive of course,” said the girl. “When you’ve been in marketing as long as I have you’ll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.”
Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer’s movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants.
Numbers
a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself.
Arthur could almost imagine Paul McCartney sitting with his feet up by the fire one evening, humming it to Linda and wondering what to buy with the proceeds, and thinking, probably, Essex.
It was conclusively proved that more people watched the Tri-D television coverage of the launch than actually existed at the time, and this has now been recognized as the greatest achievement ever in the science of audience research.
they passed a law decreeing that anyone who had to carry a weapon as part of his normal Silastic work (policemen, security guards, primary school teachers, etc.) had to spend at least forty-five minutes every day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off his or her surplus aggression.
A supposedly dystopian thing we never thought would actually happen.
Gunfire erupted from a window high above them, but it was only a bass player getting shot for playing the wrong riff three times in a row, and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City.
He tried to discover what the computer’s other mental block was all about, but it seemed, not unnaturally, to have a mental block about it. He could no longer find any trace of it at all, in fact; it was that good. He wondered if he had been imagining it. He wondered if he had been imagining that it was something to do with something in the building, and something to do with the number thirteen. He ran a few tests. Yes, he had obviously been imagining it.
He was just passing the seventeenth floor now, where the marketing department hung out. Load of tosspots all arguing about what color the Guide should be and exercising their infinitely infallible skills of being wise after the event.
The villagers were absolutely hypnotized by all these wonderful magic images flashing over her wrist. They had only ever seen one spaceship crash, and it had been so frightening, violent and shocking and had caused so much horrible devastation, fire and death that, stupidly, they had never realized it was entertainment.
“So what happens is, the bozos in the marketing and accounting departments say, ‘Oh, that sounds good, doesn’t that mean we only have to make one of them and then sell it an infinite number of times?’ Don’t squint at me like that, Arthur, this is how accountants think!” “That’s quite clever, isn’t it?” “No! It is fantastically stupid.
One of the troublesome circumstances was the Plural nature of this Galactic Sector, where the possible continually interfered with the probable.
Plurals
