The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #1-5)

by Douglas Adams

Douglas was a genius, because he saw the world differently, and more importantly, he could communicate the world he saw. Also, once you’d seen it his way you could never go back.

When he was eighteen, drunk in a field in Innsbruck, hitchhiking across Europe, he looked up at the sky filled with stars and thought, “Somebody ought to write the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Then he went to sleep and almost, but not quite, forgot all about it.

He worked with former Python Graham Chapman writing scripts and sketches for abortive projects (among them a show for Ringo Starr which contained the germ of Starship Titanic) and with writer-producer John Lloyd (they pitched a series called Snow Seven and the White Dwarfs, a comedy about two astronomers in an observatory on Mt. Everest—“The idea for that was minimum casting, minimum set, and we’d just try to sell the series on cheapness”).

He liked science fiction, although he was never a fan.

In 1977 BBC radio producer (and well-known mystery author) Simon Brett commissioned him to write a science fiction comedy for BBC Radio Four. Douglas originally imagined a series of six half-hour comedies called The Ends of the Earth—funny stories which at the end of each, the world would end. In the first episode, for example, the Earth would be destroyed to make way for a cosmic freeway.

For those people listening to BBC Radio 4 in 1978 the show came as a revelation. It was funny—genuinely witty, surreal, and smart. The series was produced by Geoffrey Perkins, and the last two episodes of the first series were co-written with John Lloyd.

By now, Douglas had a real job. He was the script editor for the long-running BBC SF series Doctor Who, in the Tom Baker days.

Douglas got the manuscript for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in to his editors at Pan slightly late (according to legend they telephoned him and asked, rather desperately, where he was in the book, and how much more he had to go. He told them. “Well,” said his editor, making the best of a bad job, “just finish the page you’re on and we’ll send a motorbike around to pick it up in half an hour”). The book, a paperback original, became a surprise bestseller, as did, less surprisingly, its four sequels. It spawned a bestselling text-based computer game.

I read a lengthy newspaper article recently demonstrating that Hitchhiker’s was in fact a lengthy tribute to Lewis Carroll (something that would have come as a surprise to Douglas, who had disliked the little of Alice in Wonderland he read). Actually, the literary tradition that Douglas was part of was, at least initially, the tradition of English Humor Writing that gave us P. G. Wodehouse (whom Douglas often cited as an influence, although most people tended to miss it because Wodehouse didn’t write about spaceships).

Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on.

He loved talking to audiences. He liked writing screenplays. He liked being at the cutting edge of technology and inventing and explaining with an enthusiasm that was uniquely his own. Douglas’s ability to miss deadlines became legendary. (“I love deadlines,” he said once. “I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”)

He died in May 2001—too young. His death surprised us all, and left a huge, Douglas Adams–sized hole in the world. We had lost both the man (tall, affable, smiling gently at a world that baffled and delighted him) and the mind.

He left behind a number of novels, as often-imitated as they are, ul...

He left sentences that will make you laugh with delight as they rewire the back of your head.

And he made it look so easy.

The history of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is now so complicated that every time I tell it I contradict myself, and whenever I do get it right I’m misquoted. So the publication of this omnibus edition seemed like a good opportunity to set the record straight—or at least firmly crooked. Anything that is put down wrong here is, as far as I’m concerned, wrong for good.

I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1971. Not particularly drunk, just the sort of drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff Gössers after not having eaten for two days straight, on account of being a penniless hitchhiker. We are talking of a mild inability to stand up.

I didn’t have a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day (as it then was) because I wasn’t in that financial league.

In its original form the show was going to be rather different. I was feeling a little disgruntled with the world at the time and had put together about six different plots, each of which ended with the destruction of the world in a different way, and for a different reason. It was to be called “The Ends of the Earth.”

The first episode went out on BBC Radio 4 at 10:30 P.M. on Wednesday, March 8, 1978, in a huge blaze of no publicity at all. Bats heard it. The odd dog barked.

Meanwhile, I was busy trying to write another series and was also writing and script editing the TV series “Dr. Who,” because while it was all very pleasant to have your own radio series, especially one that somebody had written in to say they had heard, it didn’t exactly buy you lunch.

So that was more or less the situation when the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published in England in September 1979 and appeared on the Sunday Times mass market best-seller list at number one and just stayed there. Clearly, somebody had been listening.

The radio series began in England in March 1978. The first series consisted of six programs, or “fits” as they were called. Fits 1 thru 6. Easy. Later that year, one more episode was recorded and broadcast, commonly known as the Christmas episode. It contained no reference of any kind to Christmas. It was called the Christmas episode because it was first broadcast on December 24, which is not Christmas Day. After this, things began to get increasingly complicated.

In the fall of 1979, the first Hitchhiker book was published in England, called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was a substantially expanded version of the first four episodes of the radio series, in which some of the characters behaved in entirely different ways and others behaved in exactly the same ways but for entirely different reasons, which amounts to the same thing but saves rewriting the dialogue.

At roughly the same time a double record album was released, which was, by contrast, a slightly contracted version of the first four episodes of the radio series. These were not the recordings that were originally broadcast but wholly new recordings of substantially the same scripts. This was done because we had used music off gramophone records as inci...

In the fall of 1980, the second Hitchhiker book was published in England, around the same time that Harmony Books published the first book in the United States. It was a very substantially reworked, reedited and contracted version of episodes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 5 and 6 (in that order) of the radio series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” In case that seemed too straightforward, the book was called The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, because it included the material from radio episode 5 of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” which was set in a restaurant called Milliways, otherwise known as the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

At roughly the same time, a second record album was made featuring a heavily rewritten and expanded version of episodes 5 and 6 of the radio series. This record album was also called The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Meanwhile, a series of six television episodes of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” was made by the BBC and broadcast in January 1981. This was based, more or less, on the first six episodes of the radio series. In other words, it incorporated most of the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the second half of the book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Therefore, though it followed the basic structure of the radio series, it incorporated revisions from the...

In the summer of 1982, a third Hitchhiker book was published simultaneously in England and the United States, called Life, the Universe and Everything. This was not based on anything that had already been heard or seen on radio or television. In fact it flatly contradicted episodes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 of the radio series. These episodes of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” you will remember, h...

I wrote a fourth and last book in the trilogy, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. This was published in Britain and the USA in the fall of 1984 and it effectively contradicted everything to date, up to and including itself.

People often ask me how they can leave the planet, so I have prepared some brief notes.

Douglas Adams Los Angeles 1983 and London 1985/1986

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

Human beings are great adapters, and by lunchtime life in the environs of Arthur’s house had settled into a steady routine. It was Arthur’s accepted role to lie squelching in the mud making occasional demands to see his lawyer, his mother or a good book; it was Mr. Prosser’s accepted role to tackle Arthur with the occasional new ploy such as the For the Public Good talk, or the March of Progress talk, the They Knocked My House Down Once You Know, Never Looked Back talk and various other cajoleries and threats; and it was the bulldozer drivers’ accepted role to sit around drinking coffee and experimenting with union regulations to see how they could turn the situation to their financial advantage.

The contents of Ford Prefect’s satchel were quite interesting in fact and would have made any Earth physicist’s eyes pop out of his head, which is why he always concealed them by keeping a couple of dogeared scripts for plays he pretended he was auditioning for stuffed in the top. Besides the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic and the scripts he had an Electronic Thumb—a short squat black rod, smooth and matt with a couple of flat switches and dials at one end; he also had a device that looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million “pages” could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost.” What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Ford was very kind—he gave the barman another five-pound note and told him to keep the change. The barman looked at it and then looked at Ford. He suddenly shivered: he experienced a momentary sensation that he didn’t understand because no one on Earth had ever experienced it before. In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be farther than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn’t very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born six hundred light-years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse. The barman reeled for a moment, hit by a shocking, incomprehensible sense of distance. He didn’t know what it meant, but he looked at Ford Prefect with a new sense of respect, almost awe.

But it was not in any way a coincidence that today, the day of culmination of the project, the great day of unveiling, the day that the Heart of Gold was finally to be introduced to a marveling Galaxy, was also a great day of culmination for Zaphod Beeblebrox. It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the presidency, a decision that had sent shock waves of astonishment throughout the Imperial Galaxy. Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the President? Many had seen it as clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.

Only six people in the entire Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was more or less a fait accompli: he was ideal presidency fodder.*

There was a mood of immense excitement thrilling through all of them. Together and between them they had gone to and beyond the furthest limits of physical laws, restructured the fundamental fabric of matter, strained, twisted and broken the laws of possibility and impossibility, but still the greatest excitement of all seemed to be to meet a man with an orange sash round his neck. (An orange sash was what the President of the Galaxy traditionally wore.) It might not even have made much difference to them if they’d known exactly how much power the President of the Galaxy actually wielded: none at all. Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.

Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.

Within seconds he ran out onto the deck and waved and grinned at over three billion people. The three billion people weren’t actually there, but they watched his every gesture through the eyes of a small robot tri-D camera which hovered obsequiously in the air nearby. The antics of the President always made amazingly popular tri-D: that’s what they were for. He grinned again. Three billion and six people didn’t know it, but today would be a bigger antic than anyone had bargained for.

“Wow,” said Zaphod Beeblebrox to the Heart of Gold. There wasn’t much else he could say. He said it again because he knew it would annoy the press. “Wow.” The crowd turned their faces back toward him expectantly. He winked at Trillian, who raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes at him. She knew what he was about to say and thought him a terrible show-off. “That is really amazing,” he said. “That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingly amazing I think I’d like to steal it.”

The President in particular is very much a figurehead—he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had—he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Thus the planet Vogsphere whiled away the unhappy millennia until the Vogons suddenly discovered the principles of interstellar travel. Within a few short Vog years every last Vogon had migrated to the Megabrantis cluster, the political hub of the Galaxy, and now formed the immensely powerful backbone of the Galactic Civil Service. They have attempted to acquire learning, they have attempted to acquire style and social graces, but in most respects the modern Vogon is little different from his primitive forebears. Every year they import twenty-seven thousand scintillating jeweled scuttling crabs from their native planet and while away a happy drunken night smashing them to bits with iron mallets. Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was a fairly typical Vogon in that he was thoroughly vile.

“Go away!” he shouted at a young Vogon guard who entered the bridge at that moment. The guard vanished immediately, feeling rather relieved. He was glad it wouldn’t now be him who delivered the report they’d just received. The report was an official release which said that a wonderful new form of spaceship drive was at this moment being unveiled at a Government research base on Damogran which would henceforth make all hyperspatial express routes unnecessary.

“I like the cover,” he said. “ ‘Don’t Panic.’ It’s the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody’s said to me all day.”

“Vogon Constructor Fleets. Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy—not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. “The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. “On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you.”