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The Guide Mark II is a chilling and prescient warning about mixing Artificial Intelligence with Corporate Venality. We are only just waking up to the box-ticking, goal-driven, share-and-enjoy surveillance society Douglas anticipated.
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn’t work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn’t really any point in being there.
When it’s fall in New York, the air smells as if someone’s been frying goats in it, and if you are keen to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head in a building.
‘I know that astrology isn’t a science,’ said Gail. ‘Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what’s that strange thing you British play?’ ‘Er, cricket? Self-loathing?’ ‘Parliamentary democracy.
This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (the Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).
He was sitting with his elbows resting on the table and holding his fingertips together in a manner which, inexplicably, has never been made a capital offence.
‘Kill!’ shouted Ford. He shouted it at his towel. The towel leapt up out of Harl’s hands. This was not because it had any motive force of its own, but because Harl was so startled at the idea that it might.
This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology’s greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
‘Even travelling despondently is better than arriving here.’
The main trade that was carried out was in the skins of the NowWhattian boghog but it wasn’t a very successful one because no one in their right minds would want to buy a NowWhattian boghog skin. The trade only hung on by its fingernails because there was always a significant number of people in the Galaxy who were not in their right minds.
The fat man jumped to his feet, grabbed the stick, beat the boghog’s brains into a sticky, pulpy mess on the thin carpet, and then stood there breathing heavily as if daring the animal to move again, just once.
Well, not exactly steal. If his accounts supervisor didn’t start to hyperventilate and put out a seal-all-exits security alert when Ford handed in his expenses claim then Ford felt he wasn’t doing his job properly. But actually stealing was another thing. That was biting the hand that feeds you. Sucking very hard on it, even nibbling it in an affectionate kind of a way was OK, but you didn’t actually bite it.
The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no difference. Being virtually killed by a virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.
What the hell, he thought, you’re only young once, and threw himself out of the window. That would at least keep the element of surprise on his side.
The main force of the explosion was directed downwards. Where, a second earlier, there had been a squad of InfiniDim Enterprises executives with a rocket launcher standing on an elegant terraced plaza paved with large slabs of lustrous stone cut from the ancient alabastrum quarries of Zentalquabula there was now, instead, a bit of a pit with nasty bits in it.
Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was, so he was winning already. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
‘The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.’)
The Sandwich Maker had been sent to them by Almighty Bob in a burning fiery chariot. This, at least, was what Thrashbarg said, and Thrashbarg was the authority on these things. So, at least, Thrashbarg claimed, and Thrashbarg was . . . and so on and so on. It was hardly worth arguing about.
One day Old Thrashbarg said that Almighty Bob had decreed that he, Thrashbarg, was to have first pick of the sandwiches. The villagers asked him when this had happened, exactly, and Thrashbarg said it had happened yesterday, when they weren’t looking. ‘Have faith,’ Old Thrashbarg said, ‘or burn!’ They let him have first pick of the sandwiches. It seemed easiest.
The insurance business is completely screwy now. You know they’ve reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?’ ‘Really?’ said Arthur. ‘No, I didn’t. For what offence?’ Trillian frowned. ‘What do you mean, offence?’
He wouldn’t try to beat the system, he would just use it. The frightening thing about the Vogons was their absolute mindless determination to do whatever mindless thing it was they were determined to do. There was never any point in trying to appeal to their reason because they didn’t have any. However, if you kept your nerve you could sometimes exploit their blinkered, bludgeoning insistence on being bludgeoning and blinkered. It wasn’t merely that their left hand didn’t always know what their right hand was doing, so to speak; quite often their right hand had a pretty hazy notion as well.
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.
He didn’t suppose, of course, that the warranty had especially mentioned that the watch was guaranteed to be accurate only within the very particular gravitational and magnetic fields of the Earth, and so long as the day was twenty-four hours long and the planet didn’t explode and so on. These were such basic assumptions that even the lawyers would have missed them.
‘Ford Prefect? Is he the one who . . . ?’ ‘Yes,’ said Arthur tartly.
He knew that one of the things he was supposed to do as a parent was to show trust in his child, to build a sense of trust and confidence into the bedrock of relationship between them. He had had a nasty feeling that that might be an idiotic thing to do, but he did it anyway, and sure enough it had turned out to be an idiotic thing to do. You live and learn. At any rate, you live. You also panic.
He looked up at the sky, which was sullen, streaked and livid, and reflected that it was the sort of sky that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wouldn’t feel like a bunch of complete idiots riding out of.
For a long period of time there was much speculation and controversy about where the so-called ‘missing matter’ of the Universe had got to. All over the Galaxy the science departments of all the major universities were acquiring more and more elaborate equipment to probe and search the hearts of distant galaxies, and then the very centre and the very edges of the whole Universe, but when eventually it was tracked down it turned out in fact to be all the stuff which the equipment had been packed in.
It was a little like a pikka bird, only rather smaller. That is to say, in fact it was larger, or to be more exact, precisely the same size or, at least, not less than twice the size. It was also both a lot bluer and a lot pinker than pikka birds, while at the same time being perfectly black.
‘You!’ said Ford Prefect. ‘You!’ said Arthur Dent. Ford groaned again. ‘What do you need to have explained this time?’ he said, and closed his eyes in some kind of despair.
‘Well, well, well. When did this happen, then?’ ‘I’m not quite sure.’ ‘That sounds like more familiar territory,’ said Ford.
‘What was the self-sacrifice?’ ‘I jettisoned half of a much loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes.’ ‘Why was that self-sacrifice?’ ‘Because they were mine!’ said Ford crossly. ‘I think we have different value systems.’ ‘Well, mine’s better.’
No one knew where they came from, no one knew where they went. They were so important to the lives of the Lamuellans, it was almost as if nobody liked to ask. Old Thrashbarg had said on one occasion that sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away. Some of the villagers had privately said that this was the only properly wise thing they’d ever heard Thrashbarg say, and after a short debate on the matter, had put it down to chance.
There were about three other customers in the place, sitting at tables, nursing beers. About three. Some people would say there were exactly three, but it wasn’t that kind of a place, not the kind of a place that you felt like being that specific in.
There were about three other customers in the place, sitting at tables, nursing beers. About three. Some people would say there were exactly three, but it wasn’t that kind of a place, not the kind of a place that you felt like being that specific in.
On the monument there is carved an arrow which points away into the fog, under which are inscribed in plain, simple letters the words ‘The buck stops there.’
He had a very simple method of dealing with establishments of which he was not a member. He simply swept in as soon as the door was opened, pointed back at Arthur and said, ‘It’s OK, he’s with me.’
This is also my method: it works too!
