The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide, #1)

by Douglas Adams

A Guide to the Guide Some unhelpful remarks from the author

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.

The idea for the title first cropped up while 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 Gossers after not having eaten for two days straight, on account of being a penniless hitch hiker. We are talking of a mild inability to stand up.

As it is I went to lie in a field, along with my Hitch Hiker’s Guide to Europe, and when the stars came out it occurred to me that if only someone would write a Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as well, then I for one would be off like a shot. Having had this thought I promptly fell asleep and forgot about it for six years.

I think that the BBC’s attitude towards the show while it was in production was very similar to that which Macbeth had towards murdering people – initial doubts, followed by cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm at the sheer scale of the undertaking and still no end in sight.

Then some publishers became interested, and I was commissioned by Pan Books to write up the series in book form. After a lot of procrastination and hiding and inventing excuses and having baths, I managed to get about two-thirds of it done. At this point they said, very pleasantly and politely, that I had already passed ten deadlines, so would I please just finish the page I was on and let them have the damn thing.

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

If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance.

If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it’s vitally important you get away before your phone bill arrives.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

Ford Prefect was desperate that any flying saucer at all would arrive soon because fifteen years was a long time to get stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mindbogglingly dull as the Earth.

‘But can we trust him?’ he said. ‘Myself, I’d trust him to the end of the Earth,’ said Ford. ‘Oh yes,’ said Arthur, ‘and how far’s that?’ ‘About twelve minutes away,’ said Ford. ‘Come on, I need a drink.’

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

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.

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

‘On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you.’

Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe.

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.

‘All right,’ said Ford, ‘just stop panicking!’ ‘Who said anything about panicking?’ snapped Arthur. ‘This is still just the culture shock. You wait till I’ve settled down into the situation and found my bearings. Then I’ll start panicking!’

I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.’ ‘Why, what did she tell you?’ ‘I don’t know, I didn’t listen.’

‘Space,’ it says, ‘is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.

A computer chattered to itself in alarm as it noticed an airlock open and close itself for no apparent reason. This was because Reason was in fact out to lunch.

‘Well, perhaps, we’re both going mad.’ ‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘we’d be mad, all things considered, to think this was Southend.’ ‘Well, do you think this is Southend?’ ‘Oh yes.’ ‘So do I.’ ‘Therefore we must be mad.’ ‘Nice day for it.’

‘Please relax,’ said the voice pleasantly, like a stewardess in an airliner with only one wing and two engines one of which is on fire, ‘you are perfectly safe.’

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smartass.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as ‘a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes’, with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.

‘I’ve just thought of something,’ she said. ‘Yeah? Worth interrupting a news bulletin about me for?’ ‘You hear enough about yourself as it is.’ ‘I’m very insecure. We know that.’ ‘Can we drop your ego for a moment? This is important.’ ‘If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.’

One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.

‘It is most gratifying,’ it said, ‘that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated, and so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients, and the fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a courtesy detail. We look forward to your custom in future lives…Thank you.’

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was, Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

‘You think you’ve got problems,’ said Marvin as if he was addressing a newly occupied coffin, ‘what are you supposed to do if you are a manically depressed robot? No, don’t bother to answer that, I’m fifty thousand times more intelligent than you and even I don’t know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level.’

‘According to the legends,’ he said, ‘the Magratheans lived most of their lives underground.’ ‘Why’s that?’ said Arthur. ‘Did the surface become too polluted or overpopulated?’ ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Zaphod. ‘I think they just didn’t like it very much.’

He woke the robot up because even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.

He had an odd feeling of being like a man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman’s husband wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few idle remarks about the weather and leaves again.

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.

The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, but in fact the message was this: So long, and thanks for all the fish.

‘Look,’ said Arthur, ‘would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?’

These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vast hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front.’

There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are: Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

‘The Answer to the Great Question…’ ‘Yes…!’ ‘Of Life, the Universe and Everything…’ said Deep Thought. ‘Yes…!’ ‘Is…’ said Deep Thought, and paused. ‘Yes…!’ ‘Is…’ ‘Yes …!!! …?’ ‘Forty-two,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.’

Arthur glanced around him once more, and then down at himself, at the sweaty dishevelled clothes he had been lying in the mud in on Thursday morning. ‘I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,’ he muttered to himself.

‘What happened to you?’ demanded Arthur. ‘Well,’ said Zaphod, attacking a boneful of grilled muscle, ‘our hosts here have been gassing us and zapping our minds and being generally weird and have now given us a rather nice meal to make it up to us.

I don’t go around gratuitously shooting people and then bragging about it afterwards in seedy space-rangers’ bars, like some cops I could mention! I go around shooting people gratuitously and then I agonize about it afterwards for hours to my girlfriend!’

I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it,’ said Marvin. ‘And what happened?’ pressed Ford. ‘It committed suicide,’ said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold.