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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Eoin Colfer
Read between
July 17 - July 18, 2025
If you own a copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, then one of the last things you would be likely to type into its v-board would be the very same title of that particular Sub-Etha volume.
However, presumption has been the runner-up in every major Causes of Intergalactic Conflict poll for the past few millennia. First place invariably going to “land-grabbing bastards with big weapons,” and third usually being a toss-up between “coveting another sentient being’s significant other” and “misinterpretation of simple hand gestures.”
Had the human race held a referendum, it’s quite likely that Arthur Dent would have been voted least suitable to carry the hopes of mankind into space.
Arthur’s university yearbook actually referred to him as “most likely to end up living in a hole in the Scottish highlands with only the chip on his shoulder for company.”
Zaphod Says Yes to Zaphod was probably the most famous T-shirt slogan, though not even his team of psychiatrists understood what it actually meant. Second favorite was probably Beeblebrox. Just be glad he’s out there. It is a universal maxim that if someone goes to the trouble of printing something on a T-shirt, then it is almost definitely not a hundred percent untrue, which is to say that it is more than likely fairly definitely not altogether false. Consequentially, when Zaphod Beeblebrox arrived on a planet, people invariably said yes to whatever questions he asked and when he left they
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His tranquillity was disturbed by the arrival of a couriered box from Ford Prefect, which contained the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Mark II in the form of a smarmy pan-dimensional black bird. Trillian, who was now a successful newswoman, had a delivery of her own for Arthur in the shape of Random Dent, the daughter conceived with the donated price of seat 2D on the Alpha Centauri red-eye.
Only then was the Mark II’s objective revealed. The Vogons, irritated by the Earth’s refusal to stay ka-boomed, had engineered the bird to lure the escapees back to the planet before they destroyed it in every dimension, thus fulfilling their original order.
Thanks to the old dimensional axis/plural zone thing, they found Trillian and Tricia McMillan coexisting in the same space-time, both being screamed at by an emotional Random. Confused? Arthur was, but not for long. Once he noticed the green death rays pulsating through the lower atmosphere, all of the day’s other niggling problems seemed to lose their nigglyness.
Was there anything to trust? Anything to take comfort from? The setting suns lit crescents on the wavelets, burnished the clouds, striped the palm leaves silver, and set the china pot on his veranda table twinkling. Ah, yes, thought the old man. Tea. At the center of an uncertain and possibly illusory universe there would always be tea.
Random had every right to feel displaced: Her father was a test tube; her home planet, insofar as she had one, had been destroyed in several dimensions; and her mother had taken one look at her and decided to vigorously pursue a career that would take her far from home for long periods.
The white spaceship shuddered and a door opened smoothly, telescoping to the ground. Zaphod Beeblebrox, Galactic President, interplanetary fugitive, and committed self-serving entrepreneur, appeared in the doorway, planet-sized ego shining through his bright eyes, golden hair bouncing in shoulder-length curls. Very outer-ring, but he carried it off well.
The list is almost endless. Suffice it to say, without cataloguing every single one of the various deaths misadventure or adventure, accidental (or on purpose), Occidental, dental, mental, rental, retail, fetal, fecal, decal (smothered by Saran Wrap), to name but a few, that only one Arthur Dent survived in any dimension after the final, once and for all, no-tricky-loophole destruction of Earth. The same is true of both Ford Prefect and Trillian, but not Random or Zaphod, who were sticking to their pan-dimensional roles well enough to earn gold stars. Related Reading: Someone’s Out to Get Me
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“Now that the ship is not being run by my imbecilic predecessor, our life expectancy has risen by eight hundred percent.” Random, a politician, nodded appreciatively at the statistic.
A red light flashed on Left Brain’s dome. “Stop talking now, Earthman. The word tea has been flagged. The last time you asked for tea, you backed up the entire system during an alert.” Another forced chuckle from Arthur, followed by a little shuffle and a quick exit to the viewing gallery. “I’m just going to check the death-ray lattice thing. See how we’re getting on. Can I get anyone anything?” No one bothered to reply.
Zaphod draped an arm around his cousin’s shoulders. “It’s true, buddy. You’ve been wrangled by the best. Ford here once made a Voondonian grand high friar attack him with incense sticks.” “For a bet,” said Ford, who wouldn’t like people to believe that he went around incensing incensed friars for no reason.
Currently I am being chased by over a hundred bounty hunters, sixteen government vessels, a few unmanned Smart-O-Missiles, and half a dozen wannabe immortals who want to eat my heart and steal my powers. If only it were that easy.
Arthur Dent watched his world die for the last time. 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.
The death rays were the fat tubular kind favored by late-twentieth-century television animators, and the Earth itself looked like a football covered in papier-mâché. But it is real. Horribly so.
So if all Vogons are repulsive, bureaucratic sadists, how does one get ahead in their society? It is a matter of being more Vogon-ish than the rest. The Vogons have a word for it. When one of their number distinguishes himself in the ruthless prosecution of his orders; when the man-hours and body count are ridiculously disproportionate to the importance of the task, when a Vogon forges ahead where others would have been discouraged by plural zones, hordes of Silastic Armorfiends, or the tears of widows—that Vogon is spoken of in the halls of power as having kroompst.
Once again, it was Jeltz. And now, in his finest hour, he had with only a single ship at his disposal arranged for all Earths in all parallel universes to be destroyed by Grebulon death rays, because the last thing interstellar travelers wanted was surprise planets popping out of plural zones every third trip.
Whenever Jeltz played the epithet game, he always came back to his father’s pet name for him. Jeltz the Utter Bastard. That said it all, really. Jeltz remembered one of his own early poems. “Utter bastard,” he said in a voice of distant rumbling thunder. “Play thee, No more, By the crabby hole. Lay down thine mallet And flap flippy floppy arms, At a world of sun and tight skin. Learn hate well, My little, Utter Bastard.”
“Okay. All right. Thank you.” Fenchurch was miffed. “After all I have done for you. The twenty-twenty vision and the kidney stones.” “What?” said Arthur, alarmed. “Didn’t you notice your improved vision? I fixed your retina. Also my scanners detected a cluster of kidney stones, so I pulverized them.” Arthur closed his good eye and realized that his other eye was also a good one.
Anything can be real. Every imaginable thing is happening somewhere along the dimensional axis. These things happen a billion times over with exactly the same outcome and no one learns anything. Whatever a person can think, imagine, wish for, or believe has already come to pass. Dreams come true all the time, just not for the dreamers. Think of something crazy, or if that’s too taxing just throw random adjectives and nouns together.
Guide Note: Throughout recorded history the ability to “state one’s case well” has generally had about as much success as “talking things out reasonably” or “putting aside our differences.” The people who use these tactics generally mean well and would make excellent motivational speakers or kindergarten teachers, but on no account should they be put in charge of situations where lives are at stake.
Successful negotiations are invariably conducted from a position of power, or at least the perception of power.
General Anyar Tsista, the acknowledged prince of negotiators, once claimed that while on the job he never used a sentence that did not include at least one Zark, two shits, and half a dozen asscracks. His final pronouncement contained only a single shit, and was uttered in the form of an authoritative command to his bowels which had locked up as a result of too many hours seated around the negotiation tables. Unfortunately, because of their thin bowel walls, Golgafrinchans are prone to catastrophic bowel ruptures, so General Anyar Tsista’s final utterance was also what killed him.
The universe cannot suffer tender moments like this to last for very long, and there were contenders for the honor of trampling roughshod over this one. First was Random Dent, who was taking a moment to compose a disgusted disparagement before she stalked from the bridge for the second time. But the winner was her father, Arthur Dent, whose comedic arrival nicely counterbalanced the saccharine nature of the moment, thus restoring order to the Universe. “Right, you zarkers!” said Arthur, rushing onto the bridge. “We need to turn this turd bucket around and get our pormwrangling tails to the
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Guide Note: The notion that religions can be useful tools for keeping the rich rich and the poor abject has been around since shortly after the dawn of time, when a recently evolved bipedal frogget managed to convince all the other froggets in the marsh that their fates were governed by the almighty Lily Pad who would only agree to watch over their pond and keep it safe from gurner pike if an offering of flies and small reptiles was heaped upon it every second Friday. This worked for almost two years, until one of the reptile offerings proved to be slightly less than dead and proceeded to eat
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Cthulhu accepted the compliment with a flap of one prodigious tentacle. “Let’s move on, shall we? Where do you stand on the whole Babel fish argument? Proof denies faith and so forth.” “My subjects will have proof and faith,” rasped Cthulhu agitatedly. “I will bind them to slavery and trample the weak underfoot.”
“Hmm,” said Cthulhu. “So. An old standard next. Presuming your application is successful, where do you see yourself in five years’ time?” Cthulhu brightened. Thank you, Hastur, he beamed into space. “In five years I will have razed this planet, eaten its young, and stacked your skulls high in my honor.” He sat back satisfied. Succinct and informative, a textbook answer.
“Skull stacking! Come on, Mr. Cthulhu. Really? Do you think that’s what gods do today? These are interstellar times we’ve got here. Space travel, time travel. What we need on Nano is what I like to call an Old Testament god. Strict, sure. Vengeful, fantastic. But indiscriminate eating of young? Those days are gone.” “Shows what you know,” muttered Cthulhu, crossing his legs. Hillman tapped the résumé. “I have something highlighted here. Under current status it reads, ‘dead but dreaming.’ Could you elaborate on that? Are you dead, sir?”
“Ah, yes, but this tiny form is not me.” Cthulhu poked his body as if he were not familiar with its workings. “This is my dream of me made substantial by dark and terrible forces. I wear this form until my true self is called back to service. My true self is quite a bit bigger.”
“Well…that’s true. But I suppose, technically—and I stress that technically—I am not actually a god. I am a Great Old One. A demigod, you might say.” Hillman closed the file. “Oh,” he said. “I see.” “It’s more or less the same thing,” persisted Cthulhu. “I do all the same things. Apparitions. Impregnating. You name it. I have cards for the lounges in Asgard and Olympus. Gold cards.” “These things are all well and good, but…”
Cthulhu rose from his chair in a furious rage. “I will crack open your skull,” he thundered. “I will visit pestilence on your land.” But he was not needed and was already fading. “I will tear your head from your torso and drink your…”
He leaned back in his chair and turned on the back massager. Hillman was a positive kind of guy, always willing to look on the bright side, but this hunt for a god was getting depressing. Not one of the interviewees had met his standards.
“Get up off your backside, Hillers,” he said in Nano’s tones. “Those people need you.” It was true. The colonists did need him, especially after the kidnapping of Jean Claude. What Nano needed was a real live god to thunderbolt a bit of discipline into its residents. But how did you attract a grade A god to the unfashionable fringe of the western spiral arm of the Dark Nebula of Soulianis and Rahm? It would take one hell of a benefits package, that was for certain.
Zaphod sighed and straightened his coat. “People like me, LB, the truly great ones. We are always alone.”
Heimdall, God of Light, left Zaphod thrashing in the inky void for twenty-nine seconds before lobbing out an atmosphere yo-yo to reel him to safety. In those twenty-nine seconds Zaphod Beeblebrox was forced to think on the inside of his head rather than transmitting his thoughts directly to the universe as he preferred.
And so, the moment has arrived. I grieve bitterly, not for myself, but for those who have been denied the ecstasy of knowing Zaphod Beeblebrox. People will recognize the name, I suppose. Beeblebrox has done a few small things in his short existence. How will I be remembered? As a supernova perhaps, a celestial body that blazes in the night sky, a light in the darkness, granting those that felt its heat on their faces a moment of wonder and perhaps hope. This would be enough. There are those who heap praise upon my shoulders, lauding me as a prophet, a revolutionary, or a great satisfier of
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Size-wise, Asgard was no Megabrantis Delta, but what was there made a big impression. For a start, there was the whole encased in ice thing, which cast a flickering silver blue light show over the entire surface. The surface itself was littered with the kind of dramatic topographic features that would drive a Magrathean to industrial espionage. Mighty, gushing rivers; high, snow-peaked mountains; and fjords as intricate as a twitterflitter’s electrocardiogram readout. Glistening ice fields coexisted impossibly alongside tracts of golden corn, all bathed by sunrays which could not be traced
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Guide Note: Vogons survived until they died through determined extrospection. Apart from disdainful dabblings in the poetic arts, most Vogons try to focus their attentions very much on other species in order to avoid dwelling on their own various physical and psychological shortcomings. Vogons rarely spend time in flotation tanks, they never meditate in steam lodges, and they most certainly do not gaze at their misshapen warty faces in mirrors. The only race to ever have successfully perverted a Vogon planetary demolition order were the Tubavix of Sinnustra, who sent a reformatting screen
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Something had happened to Mown. A few months previously, his block of breakfast gruel had been cross-contaminated with the tip of a toadstool mandarin tentacle, which released just enough entheogens into Mown’s system to prompt him to acknowledge something he had already suspected. I do not hate myself. This was a revolutionary, if not heretical, thought for a Vogon to construct, and would surely have had Mown expelled from the Bureaucratic Corps had he admitted to it on his psych test. If the bureaucratic corps had a psych test.
And if Mown did not hate himself, what did he have to project onto the universe? If not love, then certainly an affable diluted version.
Random was enclosed in a soundproof tube and sent asleep with a shot of twinkling green gas. Her face twitched and then assumed a strange expression that it took Trillian a moment to identify as a smile. “Now I’m going to cry,” she said, gazing fondly at her drugged and imprisoned daughter. “I haven’t seen a smile like that for years. Not since Random was appointed junior judge in preschool. She loved handing out those demerits.” “The child is dreaming. I can show you the recording if you like,” offered the green ship’s captain.
“Your daughter is relaxed and dreaming,” continued Bowerick Wowbagger. He winced at whatever was on-screen. “Though perhaps it’s better if I don’t show you the dreams. They’re a little matricidal.” “Wake her up!” demanded Trillian. “Absolutely out of the question.” “Wake her up immediately.” “Not likely. She is insufferable.” “And you’re not, I suppose.”
Wowbagger winced at the thought. “How about I put her in storage for a while? I can have the computer melt some of that nicotine from the walls of her lungs.” “Don’t you dare put her in storage!” shouted Trillian, resisting a strong urge to stamp her foot. Then: “Nicotine. Has she been smoking?” “For a few years, according to my readings.” “Smoking! Where did Random find time to smoke? I don’t think I’ve ever seen her breathe in with all the complaining she does.” “Storage? Go on.”
Bowerick reached his hand into an amorphous gel table and pulled out a mug of tea. “I think we should leave her in there until we reach the nebula. Nobody suffers, everyone’s a winner.”
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.” “You are pathetic.” “That was one of my favorites movies. I’ve watched a lot of movies.” “And insulted a lot of people.” “That too.”
“What am I shooting at?” “Not the bridge, Heimdall’s on the bridge. But anything else that moves!” snapped the she-devil. “We might lose a few dragons, but there are aliens inside the shell.” Loser craphole, thought Modgud sulkily, opening a window on his wrist computer. At least we acknowledge the existence of technology down here. At least we’re not relying on archaic phone calls and bong codes. “I can mentalbrain what you’re thinking!” screeched Hel. “Something about tents and cake!” Modgud activated the cannons with a few taps on his screen. God help us, he thought. But not the gods we
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I shall make reaching that wall my new short-term goal, decided Zaphod with the same full tank of foundation-free reasoning that characterized most of his life-changing decisions. If it’s the last thing I do, I will reach that wall.
