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- Adams famously came up with the need for a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy while lying drunk and poor in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, while backpacking around Europe before going to university.
- In a wonderful twist in keeping with the book’s opening premise of Earth being demolished to make way for a motorway, the Innsbruck field has since been paved over to make way for a stretch of autobahn.
- There is some disagreement as to the correct writing of the book’s title, notably in the book itself, where it ranges from Hitch-hiker’s to Hitchhiker’s and Hitch Hiker’s, with and without apostrophes, depending on whether you are looking at the cover, the spine, the contents, the radio outline, or the American version.
- Arthur Dent was to be called Aleric B before a last-minute replacement in the script outline Adams pitched to the BBC. He had originally thought of writing six episodes in which the Earth ended differently each time, but needed a means of explaining the universe at which point he remembered his idea from Innsbruck.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the first book in Douglas Adams’s series of five novels tracing Arthur Dent’s journey through space. The second installation is called The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and it picks up where The Hitchhiker’s Guide leaves off, following Arthur and his friends as they leave Magrathea and head for a “quick bite” at—of course—the ...
- If you’re ever stuck on a question, you know the answer is, of course, just “42.”
- Forget “Keep Calm and Carry On.” The book teaches this motto: Don’t Panic, written in very friendly letters on the front of the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide.
- You learn to always know where your towel is, because that thing can save your neck in more ways that you can count.
- Dolphins are smarter than humans — but they’re still thankful for all that fish.
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Media Adaptations
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Compare & Contrast
- Historical Context
When The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was first broadcast as a 12-part radio series on the British Broadcasting System in 1978, it was successful. No one could have guessed, though, that it would mushroom into a multimedia phenomenon that would encompass five novels, a television series, a stage production, and, more than twenty years later, do...
Douglas Adams was born in 1952, in Cambridge, England. He attended school at John's College in Cambridge, where he began his career writing comedy sketches, and received his master of arts degree. In 1978 he began writing radio scripts for the British Broadcasting System. One of the se-ries he created was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which...
Earth
As The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxyopens, Arthur Dent wakes to discover bulldozers ready to tear his house down in order to build a freeway bypass. He goes out and lies in front of the bulldozers. The foreman cannot convince Arthur to move. The foreman insists that the plans have been on display for months and that Arthur could have filed a complaint if he wanted to, but Arthur says he knew nothing about the plans until the day before, and when he did learn of them, he found them "display...
The Heart of Gold-1
Meanwhile on the opposite spiral arm of the galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed President of the Imperial Galactic Government, is attending the unveiling of the Heart of Goldship, a top-secret project that is only today being revealed to the public. Zaphod steals the ship, taking with him Trillian, a girl he recently picked up at a party on Earth.
Hitchhiking
Seconds before Earth is destroyed, Ford hitches a lift on one of the Vogon ships, taking Arthur with him. The Vogons hate hitchhikers, but luckily they employ the Dentrassis people as their caterers, and the Dentrassis love to annoy the Vogons, so they gladly picked up the hitchhikers and hid them in a small cabin in the ship. Ford explains this to Arthur, and hands him The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxyso that he can learn more. He also puts a Babel fish in Arthur's ear. The fish allows Ar...
Zaphod Beeblebrox
Zaphod is described as having two heads and three arms, the third arm having been attached "to improve his ski-boxing." As the President of the Imperial Galactic Government, Zaphod was presiding over a ceremony unveiling the Heart of Gold, which was the first ship to run on Infinite Improbability Drive, when, on impulse, he paralyzed all of the onlookers and stole the ship. Zaphod is not sure what compels him to do the things he does. For most of the book he assumes that his freewheeling, hap...
Arthur Dent
Arthur was born and raised on Earth, and he is the book's protagonist. When the novel begins, Arthur wakes up to find that bulldozers outside of his house in England are ready to demolish it so that a bypass for the expressway can be built. While he is trying to stop the demolition by lying in the way of the trucks, his friend Ford Prefect comes and convinces him to go to the pub with him. It turns out that a similar event is happening on a much larger scale—that the Vogon race is about the d...
Eddie
Eddie is the computer on board the Heart of Gold. He is as annoyingly cheerful as Marvin is de-pressed. As the ship plummets toward the surface of Magrathea, for example, the crew is terrified, but Eddie sings a happy song, interrupting itself frequently to tell them how many seconds there are until impact. Later, Zaphod programs it with an "emergency back-up personality," but that personality is whiny and argumentative.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Video-cassette. Six-episode British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) Television series. BBC Video/CBS Fox, 1981.The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Audiocassette. Read by Stephen Moore. Ontario: Music for Pleasure Ltd., 1981.The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Audiocassette. Read by Stephen Moore. Ontario: Music for Pleasure Ltd., 1983.Life, the Universe and Everything. Audiocassette. Read by Stephen Moore. Ontario: Music for Pleasure Ltd., 1984.Absurdity
One of the guiding principles of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is that of absurdity, of things happening randomly without cause or meaning. This does not mean that the whole book is a series of events that occur in random order. Most of the extreme examples of meaninglessness, in fact, do have a cause—they are the products of the Infinite Improbability Drive on the Starship Heart of Gold. The fairly logical explanation of the Improbability Drive in Chapter 10 allows the novel to introd...
Nature and Its Meaning
Rather than being a source of meaning, as is frequently assumed, humanity is presented in this book as a taker of meaning, acting out the roles that are assigned by the animals around us. This is most evident in the interactions with the laboratory mice: scientists believe that they are manipulating the mice's behaviors in order to learn more about nature, but the mice are actually manipulating the scientists' behaviors to learn more about humans. To these mice, the meaning of the Earth and i...
Permanence
The book begins with what would ordinarily be considered the end of all that we know—the destruction of the Earth—but then it goes on to explain a broader context in which the Earth's existence played only a small part. The Earth came into existence because it was manufactured by the Magratheans, who would never have done it without being paid for the job. So its destruction, like the demolition of Arthur Dent's house or the crumpling of a piece of paper, is irrelevant to the people who have...
Make up a work order for the Magratheans, explaining the kind of world you would like them to build. Be specific about the kinds of geographical features and animals you would like to see, and expl...The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxysummarizes the whole Earth with only two words: "mostly harmless." Write up an extended entry for a guidebook that will explain your town in detail to people fro...Write a poem that you think might have been written by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, whose work is identified in the novel as the worst in the universe. Explain the...Suppose that the novel is right in saying that humans are not in control of Earth, but wrong in believing that either mice or dolphins are the most intelligent animals on the planet. Which animals...Parody
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a parody of traditional science fictionadventure stories. A parody is a work that takes the conventions and rules of one form and uses them for comic effect. It is distinguished from a satire in that satire usually tries to point out human folly and vices in order to reform them, while the subject of parody is the style of writing itself. Traditional science fictiontakes the reader, often through the adventures of a common person like Arthur Dent, into...
Episodic Plot
The story that this book is based on was originally written as a 12-part radio series for the British Broadcasting System. Being presented in installments created certain requirements for its plot structure. The action had to reach a peak every so often, raising the curiosity of listeners who would not be able to simply turn the page to find out what would happen next. At the same time, the individual segments each had to tell an independent story, in case someone heard just one episode in th...
Anthropomorphism
Anthropomorphism is the practice, common in literature, of giving human thoughts, motives and behavior patterns to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects. It is most evident here in the thoughts that are ascribed to animals. This does not apply to the mice, because it is explained that they are not really mice but humanoid aliens in disguise. Yet no such explanation is offered to explain why the dolphins would be able or willing to conceive of a warning about the Earth's impen...
1979: Iranian leader Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlevi fled the country. Shiite Muslim leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, returning from fifteen years' exile, took de facto control of Iran. In November, wo...1979: Disco, a musical trend popular in urban areas throughout the mid-seventies, was at its peak. Big hair, big collars, and platform shoes were popular across the country. Today:Because of the ch...1979: Comedy was very popular: Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British show from the early 1970s, was finishing its first run on American television; the young unknowns who starred on Saturday Nigh...1979: A partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania forced an evacuation of thousands of nearby residents and left Americans fearful of radiation poiso...Space Exploration
By the time The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was published in 1979, many people had tired of the American and Soviet race for dominance in space. Twenty years earlier, there had been excitement and anticipation in the United States, spurred on by fear that the Soviet Unionwould be the first country to conquer space. The first evidence of real progress in the exploration of space was witnessed in 1957, when the citizens of the world woke up one day to find that the Soviets had put an artif...
The Internet
The basic concept of the Internet had started in 1969, when the Defense Department of the United States ordered that information that was crucial to national defense should not be held in one place where it could be vulnerable to a nuclear attack. In response to the order, the University of California at Los Angelesorganized a "node," a network that could disperse information to decentralized locations. Soon, other universities linked their databases with UCLA's, as did government research fa...
Oct 4, 2024 · The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the first book (1979) in the highly popular series of comic science fiction novels by British writer Douglas Adams. The saga mocks modern society with humour and cynicism and has as its hero a hapless, deeply ordinary Englishman (Arthur Dent) who unexpectedly finds himself adrift in a universe characterized by randomness and absurdity.
Sep 16, 2024 · The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books were first published in October 1979.First, the adventures of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and Marvin the Paranoid Android were transmitted over the airwaves, and then came Douglas Adams' five science fiction books set in the Hitchhiker’s universe, which have inspired stage plays, TV shows and film adaptations, as well as an annual day of celebration ...
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Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a comedic science fiction novel by British author Douglas Adams, first published in 1979. The novel follows the misadventures of the hapless human Arthur Dent after he is saved from Earth’s destruction by Ford Prefect, a friend who turns out to be an alien.
