#i kinda wanna feature it more often for self ship purposes

[godteri-takk]

Not sure if you wanna read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? Here’s a review!

Welcome a book review of the brilliant and amazing book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! It’s written by Douglas Adams, a British author born in 1952, dead in 2001. He is famous for his work with Doctor Who, a book series about the detective Dirk Gently, and of course The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a series of five books named up after the first one. The first book was published in 1979, and it has 216 pages. It’s a science fiction story filled with spaceships, robots, aliens, space-travel and madness of good quality.

Summary

The book begins when Arthur Dent, the main character, wakes up. His house will be demolished and replaced with a bypass, but that does not matter, because Earth gets pulverised shortly after. Arthur is saved by his close friend Ford Prefect, who turns out to be an author from another planet. While this is happening, Zaphod Beeblebrox steals the legendary and newly finished ship, the Heart of Gold. This ship is powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive, a system that makes the most unlikely and improbable things to happen while in use. 

After being tortured with poems and thrown into space by the horrible Vogons, Arthur and Ford get picked up by the Heart of Gold. After a lot of odd occurrences, they finally move on to the quest of finding the legendary planet-making planet Magrathea. 

Characters

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has many good characters, and I will describe the five most important characters, the ones who appear in every book, and are the main characters. The first one is Arthur Dent, an Earthling in his twenties. He is a tall Brit with dark hair and is “never quite at ease with himself”, as it’s written in the first chapter. Arthur just wants a nice cup of tea and some peace, but neither are to find on the Heart of Gold. He is usually confused, scared or simply indifferent. Still, he is a polite soul, and he tries his best to cope with it all. His closest friend, Ford Prefect, looks very human, but he is in fact from Betelgeuse, a planet six hundred light-years away. Ford has wiry, gingerish hair, and I have always imagined him with freckles, for some reason. “He was not conspicuously tall, his features were striking but not conspicuously handsome.” Ford is a firm and confident guy, and he always knows where his towel is. He loves his job, but he loves partying even more. He is easily annoyed, skeptical and pessimistic. Ford looks down on humans, including Arthur. But after all, he was stuck on our “boring planet” for fifteen years.

Ford’s half cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox has two heads, three arms, sparkling blue eyes, messy hair, and unshaven chins. He has von the price of Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe seven years in a row. “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.” He has the title of President of the Galaxy, but no actual power. He is just a figurehead, and his purpose as “President” is to draw attention away from the actual people in charge. Zaphod is very clever, but often pretends to be dumb to psyche out others. He is extroverted, untrustworthy, irresponsible and imaginative, and 200 years old. I could go on and on about Zaphod Beeblebrox, because he is the most described, and also the most interesting, character of them all.

Zaphod’s girlfriend is also an Earthling, the only one left in addition to Arthur. Her name is Tricia McMillan, or Trillian. She has dark skin, black hair, brown eyes and a red headscarf. She is very smart, as she is an astrophysicist. Trillian is patient, gentle and friendly, but kinda stubborn at times. She plays a very big role in the third book, and you could say she is the most sane person of them all. Trillian also tries to be nice to Marvin, the extremely annoying and chronically depressed robot. He is made of metal, and he has wheels under his foot-soles. His eyes are flat-topped triangles, and he is always annoyed, grumpy, sad or just bored. “Life. Don’t talk to me about life,” he often says. His views on Life are so dark, twisted and depressing that when he talked about it to a computer, it committed suicide. He is extremely intelligent, and he does equations for fun. The only living creature that ever liked him was a living mattress from a swamp-planet. Marvin actually saved the others more than once through the series. Yet he still hates them, and so they are very irritated by him.

The setting

The story takes place almost 2000 years CE, probably around the ‘90s. It starts on Earth in the United Kingdom, but after the planet gets destroyed, the characters travel all around the Galaxy through the whole series, never staying in the same place for a very long time. Of course, they always return to Heart of Gold at some point. The Milky Way is portrayed in a funny and chaotic way in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Lots of funny planets and odd, yet interesting aliens fill the world, and no one really misses the Earth, except for Arthur. There are planets merely made out of beaches, hotels and swimming pools, planets populated by vacuum cleaners, planets filled with ballpoint pens, in short there is a planet for every taste. Advanced, yet useless and silly technology can be found around every corner: Slot machines that only produce “liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.” Radios that can sense movement and change the channel every time you move. Doors that make enthusiastic noises of happiness every time they open or close, simply because they love to live. Millions of species and billions of religions and organisations, the Galaxy is a wonderful place. And if someone in this Galaxy ever has a question about any of it all, they read the book that the book is named up after: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! A book in this story with the same name as the actual book I am reviewing. It plays a big role through the series, and is often quoted. 

My opinion

It’s probably obvious, but I love this book, the whole series in fact. It’s one of my (many) favourites. The characters are unique, and they all go through interesting character developments. The different planets, political systems, aliens, religions and books are imaginative and completely out of this world, yet realistic, because if there really is more intelligent life out there, it might be just like this. Varied, crazy, sad and wonderful at the same time. Through the books, we do not only read about the main story itself, we get long excerpts from the fictional book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, footnotes that explain made up words and other oddities, and maybe a chapter or two that tells the story of something seemingly unrelated, yet hilarious. Between the amusing moments and the heartbreaking scenes, we find golden pieces of mind-blowing philosophy. I give The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a shiny six out of six.