The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
Summary
Arthur Dent wakes to find bulldozers about to flatten his house for a bypass, and before he can finish complaining about it Earth itself is demolished by a Vogon constructor fleet to make way for a hyperspace expressway. His friend Ford Prefect, secretly a researcher for a wildly unreliable electronic travel guide called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, hitches them both a ride off the planet moments before impact. Adrift among Vogons who force feed their prisoners appalling poetry, Arthur and Ford are picked up by the stolen starship Heart of Gold, crewed by Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two headed, semi disgraced President of the Galaxy, the human Trillian, and a chronically depressed robot named Marvin. The ship's Improbability Drive delivers them to Magrathea, a legendary planet building world, where Arthur learns the almost unbearable truth: Earth itself was a colossal supercomputer, commissioned ten million years earlier by hyperintelligent beings disguised as mice, built to calculate the Ultimate Question to which the answer, already known and famously useless on its own, is forty two. The mice, furious that their experiment was destroyed with the question still unclear, offer to buy Arthur's brain instead; he refuses, a chase ensues, and the group escapes toward the Restaurant at the End of the Universe with the true question no closer to being found.
Adams writes in short, escalating comic set pieces built on deadpan understatement, guidebook entries interrupting the plot with entirely useless practical advice, so the novel reads fast and light even while it is quietly working out a genuinely bleak joke about human insignificance. Its humor depends on tone as much as incident, absurd bureaucracy, mild mannered despair, and things going wrong for reasons no character can quite follow, which is exactly why lines from it, especially the number forty two and the advice not to panic, escaped the book itself and entered ordinary conversation.
Historical Context & Significance
Adams developed the story first as a BBC radio comedy broadcast in 1978 before turning it into this novel, published in Britain by Pan Books in October 1979 and reaching American readers the following year; no award marked its first appearance. It became a fast commercial success on its own terms, selling a quarter million copies within three months and passing a million sold in Britain by 1984, when Pan gave it a Golden Pan award to mark the figure.
Its afterlife has dwarfed most prize winners of its year: sequels, a 1981 BBC television adaptation, a long running series of stage, radio, and computer game versions, and a 2005 film kept expanding the story, while the number forty two and the phrase do not panic became durable pieces of popular culture on their own, cited well outside science fiction fandom decades after the joke was first written.