The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

This one-man franchise, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, began life inside the head of a drunkard by the name of Douglas Adams who, in the late ‘70s, managed to write a fairly successful radio-play with that name. He then turned it into a novel, another series was commissioned, he wrote a sequel, again pilfering parts of his earlier radio-play, a television series appeared in 1981, more sequels and spin-offs came along, until Adams’ untimely death in 2001, and there it would have ended but for a film adaptation a few years later. The original book, then, is a fairly small part of a much larger whole, and was not even the progenitor of the franchise – that was the first radio series, of which the novel is itself an adaptation, albeit from the same person who was behind everything else that bears the name. It’s comic sci-fi, quite wacky, and delving into it has required more in the way of patience from me than mere reading.

          The story is as follows: Arthur Dent is a perfectly ordinary, fairly miserable 1970s Englishman, who wakes up one morning to find a construction crew wanting to knock down his house so that they can build a bypass. Arthur then finds out that his friend, Ford Prefect, is actually an alien who has been marooned on Earth for the past fifteen years, who arrives to warn him of the Earth’s impending doom – Arthur’s home planet, like his house, is scheduled for demolition, the planning department of the organisation responsible having conveniently overlooked telling the inhabitants about it. Ford and Arthur hitch-hike their way off Earth moments before its destruction, opening the way for adventures across the galaxy.

          Forced to jump ship again, Ford and Arthur wind up on the spaceship ‘Heart of Gold’, recently stolen by Ford’s cousin – fugitive Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox – and Tricia McMillan (aka Trillian), a human astrophysicist who got off Earth a few months before Arthur, and Marvin the Paranoid Android, a robot whose programming has sadly left him really, really depressed – and willing to explain as much to everybody within earshot at every moment of the day. Zaphod has a dubious goal in mind – to seek out the lost planet Magrathea, and lay his hands on all its fabled wealth. The story is not so much of secondary importance, but of tertiary – trying to keep up with it is ultimately a waste of time, because things just happen one after another. There’s some claptrap about finding out the Question to the Answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything, because it turns out the Earth was actually quite important in that regard.

          The actual Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which the story is named after, is a convenient little electronic encyclopaedia that Ford Prefect carries around with him, packed with all sorts of useful and well-presented information for the budget-constrained space-traveller. Nowadays it might be likened to a corporate-sponsored Wikipedia on a small-screened tablet device, with none of the other functions or inbuilt usability that has become a staple in the modern world. Anyway, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – from the story with the same name – is a useful little plot device, allowing the narrator to take the reader away from the immediate circumstances of their location in order to add a bit of development to Adams’ comic sci-fi world, to tell small, tangentially relevant stories and, more importantly, to explain his more bizarre concepts in a faintly detached yet humorous way. It’s at these moments that some of the better examples of the story’s comedy are revealed.

          Adams’ book itself is a rather poor piece of literature. The plot just bumbles along from one place to another, and the characters are two-dimensional and not especially well developed. That said though, it never needed to be great literature – it works where it counts, in the humour. While far from the greatest book ever written, Adams has a generally unwavering grip on comic genius; many of the lines are delivered superbly, and the dialogue works extremely well. Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent bring the first half of the book alive with their bizarre little exchanges; Arthur the bewildered Englishman out of his depth, and Ford the mind-boggling alien whose job it is to explain just how crazy the universe is. In a scene towards the beginning, Ford and Arthur talk over a few pints in the local pub:

          ‘”Ford,” said Arthur, “would you please tell me what the hell is going on?”

          “Drink up,” said Ford, “you’ve got three pints to get through.”

          “Three pints?” said Arthur. “At Lunchtime?”

          The man next to Ford grinned and nodded happily. Ford ignored him. He said, “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

          “Very deep,” said Arthur, “you should send that in to the Reader’s Digest. They’ve got a page for people like you.”

          “Drink up.”

          “Why three pints all of a sudden?”

          “Muscle relaxant, you’ll need it.”

          “Muscle relaxant?”

          “Muscle relaxant.”

          Arthur stared into his beer.

          “Did I do anything wrong today,” he said, “or has the world always been like this and I’ve been too wrapped up in myself to notice?”

          “Alright,” said Ford, “I’ll try to explain. How long have we known each other?”

          “How long?” Arthur thought. “Er, about five years, maybe six,” he said. “Most of it seemed to make some kind of sense at the time.”

          “Alright,” said Ford. “How would you react if I said that I’m not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse?”

          Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way.

          “I don’t know,” he said, taking a pull of beer. “Why – do you think it’s the sort of thing you’re likely to say?”

          Ford gave up. It really wasn’t worth bothering at the moment, what with the world about to end. He just said:

          “Drink up.”

          He added, perfectly factually:

          “The world’s about to end.”

          [...] “This must be Thursday,” said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer, “I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”’

                             [Excerpt, (1979) pp. 22-23]

          The main reason the book works in this way is actually very simple; it was originally a radio-play, and the book is pilfered nearly word-for-word from the script that Adams originally churned out for the radio. It is essentially just witty, fast-paced comic dialogue, broken up by slower periods of brilliantly witty exposition from The Guide itself. The novel succeeds because it adds nothing more, just a few brief lines of description to make it functional in the printed format. There are one or two minor differences between the radio-play and the novel, ever so slight differences in the plot, but overall no dramatic changes have been made – although it must be pointed out that the novel suddenly ends on a bit of an anticlimax, finishing without in any way wrapping up the plot that had been developing for the past hundred-and-fifty pages. Essentially it cuts of mid-way through the Hitch-Hiker canon, before the events of the radio-series end, Adams saving the subject of the last two episodes for the novel’s sequel. This is a bit of a shame, because the sequel is where it all started to go wrong.

          Let me explain. The radio-series was pretty good; if you like the style of comedy it uses, a broad yet witty kind of fast-paced dialogue comedy with a bit of obvious though brilliant satire thrown in, you will doubtless find it more than palatable. The novel adaptation was also pretty good, because it made very little alteration to the original formula. The main weaknesses of the novel only become apparent when Adams tries actually writing; because he seems to forget that the attractions of his work are in the dialogue and the frequent encyclopaedia-exposition of The Guide itself, and instead tries to bring in more sci-fi, more plot, and more character development – three things he is not so good at. The major difference between the radio and the novel is that, aside from finishing earlier, the novel gives Zaphod Beeblebrox more character, and a serious back-story to do with his motives for stealing the Heart of Gold. And by God, every moment of it is shit. Without the comedy, Adams’ writing is nothing more than the most awful science-fiction imaginable; incomprehensible, scatter-brained nonsense, devoid of any amount of writing skill or reason for existing. Fortunately, such examples are few and far between in the first novel, and don’t cause any major difficulty.

          This problem only becomes pronounced when you look at the sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The events of the last two episodes of the radio-series could not hold up a whole book on their own, and so Adams decided to shoehorn an entirely new section into the narrative – and thus we get an adventure from Zaphod Beeblebrox, going solo on a couple of alien planets, where he confronts the true darkness of the universe. It’s called ‘the Frogstar sequence’, and it’s awful. Remember what I said before, about how the reason for actually getting into this is the comedy? For about seventy pages or so, we get almost no comedy; just Zaphod, bumbling through the hopelessly contrived plot of the worst sci-fi ever written. There were one or two feeble attempts at making laughter during this section, but Adams seems to have lost any wit he once had, and was so busy trying to be moody that any comedy just gets swamped. It’s like a clown comes on stage and pitifully honks his horn twice, before delivering a series of poorly-written angsty poems on how miserable he is.

Only... only when we pick up at the next section pilfered from the original radio-play, when the four main characters are reunited, does the novel gasp into life again. There is a genuine change in tone, once we reach Chapter 14, and I can tell you it’s a relief. The rest of The Restaurant is by no means a perfect book, lacking much of the original wit of the earlier book and sharing itself with Adams’ attempts to be serious and profound, but it’s still heaps better than the first seventy pages.

          The second book ends where the original radio-series finished, with Ford and Arthur stranded two million years in the past on a prehistoric Earth, freshly colonised by a useless lower-middle-class third of the doomed Golgafrincham civilisation. Even here, Adams watered down the comedy of the original in order to try to insert some profundity, and it doesn’t work all so well; but at least it’s an ending. It’s nicely cyclical; the wandering plot-points that have gathered since the Earth was originally destroyed are finally put to rest, and The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is symbolically thrown in a river, giving a conclusion to the whole matter – although again the radio and novel versions disagree on who actually performed this last act; the radio says it was Ford, while the novel says it was Arthur. I’m just glad it ended up in the river, to be honest.

          There the series could have ended – should have ended – but the one-man franchise kept going. The audience naturally wanted more, but Adams never regained the comic-wit that made his original work so memorable. The 1981 TV series, being based on the best points of both radio and novel, was actually a genuinely decent piece of work, starring several of actors from the main roles from the radio version (Arthur Dent, Zaphod, Marvin, and Peter Jones as The Book), and including some of the better reworkings from the novels (thankfully omitting the Frogstar section, whilst keeping some of the ‘Disaster Area’ Rock Band elements). In fact, I might be so bold as to say that the TV adaptation is the ultimate version of the franchise, considering that my only real dislike about it was the alteration of Trillian’s character; you could call her an astrophysicist all you wanted, but a dumb blond squeaky-voiced American puts an unpleasant dampener on that notion.

          Adams kept writing Hitch-Hiker novels, unfortunately. In Life, the Universe and Everything, Arthur and Ford escape from prehistoric Earth back to a more modern time – Ford having rescued his copy of The Guide from the river beforehand, despite the fact it is never really used in the novel again, as another example of Adams killing his own comic genius – just in time to wind up in the middle of a galactic-scale apocalypse. I think I chuckled about three times in the entirety of this 160-page novel, which in a chuckle-to-book-length ratio suggests that this is, not actually, like the original, a comedy. In fact it is depressing, tedious, and rather boring. It’s not comic sci-fi at all, but just a really, really, bad sci-fi. The next book, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, I couldn’t find a copy of, so I haven’t even read it. Mostly Harmless, the book after that, I tried reading, but couldn’t get through the first few chapters without wanting to commit suicide from exasperation. It seemed better written than the first book, but there’s no comedy in it, and Adams just never seemed to realise that neither his characters nor his garbled setting were interesting enough to sustain novels in their own right. There is nothing good about them. All the later Hitch-Hiker novels are terrible.

          So, I think that about clears up everything except the last chapter in this dismal little series: The Movie! In 2005, a few years after Adams’ death, the long-awaited movie version of the original story was finally released, and it was... well, let’s be honest, it wasn’t great. It seemed to have been made by a bunch of people who, seemingly, had never actually read, watched or listened to any previous incarnation of the franchise, only heard about it from someone. It has absolutely none of the comic wit of any of the other versions – in the originals, Arthur Dent, having stopped the bulldozer from knocking his house down by lying in front of it, is taken away by Ford who convinces the foreman, through an insane twist of logical reasoning that beggars belief, to lie down in Arthur’s place. In the 2005 movie, Ford turns up with a trolley-load of beer and gives it away to the construction crew. 
            WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK???? 
         They neutered a truly great piece of comedy right in front of my eyes, and I loathe hate and despise it for that. Thereon out the rest of the movie fails consistently. Events happen out of place, character motives have been swapped around, and at some point they even forget to follow any of the storyline of the original(s). Basically, it’s a stretch of the imagination to call it an adaptation. Which is a shame, because there were some very good casting decision and design choices made. My suspicion is that the original movie script was repeatedly violated by committees of American investors, who understood nothing of wit, of comedy, or even the fact that they themselves were one of the main targets of fun and ridicule in the original. The one good thing to say about it is that at least, unlike Adams, the film never wanted to be taken too seriously.

          In conclusion, Douglas Adams was a goose who laid just one golden egg, and he sat on it for the rest of his life. He laid other eggs, but they were the regular kind of infertile goose-eggs, and it’s no surprise they made no real impact outside of Adams’ cult. This review has been harsh, I know, but don’t let that obscure the fact that originally, back at the turn of the ‘80s, this one-man franchise was actually a good thing, well worthy of its popularity and praise. If you want to experience The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I encourage you to do so, then listen to the 1978 radio-series, or watch the 1981 TV series. Maybe even read the 1979 novel, but be aware that the ending is a bit abrupt and anticlimactic. If you want to read the sequel, then you might want to skip the first twelve chapters, because they’re terrible. The movie is not The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so that can be comfortably forgotten, as can all the later books in the series. Due to the fractious nature of the franchise, I can’t make this conclusion any simpler, and for that I apologise. So I’ll leave you here with a piece of Adams at his best, how he’s remembered, with one of his classic comedic creations, the Vogons: 

          ‘Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy – not actually evil, but bad tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.

          The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your fingers down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

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

                             [Excerpt, (1979) P. 45]

Biblioverse

Adams, Douglas. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Pan Books: Bungay. (1979)

-      The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Pan Books: Bungay. (1980)

-      Life, the Universe and Everything. Pan Books: Bungay. (1982)

-      So Long and Thanks for all the Fish. Pan Books. (1984)

-      Mostly Harmless. William Heinemann Ltd. (1992)