Episode 11: Amateur Book Review – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (9/23/2020)

Hey y’all! Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me while I explore the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever (and never) wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.

It’s Amateur Book Review time! Today’s episode: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. This will contain spoilers.

Douglas Adams was an English author and screenwriter who had a significant impact on the science fiction and satire worlds in the 1980s and 90s. He wrote or co-wrote at least eleven books, and his screenwriting was featured in episodes of Doctor Who and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, among others, as well as several radio broadcast series. He’s one of those authors that your English teacher might put on the wall underneath a quote, or you’ll mention him to your parents and they’ll go, “oh yeah, him.” Which is, of course, the highest achievement an author can get.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the first in a 5-book series. There is technically a sixth book, called The Salmon of Doubt, which was unfinished and published after Adams’ death. I haven’t read it though, so in my mind, it’s not really part of the series. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is another science fiction book that I actually like, despite its numerous white men having so few problems that they have to create their own. I think the reason I like it is that while it is just another satirical hero’s journey, it is also rich with deep metaphor and commentary on our existence in an infinite universe, and throughout the five book series, there is the constant question of why we matter in a universe where we actually don’t. It’s also ridiculously abstract and every time you think you’ve got your head wrapped around it, it throws you for another loop.

And with that, let’s jump into the plot.

We open with an introduction to our lovely main character, Arthur Dent. Well, lovely is a strong word, I suppose. He’s not bad, by any means, he’s just average, which is fun for a main character. So many stories are about a person who thinks they’re average but they’re actually remarkable, or something remarkable happens to them, but Arthur… well, he’s just a guy. He is also about to get his house demolished by a bulldozer to make way for the construction of a bypass.

So Arthur is lying in front of the bulldozer, because they can’t run over him, and arguing with the construction manager, when his friend Ford Prefect arrives. Now, “Ford Prefect” is a rather odd name, and at first I thought it was just a British thing, but no, it’s just weird. It’s weird because Ford Prefect is an alien, but Arthur doesn’t know that. Ford is on Earth because he’s a field researcher for a traveler’s guidebook, called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He was only supposed to study Earth for a little while, but no ships ever come to the little blue planet, so he hasn’t been able to hitchhike off. In the meantime, he pretends to be an out-of-work actor, and he made friends with Arthur.

Ford takes Arthur to a pub and gives him some bad news. Just like Arthur’s house is going to be bulldozed to make room for a bypass, the entire Earth is going to be bulldozed for a bypass. Whoops! No more Earth. Oh well. Lucky for Ford (and, to a possibly lesser extent, Arthur) they can hitchhike on one of the ships that’s coming to destroy Earth and make it out alive. Arthur takes this about as well as you would expect, which is to say, not well at all. He’s still busy processing when the ships arrive, setting the scene for one of Douglas Adams’ more iconic quotes: “The ships hung in the sky much in the way that bricks don’t.” I’ll give you a second with that… Imagine what bricks don’t do, and that’s what the ships were doing. They hung… yeah, you got it, moving on.

Ford and Arthur make their way onto one of the ships using a piece of technology that Arthur doesn’t quite understand and that means I don’t either, but it doesn’t matter, since they’re there now and Earth is destroyed so there’s no going back. Unfortunately, the fleet of ships belongs to a particularly unpleasant alien species called the Vogons, who, to give a human comparison, are a little bit worse than getting an Uber from a wrestler in a smart car. They also write terrible poetry. Did I mention that this book is satire? This book is satire.

Long story short, Ford and Arthur get discovered and thrown out the airlock, but they get picked up by another ship running on the power of improbability that was just stolen by the multi-headed President of the Galaxy and his human girlfriend, both of which are old acquaintances of Ford and Arthur, separately. Don’t worry about it.

It’s improbable, that’s the point. That’s how the ship works. It just takes the most improbable thing to happen and spins it through the engine a couple times, then spits out a plot point. I don’t know. Don’t worry about it.

Let’s review the major characters we have so far. We have Arthur, our average human man. We have Ford, our intergalactic hitchhiker. We just met the President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who’s kind of an idiot but it’s okay, the president doesn’t have any real power, it’s fine. We’ve also just met his girlfriend, Trillian Astra, who left Earth a while ago and changed her name to be more space-sounding, and is now the only human left in the galaxy other than Arthur. No, they don’t hook up. Not really. Not in this book. The only other person on the ship, if you can call him a person, is a robot named Marvin who is terribly depressed but we love him anyway. They’re all humanoid, and in the book, Trillian is described as looking somewhat Middle-Eastern, but in the film adaptation they made her very very white, which is annoying, but what did we really expect?

Okay, I’ll speedrun the rest of this plot summary, because I really just want to talk about what it means underneath its weird abstract surface. The four humanoids plus Marvin form a slightly begrudging friendship as they search for a long-lost planet so they can figure out the answer to life. Except, not really. See, in another dimension, mice are the dominant species, and the mice built a supercomputer to figure out the answer to life. The computer spat out the number 42, but not the question it answered, so the mice came to our dimension to build another supercomputer to ask the ultimate question.

The supercomputer they built was the Earth. Of course, the Earth was destroyed, so they got to work on building Earth 2. But when Arthur and friends find this planet where they’re building Earth 2, the engineers decide that Arthur must have the question within himself and they want to hack apart his brain to find it. A great chase ensues, but they get out alive, and when they get back to the ship, they decide that it’s time to get something to eat at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which is also the title of the next book.

And that’s the end of the novel. Did it make sense? Don’t worry, I don’t think it’s really supposed to. One of the beautiful things about something so abstract like this is that we can kind of all decide what it means for ourselves. So here’s what the book means to me.

All literature, at some point or another, comes face to face with the indifference of nature towards man. Herman Melville in Moby Dick rages at this fact, desperate to matter, desperate to force nature to care, but the whale is just a whale and that is all it will ever be. Lennie and George in Of Mice and Men want to control their own lives, want to have their own land, want to matter, but of course, the laws of nature and men together don’t care about them at all. Every Jack London book faces the fight against the weather, the fight to survive in a place where people really shouldn’t be, and nature is neither cruel nor kind, it simply is.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide, in its own strange, strange way, also interfaces with nature’s indifference to us, but it puts it more on a cosmic scale. The entire encyclopedia entry on humans just reads, “Mostly harmless.” In this infinite universe, there are only two humans, and they end up on a ship together, and it doesn’t matter at all. It takes Arthur all five books to come to terms with how little he matters, but also how little that matters. The universe, strictly speaking, doesn’t care. Except, Earth was a supercomputer meant to find the ultimate question to Life, the Universe, and Everything, so that the answer would make sense, and that makes Arthur one of the two most important people in the universe. Doesn’t it?

So even Douglas Adams falls prey to the ever-present human desire to matter and to be important. Of course, perhaps this is part of the satire of the entire piece. Humans want to matter so badly that they fancy themselves to be the answer to life, or, at least, the question.

Chapter 31 of the book discusses a terrible intergalactic incident involving a miscommunication that started a war that eventually led to an invasion of our galaxy, except by a miscalculation, the invaders were all much much smaller and got swallowed by a dog. The book is full of weird tangents like this, so if you blink, you’ll miss it, but there’s a very important line at the end of the page, and I’ll read it to you now. It says, “this sort of thing is going on all the time, but we are powerless to prevent it. ‘It’s just life,’ they say.”

Truthfully, we are powerless to prevent many of the things that happen to us. The whale will never hate Herman Melville. The rabbits and the mice and the puppies will never understand that Lennie is not a cruel man. The winds and the snowstorms will never intentionally be convenient or inconvenient for any dogsledder. As indifferent as nature is to us, we are not at all indifferent to it, and I don’t think humans will ever stop wanting to control nature, for we think that once we can control it, we will be as important as the world around us. Maybe that’s the human struggle. Maybe that’s the question. How will we ever matter?

42.

Doesn’t quite work, I think.

Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. Transcriptions are available at fastfactsforgenz.wordpress.com. Transcripts are released there at the same time as the podcasts. Thank you for listening. This is Callie, signing off.