The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Mass Market Author: Visit Amazon's Douglas Adams Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0345391802 | Format: EPUB
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Mass Market Description
Amazon.com Review
Join Douglas Adams's hapless hero Arthur Dent as he travels the galaxy with his intrepid pal Ford Prefect, getting into horrible messes and generally wreaking hilarious havoc. Dent is grabbed from Earth moments before a cosmic construction team obliterates the planet to build a freeway. You'll never read funnier science fiction; Adams is a master of intelligent satire, barbed wit, and comedic dialogue.
The Hitchhiker's Guide is rich in comedic detail and thought-provoking situations and stands up to multiple reads. Required reading for science fiction fans, this book (and its follow-ups) is also sure to please fans of Monty Python, Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and British sitcoms.
Review
Don't panic! Here are words of praise for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!
"It's science fiction and it's extremely funny...inspired lunacy that leaves hardly a science fiction cliche alive."
Washington Post
"The feckless protagonist, Arthur Dent, is reminiscent of Vonnegut heroes, and his travels afford a wild satire of present institutions."
Chicago Tribune
"Very simply, the book is one of the funniest SF spoofs ever written, with hyperbolic ideas folding in on themselves."
School Library Journal
"As parody, it's marvelous: It contains just about every science fiction cliche you can think of. As humor, it's, well, hysterical."
See all Editorial Reviews
- Mass Market Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Del Rey; Reissue edition (September 27, 1995)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0345391802
- ISBN-13: 978-0345391803
- Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.2 x 0.6 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
No matter how many times I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I've read it quite a few times already, it never fails to thrill me and induce bouts of almost uncontrollably hearty laughter. With this novel, Douglas Adams gave life to a phenomenon that will long outlive his tragically short life, delighting millions of readers for untold years to come. I'm not sure if science fiction had ever seen anything like this before 1979. This is science fiction made to laugh at itself while honoring its rich tradition, but it is much more than that. Adams' peculiarly dead-on humor also draws deeply from the well of sociology, philosophy, and of course science. Whenever Adams encountered a sacred cow of any sort, he milked it dry before moving on. Beneath the surface of utter hilarity, Adams actually used his sarcasm and wit to make some rather poignant statements about this silly thing called life and the manner in which we are going about living it. This is one reason the book is so well-suited for multiple readings-a high level of enjoyment is guaranteed each time around, and there are always new insights to be gained from Adams' underlying, oftentimes subtle, ideas and approach.
Arthur Dent is your normal human being, and so he naturally is more concerned about his house being knocked down than facing the fact that the world is about to end. His friend Ford Prefect, he comes to learn, is actually a researcher from a planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, but before he can even begin to comprehend this fact, he finds himself zipped up into the confines of the Vogon space cruiser that has just destroyed the planet Earth.
I'm probably treading on thin ice here, talking about a revered piece of pop culture. When I was in college, Douglas Adams had a cult following that knew all the jokes and could quote them to each other.
I find myself in a middle ground. I was first exposed to Hitchhiker's Guide when it ran as a BBC radio serial (I heard it on NPR, I think). It got a some laughs out of me, and I enjoyed it, but it didn't inspire in me the kind of devotion that it did in other geeks.
Having read the first book, I have to say the radio series is my favorite presentation of this material. Playing as a serial, the gags were front and center, the serial format left the listener with the impression that there was a lot more to come and ensured that Adams didn't overstay his welcome. Read as a novel, the book seems a little pointless. Adams wouldn't know a narrative arc if it hit him.
That said, a lot of the jokes are still funny. Adams was a vocal atheist, and at his best he has the satiric touch of a Voltaire. Evenhanded, he enjoys skewering atheists in his book: Oolon Coluphid, the atheist writer that Adams posits as "the author of philosophical blockbusters," seems quite pretentious and silly, at least in his choice of book titles.
Occasionally, there is a true insight that is nicely played for a joke. My favorite revolves around the babelfish, a fish that is used a universal translator. When a babelfish is placed in one's hear, one can hear and understand the words spoken by another, regardless of the original language spoken. The end of Adams digression on the babelfish ends with the acidly ironic observation that the babelfish is responsible for more wars than any other species in the universe.
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