Space Time Warp: A Review of Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GalaxyAn
internet
book review
called it the first in a five-part trilogy. I was
instantly intrigued. Apparently the author had intended it to come in
three parts, but somehow just couldn’t stop himself from writing books
four and five. Meanwhile, the press and the publishers still kept on
calling it a trilogy and conveniently forgot that a trilogy means only
three, and stops at that number. It is this sort of irreverent
disregard for logic that propels this book in the hundred and one
directions of
Space, time and pan-dimensionality.
Consider the premise: Arthur Dent, clad in his dressing gown (the
unequivocal British touch, for what other nationality will condone its
men sleeping in gowns?) rushes outside one morning to find that his
house is scheduled to be obliterated to make way for a road. As he
expresses his outrage and obstinacy by lying on the mud in the direct
path of a bulldozer, his friend of some five
years (Ford Prefect) talks
him into getting a drink by making one of the bulldozing team lie on
the mud in his place. The pair then proceed to the bar very near Arthur
Dent's house and order alarming amounts of beer. Strengthened by a few
pints of alcohol, his friend then reveals that in ten minutes, the
world will end.
The next scene finds them in the midst of chaos, involving an alien
race called Vogons who are telling the Earth
people that their planet
is to be destroyed to make way for some kind of space road, and that
the demolition notice had been released as far back as fifty years ago
on the nearest demolition office somewhere four light years away and
that if the Earth people can't be bothered to take an interest in local
affairs then this whole business of extinguishing Earth is really all
the Earth people's fault.
This is where the adventure and the hitchhiking begin. Ford Prefect
and Arthur Dent traverse the infinity of space getting entangled with
improbability drives (the invention of which, incidentally, makes all
space roads obsolete), and planet-making planets (of which, again,
incidentally, the Earth was a product). They also discover, along the
way, that the Earth was but a super computer built by mice whose sole
goal was to come up with the ultimate question, the answer to which had
already been derived (after seven and a half million years) by another
computer called Deep Thought. The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is 42.
Ahhh yes. This book is arguably the funniest and most sensible bit of
nonsense Britain has ever produced. At the risk of sounding like an
adolescent still deluded by the sham called puppy love (which we all
know is just the biological instinct of species perpetuation kicking
in), I must gush that Douglas Adams is a genius.On one hand,
his book is humorous and witty, and prods people to ask questions they
might never have
asked/forgotten they had asked/ didn't know could be
asked. On the other, it shows the idiocy of dwelling on questions if
that means forgetting that there is such a thing as a life to be lived
and experiences to be experienced and generally just a whole number of
other interesting things to do. It shows us how arrogant and
egotistical we must be to
actually believe that in the
impossible-to-measure infinity of the universe, we could be the highest
form of life in existence (life couldn't be that dumb), and that the
removal of Earth from being would actually merit a second thought.
It brings down mental barriers and exposes serious loopholes in the
very fiber of rationality and reason, discards the rules of logic by
asking us the importance of logic in a place where neither time nor
space (nor brainwave pattern) is absolute, and finally tells us in so
many words, that although we were born but hapless, pathetic bipeds who
might have evolved from almost brainless amoeba, we can actually live
to be flying, free-thinking, gahitchhiking bipeds who must still
call amoeba our ancestors but only in a whisper, and only when we
really must.