Douglas Adams wrote endless versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: initially there was the radio version in 1978, swiftly followed by this, the first novel. A television series and four further novels were to follow, along with various treatments for a film which must have seemed destined never to exist, as far as dear old Douglas was concerned. That it took his sudden death in 2001, aged just 49, to initiate the fresh round of studio interest and rewrites that eventually resulted in the 2005 film version was the kind of tragic irony he might well have appreciated (and no doubt would have somehow incorporated into a Dirk Gently book).I cannot now recall how old I was when I first read this book but I was probably still at school so it might have been while the television series was first on British screens. I was not entirely sure I understood throwaway snatches of intergalactic philosophy such as 'Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.' Nor did I have a clue how a spaceship could be powered by an Infinite Improbability Drive and somehow pass through every part of the universe at the same time. But the characters were utterly believable, which is what makes any science fiction novel work. Throw your protagonists into the most bizarre and outlandish of situations but ensure you focus on recognisible characteristics and you will keep your readers enthralled even when they don't have a clue what the science is all about.
As the central human (possibly only human - isn't Trillian revealed as only part human in a later novel?) Arthur Dent stumbles his way across the universe after the destruction of Earth in just the kind of tetchy, resigned yet barely engaged manner I would hope to display myself if such a turn of events befell me (and I was lucky enough to have a friend like Ford Prefect who was actually from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he had previously claimed). Ford seems odd at first but then we are properly introduced to Zaphod Beeblebrox who takes odd to another dimension. President of the Galaxy, equipped with two heads and an extra arm; this is the man who had whisked Trillian away from a party in Islington six months before the Earth's demise, after Arthur had 'totally and utterly failed to get off with her'. Trillian herself has four or five degrees and probably knows more about flying the Heart of Gold spaceship than any of them (when it comes to gadgetry, even alien men don't seem to think they need to read the manual).
That they are all thrown together and embark upon Zaphod's insane quest to discover things about the universe that are so enormous he has even tampered with his own brains to prevent himself finding out what his motivations are, is improbable. But that's the point. Douglas Adams was famously atheistic but even atheists need to find some workable thesis for how and why the universe exists. For Adams, God is not in the details, but quantum physics is, along with copious servings of extremely unlikely events and plausibility-stretching coincidences. And if the universe as we already know it is wildly improbable then it is a short leap to populate it with depressed robots, pan-dimensional beings masquerading as mice to conduct experiments on Earthlings, planetary destruction fleets led by gargantuan Vogons whose idea of torture is to read poetry to their prisoners, and super computers who spend seven and a half million years considering the question of life, the universe and everything and come up with the answer '42.'
The film that eventually hit cinema screens some 26 years after this novel was published took one or two liberties with plot but the intrinsic absurdity remained intact. Die-hard fans who have taken against it should give it another chance - Hollywood investment practically demanded that the potential for a romance between Arthur and Trillian had to be more fully explored (a fact Douglas Adams himself had recognised in several of his own versions of the script). Beyond this, Arthur is English, put-upon yet heroically stoic, and spends pretty much the entire film clad in a dressing gown.
That said, sometimes the original really is best and in the case of the first Hitchhiker's novel that is almost true. I say almost because there are one or two places where you can see the joins of the transition from radio script to novelisation and there are even one or two continuity errors. The very best Hitchhiker novel, in my opinion, is So Long and Thanks For All the Fish, simply because by the time he wrote it Adams had fully completed the transition from script-writer to novelist. A shame that in his own lifetime he never quite managed to reverse the transition enough to come up with a film script that would have allowed him to see his creation on the big screen. His legacy, however, is to have created a world that I, for one, have always hoped really does await us out there, if only we can find an Electronic Thumb and grab ourselves a lift with a passing spaceship.
