A friend and I were having an argument, and we don’t have the books to check who’s correct.
In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series (can’t remember which book) the improbability drive changed 2 missiles into other, less explosive objects. One was a whale. The other object is what we were arguing about. What was it?
The other thing is, I read the books and my friend listened to the audio tapes. Was the mystery object changed for the tapes?
Thank you.
A small potted plant of some sort. A fern, if memory serves, but I could be wrong about that. Interestingly enough, the last thought to go through the plant’s mind was, “Oh, no, not again.”
A pot of petunias. “Ferns”, indeed.
I thought it was a bowl of petunias, but that was rejected as silly. But do they change the pot/bowl of petunias to something else on the audio tapes?
Not only were they petunias, but they also aquired the reincarnated soul that has been killed many times by Arthur Dent, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. In a later book (can’t remember which), an incarnation of this soul tries to kill Dent first.
This explains the “Oh, no, not again” thought: It realized that it was Dent who suggested using the Infinite Improbability Drive as a defense against the incoming missiles, which reincarnated him again as a flightless being (pot of petunias) many miles above a planets surface.
If only he could’ve thrown himself to the ground and missed…
I thought it was a bowl of petunias, not a pot, but definitely petunias.
Sorry, my bad. Bowl it is.
S. Norman
Sorry for the double post but here is the paragraph in question:
The deadly missile attack shortly to be launched by an ancient automatic defence system will result merely in the breakage of three coffee cups and a micecage, the bruising of somebody’s upper arm, and the untimely creation and sudden demise of a bowl of petunias and an innocent sperm whale.
On a tangential note, I find it interesting that DA says something along the lines of (I haven’t read the books for a while, time to dust em off yet again) the only thing that went through the petunia’s mind was “Oh no not again.” and that if we knew the reason why it thought this, we would know more about the universe, yet in a later book (LtUaE i believe) he hints, as was mentioned earlier, that the petunia’s were one of the previous incarnations of Agrajag (sp?) that Arthur had killed. This would indeed explain why the petunia’s had that paticular thought. And the mysteries of the universe unravel before our very eyes.
Agrajag it was. They were in orbit above Magrathea, the most improbable planet in the universe. This was shortly before meeting Slartibartfast.
I have the tapes at home but I can’t remember what was said. I’ll have to check it out this weekend. Methinks that if they are different it would be that it was changed for the books, as the tapes are based on the radio series which came first. (Unless, of course, you are referring to a tape that is a direct reading of the book, as opposed to the radio series production from BBC)
There are a number of parts of the Hitchhiker’s saga that have changed slightly between book/tape/radio/video (most notably how they get to & how they leave the Restaurant at the End of The Universe).
But, as far as I can recall, it’s always a sperm whale and bowl of petunias that crash into the surface of Magrathea.
Share and enjoy…
It’s a bowl of Petunia’s in all incarnations of the story. I can’t wait to see what they do with the movie.
[slight hijack]
Who out there thinks that Bob Newhart would be an excellent Slartibarfast?
[/slight hijack]
I used to have the record (wow - ancient technology!) of the HGTTG, and there were two grooves at the end of the side with this particular passage. One groove was blank but if the needle caught the other groove, you would hear that “It was Arthur who bruised his arm.” [Found that on the third listening.]