Which series is Douglas Adams better work: the Hitchhikers series or the Dirk Gently series?
For me, as much as I do love THHGTTG in all its forms, nothing compares to the force of nature in a hat that is Dirk Gently. Even if Long Dark Teatime of the Soul was a bit of a dropoff from the first book.
The poll is comparing series to series, but use any standard you wish to base your decision on.
and feel free to quote lines to your hearts content. 
Dirk was a bit of a yawner. I don’t really remember much about the books. Hitchhikers, and especially the radio series which I heard first, was a lot more fun - especially the first few. It did go downhill. Dirk started there.
It’s been years since I read either. I remember Gently being good, but Hitchhiker’s is a classic.
I love both, but, ignoring the terrible “Don’t Panic”, there’s much more humanity (as well as Vogonity) in the Hitchhiker’s series, and many more laughs. Dirk is subtle and makes you think, and that’s certainly a good thing, but my love of HHGttG is practically instinctive.
That said, one of my favorite lines to quote comes from Dirk Gently (sort of a paraphrase/mash-up): “Sherlock Holmes once said that once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. The impossible has to it an integrity that the merely improbable often lacks.”
I’m a big fan of both (just re-read the “trilogy” for the ump-teenth time a few weeks ago), but Dirk wins it for me. Teatime has a very dark (no pun intended) and tragic bent to it that I like quite a bit.
I love the original HHGTTG but the couple Dirk Gentley books do more for me than the Guide series. Over all, they’re just better books whereas the Guide is a collection of really great scenes and lines.
This was a tough one for me. I love them both, and credit HHGTTG for getting me into reading more esoteric stuff, but in the long run, I think the Dirk Gently books have held up better over the years.
Tricky. There is an answer, but I’ll have to think about it.
The Hitchhiker books started me on that genre and were the first English books that I read (after I knew the German translation almost by heart), but I agree with Jophiel that as books the Gently novels are better.
In contrast with most people, I like So long and even Mostly Harmless more than the rest of the trilogy nowadays. But that’s probably my overexposure to the rest.
Are we supposed to be be voting on the books? I have never read any of them. I know both works primarily through the radio versions, which was the original form for Hitchhiker’s of course. Dirk Gently, as adapted for BBC radio, did not impress me much at all (maybe it works better as books). Hitchhiker’s Guide was brilliant and groundbreaking.
I am a Dirk Gently heretic–but only for the first book. *Long Dark Teatime of the Soul *left me cold.
The Dirk Gently books are tighter, but they lack the fifty million ideas-per-page that animated the earlier Hitchhiker books.
I read the first Dirk Gently book aeons ago when I was still in high school, and I remember being quite disappointed with it. I just didn’t find it funny, especially considering it was from the same man who created the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
That being said, I didn’t think the later Hitchhiker’s books were very funny either.
So my vote goes for the original trilogy.
What he said. DGHDA was one of the most intricately crafted books I’ve ever read and it will always be one of my favorites. But LDTOTS was a letdown.
Oh no, not again.
i do like HHG and only made a light attempt at DG.
having listened to the radio series of HHG before reading it also created a strong affinity for HHG. i also very much like the satire on philosophy and science. add to that the South Bank biography episode with HHG characters being involved, which was similar to the otherness of the story. then the HHG tv production and then the movie.
at some relaxed time i’ll try DG again.
The Hitchiker’s introduced me to the absurd, and as such willalways have a special place in my heart.
But the Holistic Detective novels (all two of them :mumble grumble:) kinda spoke to me, so I actually favor them a bit.
My sentiments precisely. The first two Hitchhiker books were just retooled versions of the radio series, which was not only episodic but actually written per episode with Adams having no idea what he would do next, and in fact, spending an enormous amount of time with the sound engineer trying to make phenomenal advances in the science of background ambiance that would be totally lost on the 99% of the public who were listening on cheap AM transistor radios, while avoiding doing any actual writing of dialogue. Life, The Universe, and Everything was an adapted spec script that Adams originally wrote as a Dr. Who screen treatment, and as such, at least it has a coherent story, but while providing some entertaining ideas and skewering more scifi tropes (i.e. the Somebody Else’s Problem field) it wasn’t great literature. Adams admitted that So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish was written strictly for the money, and Mostly Harmless as a kiss off to a series he’d grown to despise.
The Dirk Gently novels were better paced, more tightly constructed, and generally better written, and also don’t make obscure jokes about obsolete timekeeping technology that are nonsensical to anyone born after 1973. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was a much darker book, but also richer for it, delving into the plight of people who were no longer needed and how they were exploited. I think the lack of commercial success dimmed his enthusiasm for writing, which was a shame because he was really maturing as a novelist.
Stranger
I was going to say in my previous post that that quote (and I think you got it pretty much spot-on) is what really sucked me into the Holistic Detective concept.