I read HHGttG a few years ago, and I enjoyed it, but none of the books in the series are anywhere near the top of my list of favorite books.
I took from it that it was a rather straightforward comedy sci-fi story, with a few philosophical overtones (some smart-assed, some genuine). Of course, it could be a philosophical dissertation, wrapped in the guise of a sci-fi comedy story. I also read another reviewer describe it as a polemic against bureaucracy; I’m not really seeing it.
It’s a little of all those things, but mostly the first couple of books are about being funny. By the end of the series, it seems to be about really, really not wanting to be writing the series anymore.
To each his own, but I’d say it’s more than a few, and the story is adequate to hang them on, which is all it needs to be.
The book is the very humorous (IMHO) adaptation of a very funny Radio Play. I don’t believe there was any deep messages but along the way there were some smaller messages I think in the books. Mainly that we Earthlings have an overblown sense of our importance in the Universe.
I think Adams was trying to make a point about the futility of it all at the end of the second book when they meet the ruler of the universe and find out he’s an old man who lives in a one room shack and is basically a retard.
When I first read the Hitchhiker’s Guide, I was struck by its simlarity to a book I’d read and re-read many times, Robert Sheckley’s Dimension of Miracles. Apparently a lot of other people have the same impression, because they started saying that Adams basically rewrote Sheckley’s book.
Adams is on record as saying that Sheckley was a big influence on him, but swore in an interview that he hadn’t read DoM until after he wrote THHGTOG. I suppose it;s possible – he could’ve read some similar Sheckley work (like The Journey of Joenes) and extrapolated a similar story, but I think it more likely that he read DoM and forgot that he had.
In any event, both books are about relatively ordinary guys from Earth that get transported from the earth by aliens without any of the usual means or accoutrements of science fiction, and find themselves on an absurd journey through the universe trying to find some secure place, or Earth, if they can. Along the way they encounter the people who built the Earth, along with various other weird people and situations, and language is never a problem. Eventually, each does find the Earth.
Disclaimer: I’m going by what I remember reading in my copy of the radio play scripts, which are in storage and not at hand, then adding my own opinions to the mix.
Hitchhiker’s Guide was, as noted, originally a radio play in two six-episode series that made Douglas Adams, IMO, a prisoner of his own success. The original six episodes were intended to be all that was produced but the overwhelming response prompted Adams to produce another six episodes. You’ll notice, if you read the scripts, that the first series ended on a definite note (Ford and Arthur trapped on prehistoric Earth, Zaphod and Trillian consumed by the rapidly evolving shapeshifter, and Marvin… well, who cares) from which Adams had to extricate them all for the next six episodes. Those, in turn, were given a much more open-ended conclusion but no further episodes were produced. I think by that time the books were coming into print (I still have mine with the original “green planet” covers) and, of course, those garnered Adams greater international attention. Which in turn led to the demand for more books and, as I understand it, Adams’ increased annoyance with the whole bloody mess
culminating in Arthur’s unequivocally final death at Stavro Mueller’s club “Beta” on an alternate Earth.
So, really, HHGTTG isn’t about anything except giving a bunch of sci-fi and British humor geeks something to enjoy. Not that I’m complaining, mind you!
Of course, I could be completely wrong about all this…
I was actually all set to come in and say it was a polemic against bureaucracy myself. Seriously. And I’d never seen anyone else agree with me on this before…
Well, to the extent that it has any unifying theme, that’s what it is. I agree, though, that it’s basically just an excuse for a variety of amusing digressions.
Funny. I never saw a connection, and I still don’t (other than a person having comic adventures, but you might as well consider both books as being rewrites of Candide). And Dimension of Miracles was even more episodic than Hitchhiker’s Guide (Sheckley seemed to have been reworking some of his short stories).
I remember someone describing HHG to me in about five minutes at a con. When I read it, I discovered that everything funny had been covered. Adams could be hilarious, but it took forever for him to actually say something funny. I was more impressed with Terry Pratchett.
But when I saw the BBC TV series, it was funnier than the words on the page. Most of what made it work was Simon Jones’s delivery. Adams owed Jones big time.
I didn’t take that that was futile, really, or even that he was a retard. The idea I got was that he rules the universe as well and as fairly as anyone or anything could, but in order to do that, he needs to not live in the universe the same way that ordinary people do, so that he never biases his answers in favor of one point of view. But that might be bunk, I must admit.
In addition, and I hope that this is at least partly on-topic, it was a bit of a eureka moment for me when I realized that the central premise of Heinlein’s “Starship troopers” could be seen as an answer, if a somewhat awkward one, to the problem/question that Adams poses about rulers…
One of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it, or rather who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Who can possibly rule if no one who wants to do it can be allowed to?
(Taken from Chapter 28, “The restaurant at the end of the universe”)
It took me a few read throughs to actually get this, and once I did I thought it was brilliant, hilarious, and horribly sad at the same time. To me, it’s about assumptions. Everyone is hampered by assumptions and preconceived notions and prejudices. So the only person who can possibly rule the entire universe well, is one who lives completely without assumptions of any kind (that’s why he tests both ends of the pencil on the paper every day, then fills out the crossword). But such a person wouldn’t even believe in the universe, or anything beyond what he could pick up from his own senses, because to believe in what you can’t confirm yourself, is an assumption. The man in the shack is NOT retarded or an idiot (he coughs to cover the sound of Zaphod and co escaping), but lives completely without even the most basic assumptions that all of us make every day.
I have that tattooed on the back of my right calf. When I get too grim, I look at my leg until I laugh, then I feel better. It’s my reminder to not take life too seriously…
What’s Hitchhikers all about? The first two books are adapted from the original radio series, which were written episodically. As such, they have a very disconnected quality, and seem to bounce around at random. Douglas himself has said he’d come up with a “throwaway line”, and spend a ridiculous amount of time building up to it. So the series was basically coming up with jokes and writing this elaborate buildup to them.
The third book was an adaptation of a Doctor Who story Douglas wrote and never used, so it had a more coherent plot, but lost some of the zanyness of the first couple books. It also was pretty dark IMO, and feels less like Hitchhikers than the other books in the series. The fourth book is my favorite in the series, and is basically Douglas going back and expanding on some of the “throwaway” stuff from the previous efforts. The fifth and final book is pretty much along the same lines as the fourth (attempting to explain the bizarre assassination attempt on Arthur revealed in Life, the Universe, and Everything).
It’s also a bit of a “a philosophical dissertation, wrapped in the guise of a sci-fi comedy story”. Stuff like God’s Final Message to All His Creation, the Man in the Shack, etc, is easy to brush over but can be read into a bit deeper as well. I don’t think Douglas necessarily intended that, but he was an intelligent guy, and a lot of that intelligence came out in his humor. He’s also said a number of the stories and characters in his book are based on events or people in real life, for example, Marvin, the sentient elevators, the biscuit story in book 4, etc.
But in the end, what you get out of it is up to you. I don’t see it as a sci fi story with jokes, I see some hilarious turns of phrase and oddball characters laced with some deeper meanings, but mostly it’s about not taking life too seriously.
