I’ve got the Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide: all the books plus a short story, all in a lovely hardcover.
Anybody ever play the Infocom game? I might just have to go hunt that one down.
I played it on my Apple II E
I remember it being funny at times. And annoying, too. Then, I got a Lisa.
It’s been a while since I read it, but in Life, the Universe, and Everything, did the Scrabble letters spell out “what is 6 times 9”. I never figured out how that made 42. Or did I read it wrong?
The point is that it’s wrong. If I remember correctly, the experiment was screwed up by the arrival of the aliens by that point.
In other words, so close, yet so far. =D
Not necessarily by that point, but by two million years later. (Remember it was Arthur who pulled out the tiles.) ISTR in the book they understood what it meant (Ford says it’s a “distortion” of the real question), but in the radio show, they get all excited about it. Heh.
Mostly seconded. I was thrilled that the radio scripts had even more material that I’d never read (heard?) before, often in more lavish detail, but I have to admit some of the bits worked better in the novelization. Mebbe because Adams had a chance to re-write and fine-tune things there.
Meh. It claims to not know the word “penis.” How can I have fun without a Javapenis?
I had that green thing painted on my surfboard in high school.
The humour in his books made a huge difference to me, in my horrid two years of a Catholic boarding school. I had always wanted to meet him.
I couldn’t believe when I heard that he had died. Some deity has a lot of explaining to do.
It’s been a while since I last read any of the HHG trilogy (I’ve probably read the first four at least 10 times), but if I’m not mistaken, wasn’t the Shoe Even Horizon only featured in the radio series?
I read the original trilogy as a kid, and re-read the 5-book “trilogy” 2 years ago.
I was surprised at how much less I enjoyed the books as an adult. I think when you’re a kid, you think just about every book you read or movie you see as brilliant. As an adult, I tended to find fault with them much more easily.
Basically, I thought the original trilogy kind of got off track in Restaurant, and never got back on. I felt like the characters were “supposed” to go back to the Heart of Gold after their stop at the Restaurant At the End Of the Universe and have more adventures on it. When they instead decided to steal that stunt ship, I felt like the story had come to a fork in the road and taken the wrong path, and just kept getting farther and farther away from it. I wanted to find out what happened when they went back to the HoG. I suspect much of the humor of the third book, relying as it does on cricket, was lost on American readers.
So Long And Thanks For All the Fish and Mostly Harmless were actually better than Life, the Universe, and Everything in my opinion.
I read the first one when it first came out.
It was awesome…which was really strange for me because, back then, I was not into ‘nonsense books’ ( I liked ‘serious’ fiction)
I was grabbed and pulled in from the first page…something like ‘there lived here a race so backwards that they still thought digital watches were a neat idea’. LMAO - I had just gotten said item and thought it was neat.
Great, GREAT book(s)
I don’t remember that at all. I remember somoene using Scrabble tiles to spell out FORTYTWO but that’s it.
That is in “the Resaurant”. They are playing scrabble, and Arthur keeps pulling out scrabble pieces until they spell “what do you get if you multiply six by nine”
Ford say’s “that’s it?” and Arthur says “Thats is it. Six by Nine is 42” Then it is basically the end of the book…
What about the Nuti-Matic machine on the Heart of GOld
No, it is in the Restaurant as well… sorry for the 2 posts… Just excited about the thread…
Anybody appreciate Robert Scheckley? He is definitely in the Adams mold; inventive, with ingenious twists in his stories. I only have one of his collections of his SF short stories, “Can you feel anything when I do this?” but it’s a classic. Probably out of print; all but the top .001% of SF drops in a black hole instantly after creation.
Okay, thanks.
The orbiting party. How much fun did that sound ?!
I’m actually reading “Don’t Panic” (subtitled “Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) by Neil Gaiman at the moment, and it kind of supports what everyone’s saying ie great first two books and then downhill. Very interesting read.
This is well explained by the first two books being based on the radio serials (which had been well edited after many re-writes) while the third was actually a rehashed Dr. Who episode (DR. Who and the Krikkitmen) written during a time of tremendous personal difficulty.
The fourth, “… Fish” was virtually forced out of him by the publishers (Pan), with an editor in the next hotel room editing the book as he went along. It took four weeks to write.
Makes you wonder…
4 weeks eh? I was wondering why Thanks for the Fish paled to the others. I just thought that Adams wanted was short on money. I disagree with you on the thrid book though. I love Life the Universe and Everything as much as the first book in the series.
I guess I may be the only person who loved all five books :D. The first 2 were laugh out loud amazingly funny. Life was hilarious as well (but not like the first 2). So long and Mostly Harmless were less funny, but still very, very amusing and they told a great story (IMO).
And I liked the way it ended. Everything goes boom.