Okay, so as I mentioned before, I’m reworking my way through the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, and just finished So Long… As much as I enjoyed the book, one thing still keeps nagging me that wasn’t explained in it. What happend to the Earth? How did it just re-appear? Or was it ever actually destroyed in the first place? Is this explained in Mostly Harmless (I certainly don’t remember that bit if it was), or is it something DNA just decided to let us wonder about?
I suppose I could just start reading Mostly Harmless right now and see if it’s explained, but my eyes are too tired right now. (Yet here I am, gazing at the monitor…)
I don’t remember the exact details, but there’s a lot of time travel in the trilogy, so one explanation is that Arthur Dent just went back to a time before the Vogons detroyed the Earth. Another explanation would be that Douglas Adams was not 100% consistent in everything he put into the books / radio series / TV series.
As I recall from Mostly Harmless (and I’ve blocked most of it out, fortunately) the Earth is sitting on what is essentially a reality fault line and even though the Vogons blew up one copy of it, another just popped in from another universe to take its place.
Of course, when I was reading So Long and Thanks for All the Fish my impression was it was not the original but rather the Earth Mark 2 which was being built in the original.
Except Earth, Mark 2 would have been starting over from the very beginning, with no inhabitants or anything. The mice decided to scrap it when they discovered Arthur was alive, and when he refused to give up his brain, they opted to just make up the question and go home with that. (“How many roads must a man walk down?”)
Well, he wasn’t very clear on the details, but the message from the fishbowl seems to indicate that the dolphins were largely responsible… a twist on the ‘save the dolphin’ campaigns… the dolphins took pity on the poor humans, saved them from their doomed habitat, and transplanted them to a new world where they could prosper:
It’s explained in “So Long.” When the dolphins realized the vogons were coming, they all left Earth, but they also plucked an alternate Earth from a parallel universe to replace the one that was destroyed. This is very unclearly revealed when Arthur puts the fishbowl up to his ear.
And the dolphins could do this because the Earth was located in a “Plural” zone. That’s also the reason that Fenchurch . . . but I’m getting ahead of the book. It’s mentioned in Harmless.
Stupid retcon, IMO. (Maybe it was because I read So Long during puberty and the love scenes with Fenchurch made a real impression on me, but I find what happened to her hard to forgive.) Anyway, there’s no reason to require that Earth be in a Plural zone. It’s just that dolphis are smart.