The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

show spoilers

Summary edit see section history

Characters edit see section history

• Zaphod Beeblebrox: The president of the Galaxy. Ford's semi-Cousin. President of the Imperial Galactic Government. Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippy, good timer, (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch. He has already spent two of his ten Presidential years in prison for fraud. He was roughly humanoid in appearance except for the extra head and third arm. His fair tousled hair stuck out in random directions, his blue eyes glinted with something completely unidentifiable, and his chins were almost always unshaven. He never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomably into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
• Ford Prefect: Long time friend to Arthur Dent. Writes for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Was born somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. Humanoid in appearance. Named himself after a car. Had first arrived on the planet some fifteen Earth years previously, and he had worked hard to blend himself into Earth society. He had spent those fifteen years pretending to be an out of work actor. He was not conspicuously tall, his features were striking but not conspicuously handsome. His hair was wiry and gingerish and brushed backwards from the temples. His skin seemed to be pulled backwards from the nose. There was something very slightly odd about him, but it was difficult to say what it was. Perhaps it was that his eyes didn't blink often enough and when you talked to him for any length of time your eyes began involuntarily to water on his behalf. Perhaps it was that he smiled slightly too broadly and gave people the unnerving impression that he was about to go for their neck. He struck most of the friends he had made on Earth as an eccentric, but a harmless one - an unruly boozer with some oddish habits. For instance he would often gatecrash university parties, get badly drunk and start making fun of any astrophysicist he could find till he got thrown out. Sometimes he would get seized with oddly distracted moods and stare into the sky as if hypnotized until someone asked him what he was doing. Then he would start guiltily for a moment, relax and grin. Ford never learned to say his original name and the other kids at school nicknamed him Ix.
• Marvin: A clinically depressed robot with a very large brain.*More like mechanically depressed!*A failed prototype of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's GPP (Genuine People Personalities) technology.
• Trillian, a.k.a. Patricia "Trisha" McMillan: Zaphod's scientist girlfriend. Originated from earth. Brilliant mathematician and astrophysicist. Trillian was a girl that Zaphod had picked up recently whilst visiting a planet, just for fun, incognito. She was slim, darkish, humanoid, with long waves of black hair, a full mouth, an odd little nob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes. With her red head scarf knotted in that particular way and her long flowing silky brown dress she looked vaguely Arabic.
• Slartibartfast: An old man on the planet of Magrathea, who designs coastlines and fjords. He won an award for his design of Norway.
• Eddie: The very enthusiastic computer that controls the Heart of Gold.
• Eccentrica Gallumbits: The triple-breasted whore of Eroticon VI
• Deep Thought: A supercomputer built to find the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.
• Rahul Grandhi: “Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”
• Frankie Mouse: One of Trillian's escaped mice who was involved in the experiment to find the question to '42'
• Benjy Mouse: One of Trillian's escaped mice who was involved in the experiment to find the question to '42'
• Phouchg: was a mouse and a descendant of either Vroomfondel or Majikthise.
• Lunkwill: Lunkwill and Fook are the two programmers chosen to make the great question to Deep Thought on the day of the Great On-Turning
• Majikthise: Representative of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons.
• Mr. L. Prosser: He is a nervous roadbuilder who would like to do his job: building a bypass right through Arthur Dent's house. Very little is known about the man except for his predilection for fur hats, his marital status (married), a desire to hang axes above the door of his cottage (although Mrs. Prosser would prefer climbing roses), a direct albeit very distant patrilineal descent from Genghis Khan (of which he is unaware), and occasional visions of Mongol hordes, which are a result of his nomadic ancestry. He unfailingly addresses Arthur as "Mr. Dent." He was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.
• Fook: Lunkwill and Fook are the two programmers chosen to make the great question to Deep Thought on the day of the Great On-Turning
• Loonquawl: Loonquawl is one of the two people who return to Deep Thought to find the answer to the Ultimate question
• Vroomfondel: Representative of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons.
• Yooden Vranx: Ex-President of the Galaxay
• Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz: Who can't not love a Vogon reading poetry... well, until it makes your brain melt. Works for the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was not a pleasant sight, even for other Vogons. His highly domed nose rose high above a small piggy forehead. His dark green rubbery skin was thick enough for him to play the game of Vogon Civil Service politics, and play it well, and waterproof enough for him to survive indefinitely at sea depths of up to a thousand feet with no ill effects. He was thoroughly vile and did not like hitch hikers.
• Humma Kavula: Intergalactic fun and vary humerous
• Arthur Dent: Had moved out of London because it made him nervous and irritable. He was about thirty as well, dark haired and never quite at ease with himself. The thing that used to worry him most was the fact that people always used to ask him what he was looking so worried about. He worked in local radio which he always used to tell his friends was a lot more interesting than they probably thought. Most of his friends worked in advertising.
• Grunthos the Flatulent: Poet Master of Azagoths of Kria.
• Oolon Colluphid: author of the philosophical blockbusters "Where God Went Wrong", "Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes", "Who is This God Person Anyway?", and "Well, That About Wraps It Up For God"
• Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings: The worst poet. Lived in Greenbridge, Essex, England.

Quotes edit see section history

• “"It’s all devastatingly true — except the bits that are lies"”

• “It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man--for precisely the same reasons.”

  Narrator

• “Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”

  Narrator

• “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

• “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

  Narrator

• “Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was, Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.”

  Narrator

• “He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”

  Arthur Dent

• “One thing Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day" or "You are very tall" or "Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?"”

• “DON'T PANIC!”

  The Hitchhiker's Guide

• “What in the photon is it?”

• “Nelsons Square is gone!”

  Arthur Dent

• “I said it wasn't important”

  Slartibartfast

• “...we have normality, I repeat we have normality....Anything you can't cope with is therefore your problem. Please relax. You will be sent for soon.”

  Trillian

• “Look, would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”

  Arthur Dent

• “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”

• “There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. … What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.”

• “If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”

  Zaphod Beeblebrox

• “I'm so hip I can barely see over my pelvis. I'm so cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a week.”

  Zaphod Beeblebrox

• “And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.”

  Proluge

• “The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying ‘And another thing...’ twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument.”

  Narrator

• “Life? Don't talk to me about life!”

  Marvin

• “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

  Ford

• “You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young." "Why, what did she tell you?" "I don't know, I didn't listen.”

  Arthur and Ford

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Earth: A depressing little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive, they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. It gets demolished by the Vogons to make way for a Hyperspace bypass.
• Southend
• Damogran
• Heart of Gold: A cutting edge spaceship with a just-developed piece of technology driving its propulsion: The Improbability Drive. In order to get from one place to the other at a given speed, one simply has to determine how unlikely it is that this would ever happen. It was stolen by the President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox (effectively ending his term as president for his crime), and he subsequently joyrides around the galaxy in it, taking several of his friends with him.
• Betelgeuse: A star from which comes Ford Prefect
• Togo

Organizations edit see section history

• Vogons: Writers of horrifically bad poetry, so much so, it can be used to torture prisoners.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Sub-Etha/ The Thumb: Short squat black rod, smooth and matte with a couple of flat switches and dials at one end. The Thumb is used by Hitchhikers throughout the Galaxy to flag down passing starships.
• GPP: Genuine People Personalities. Giving mechanisms their own unique affect.
• Babel Fish: "Small, yellow, and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe." A living fish which, when placed in your ear, will live there and translate any form of language for you.
• Deep Thought: The second-largest computer ever made. It was the size of a small city. Its main console was installed in a specially designed executive office, mounted on an enormous executive desk of finest ultramahagony topped with rich ultrared leather. The dark carpeting was discreetly sumptuous, exotic potted plants and tastefully engraved prints of the principal computer programmers and their families were deployed liberally about the room, and stately windows looked out upon a tree-lined public square.
• Earth: The Largest computer made was populated by apes before its destruction by the Vogons
• Vogon Constructor Fleets: They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy - not actually evil, but bad tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat and recycled as firelighters. "The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. "On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you."
• Dentrassi: Great guys. They're the best cooks and the best drink mixers and they don't give a wet slap about anything else. And they'll always help hitch hikers aboard, partly because they like the company, but mostly because it annoys the Vogons.
• Teaser: Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.
• Buzz them: They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor soul whom no one's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their heads and making beep beep noises.

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Absurdity: One of the leading principles in the book is total absurdity. A chain of events happens, most of the time without sense, but always an absurd meaning.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Followed by The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Douglas Adams (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Alojz Kodre (Translator)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Ditmar Award (1980: Best International Fiction)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PR6051.D3352 H5 1980
• Dewey: 828.914

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Language is of a scientific nature and would confuse young readers

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Authors, A-Z › ( A ) › Adams, Douglas
• Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Science Fiction › Adventure
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Genre Fiction › Action & Adventure
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Comic

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• WikiQuote
• Folio Socity: The earth is about to be demolished by the Vogons to make way for a new hyperspatial express route. Luckily for Arthur Dent, his friend Ford Prefect turns out to be an alien from Betelgeuse and ‘a roving researcher for that wholly remarkable book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. Seconds before the planet is vaporised, Arthur and Ford escape by hitching a lift on the flagship of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz.
• Wikipedia article: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the title of the first of six books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comedy science fiction "trilogy" by Douglas Adams (with the sixth being written by Eoin Colfer). The novel is an adaptation of the first four parts of Adams's radio series of the same name. The novel was first published in London on 12 October 1979. The namesake of the novel is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a fictional guide book for hitchhikers (inspired by the Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe) written in the form of an encyclopedia.

Movie Connections edit see section history

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (IMDb): 2005
• The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (IMDb): 1981 (TV mini-series)

More Books Like This edit see section history

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

Books That Influenced This Book edit see section history

Books Influenced by This Book edit see section history