Mostly Harmless (1992) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

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• Arthur Dent: One of the main protagonists. An ape-descndant life-form from the planet Earth. A good friend of Ford Prefect.
• Tricia Mcmillan: A successful TV anchor, mother of Random.
• Random Frequent Flyer Dent: Arthur Dent and Trillian's daughter. Random was left on Lamuella by her mother so her mother could pursue her career in intergalactic space reporting. Random was conceived via artificial insemination from the sperm Arthur had given during his travels so as to pay for a better seat.
• Gail Andrews: The astrologer who realizes the truth that Trillian hasn't mentioned to anyone for so many years.
• Colin: A happy robot who will do anything for Ford.
• Trillian: Also known as Patricia McMillan is a partner of Dent and held a position as a news reporter on Earth.
• Ford Perfect: A friend of Arthur Dent who was stranded on Earth for 15 years on his hitchhiking adventures. Though he told Arthur otherwise, he actually was from Betelguese.
• The Guide Bird: A bird that is supposedly the new Guide (Guide Mk. 2).
• Old Thrashbarg: The Priest of the Village that Arthur lived in on Lamuella.
• Perfectly Normal Beast: A beast on Lamuella who's meat is used in Arthur's sandwiches.

Quotes edit see section history

• “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

  Narrator

• “Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyway, so their opinion can and should be discounted. When it's fall in New York, the air smells as if someone's been frying goats in it, and if you are keen to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head in a building.Tricia McMillan loved New York. She kept on telling herself this over and over again. The Upper West Side. Yeah. Midtown. Hey, great retail. SoHo. The East Village. Clothes. Books. Sushi. Italian. Delis. Yo.”

• “Movies. Yo also. Tricia had just been to see Woody Allen's new movie, which was all about the angst of being neurotic in New York. He had made on or two other movies that had explored the same theme, and Tricia wondered if he had ever considered moving, but heard that he had set his face against the idea. So: more movies, she guessed.”

• “Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else thatthinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool acompletely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence overand over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best conductedmillennia ago at MISPWOSO ( the MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly andPainfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).”

• “No," said the old lady. "It's the story of my life. You see, thequality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against thequality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through thisdocument you'll see that I've underline all the major decisions I evermade to make them stand out. They're all indexed and cross-referenced.See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactlyopposite to the sort of decisions that I've taken, then maybe you won'tfinish up at the end of your life" - she paused, and filled her lungsfor a good shout - "in a smelly old cave like this!"She grabbed up her table tennis bat, rolled up her sleeve, stomped offto her pile of dead goatlike things and started to set about the flieswith vim and vigor.”

• “What the hell, he thought, you're only young once, and threw himself out of the window. That would at least keep the element of surprise on his side.”

• “So, what would the engineers not be expecting someone sitting on theledge outside the window to do?He wracked his brains for a moment or so before he got it.The thing they wouldn't be expecting him to do was to be there in thefirst place. Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was, sohe was winning already. A common mistake that people make when tryingto design something completely foolproof was to underestimate theingenuity of complete fools.”

• “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thingthat cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possiblygo wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at orrepair.”

• “You know they've reintroduced the death penalty for insurance companydirectors?""Really?" said Arthur. "No, I didn't. For what offense?"Trillian frowned."What do you mean, offense?""I see.”

• “So everything was going well, was it? Everything was working out as ifthe most extraordinary luck was on his side? Well, he'd see about that.In a spirit of scientific inquiry he hurled himself out of the windowagain.”

• “They had only ever seen one spaceship crash, and it had been sofrightening, violent and shocking and had caused so much horribledevastation, fire and death that, stupidly, they had never realized itwas entertainment.”

• “It's ticking. That's the mechanism that drives the watch. It's calledclockworks. It's all kind of interlocking cogs and springs that work toturn the hands around at exactly the right speed to mark the hours andminutes and days and so on."Random carried on peering at it."There's something puzzling you," said Arthur. "What is it?""Yes," said Random, at last. "Why's it all in hardware?”

• “For a long period of time there was much speculation and controversyabout where the so-called 'missing matter' of the Universe had got to.All over the Galaxy the science departments of all the majoruniversities were acquiring more and elaborate equipment to probe andsearch the hearts of distant galaxies, and then the very center and thevery edges of the whole Universe, but when eventually it was trackeddown it turned out in fact to be all the stuff which the equipment hadbeen packed in.”

• “If you'd like to know, I can tell you that in your universe you movefreely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straightline in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in afifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that itgets a bit complicated, and there's all sorts of stuff going on indimensions thirteen to twenty-two that you really wouldn't want to knowabout. All you really need to know for the moment is that the universeia a lot more complicated than you think, even if you start from theposition of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.”

• “So that you understand that just because you see something, it doesn'tmean to say it's there. And if you don't see something, it doesn't meanto say that it's not there. It's only what your senses bring to yourattention.”

• “Your universe is vast to you. Vast in time, vast in space. That'sbecause of the filters through which you perceive it. But I was builtwith no filters at all, which means I perceive the Mish Mash whichcontains all possible universes but which has, itself, no size at all.For me, anything is possible. I am omniscient and omnipotent, extremelyvain and, what is more, I come in a handy self-carrying package. Youhave to work out how much of the above is true.”

• “Then there were the spaceships parked in front of the bar & grill.Ah. The Domain of the King Bar & Grill. Bit of an anticlimax, thoughArthur to himself.In fact only one of the spaceships was parked in front of the Domain ofthe King Bar & Grill. It was the one in front that caught the eye,though. Wonderful-looking thing. Wild fins all over it, far, far toomuch chrome all over the fins and most of the actual bodywork painted ina shocking pink. It crouched there like an immense brooding insect andlooked as if it was at any moment about to jump on something about amile away.The Domain of the King Bar & Grill was slap bang in the middle of wherethe Perfectly Normal Beasts would be charging if they didn't take aminor transdimensional diversion on the way. It stood on its own,undisturbed. An ordinary bar & grill. A truck-stop diner. Somewherein the middle of nowhere. Quiet. The Domain of the King.”

• “In the summer it's too darn hot. It's one thing to be the sort of life form that thrives and finds, as the Frastrans do, that the temperature range between 40,000 and 40,004 is very equable, but it's quite another to be the sort of animal that has to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your planets' orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin's bubbling.Spring is overrated. A lot of the inhabitants of New York will honk on mightily about the pleasures of spring, but if they actually knew the first thing about the pleasures of spring they would know of at least 5,983 better places to spend it than New York, and that's just on the same latitude.”

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• A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

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• “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”)

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

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• “You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.”

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• Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else in life becomes eerily easy.

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• Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.

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• “Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.”

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• ‘Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.’

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• It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or-what’s that strange thing you British play?” “Er, cricket? Self-loathing?” “Parliamentary democracy.

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• We live in strange times. We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

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• New York
• Pikka
• Beast
• Formen
• Lamuella
• Damascus
• Stavm
• Whatnow
• The Guide building
• ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, and followed by And Another Thing....

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Douglas Adams (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 828'.914

Notes for Parents edit see section history

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Subjects edit see section history

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

Books That Influenced This Book edit see section history