Thoughts on Hitchhiker's

[andrewducker]

It's been about 15 years since I last read a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book, and even then it  was just Mostly Harmless I read, trying to puzzle out how the whimsical light humour of the earlier books turned into this grimly depressing read.

It was late last year that I went looking for free ebooks for my Palm reader and found a ripped copy of the first book sitting on some random server.  My curiosity piqued, I read it over the following week, delighted both by the backlighting of the PDA and the discovery that the series had been horribly depressing right from the start.

Two weeks ago I discovered that the local FOPP was selling off boxed sets of all 5 paperbacks for £7, a price which would be fairly unbelievable for mediocre books, let alone for ones which I remembered as staggering genius.

I just finished reading "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe"(the second book, for those of you who don't recall or are mad enough not to have read them) and it's now obvious that Douglas Adams was horribly, horribly disillusioned and lonely a lot of the time.  That he felt the world was largely populated by pointless people that never created or discovered or built or in any way sought to be anything more than the least they could be.

Or as he named the race in the book - Golgafrinchans.  The telephone sanitisers, documentary makers, hairdressers, PR people, management consultants and other "useless bloody loonies" who crashland on a primeval earth and wipe out the quiet, noble creatures who should have been mankind.

Of course, the book also has a light, whimsical air about it, but it's clear that Douglas Adams saw the world as a huge cosmic joke, one with no intrinsic meaning or point, that was constantly messed up by people fighting over fripperies and building huge bureaucracies rather than working towards making the world a decent place to live in.

All of this, needless to say, was wasted on me when I was 15 (I didn't really have any idea of _anything_ when I was 15, a subject I keep meaning to write about).

I'm now very much looking forward to reading the other 3 books, in between the Earthdawn sourcebook I need to read through, The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Klay and An Instance of the Fingerpost (which  I need to reread before the book club meets on the 20th).

Oh, and a brief bit of spoileriness if you haven't read the second book.

I never spotted this the last time through:
When Arthur pulls the scrabble letters out of the bag, he doesn't, of course, get the right question, because the Golgafrinchan's fuck up the computation.  However, he gets something _like_ the right question, as Ford predicts.  The actual question being 'What do you get if you multiply six by seven".  

Which makes sense, if you consider that we constantly see things mirrored on different levels - Arthur's home is demolished, then his planet is, for instance.
It seems that the universe itself is a calculating machine, designed to find the answer to what is, to us, a very simple question.  The whole meaning of _everything_ is to find the solution to this problem.  It's just that (a) nobody knows this and (b) knowing it doesn't actually do anyone at all any good.

Just a thought.

Comments

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

Hell, yes. Douglas Adams was very depressing. For all of his creativity, his philosophy was nihilistic. The Earth gets destroyed... to build a throughfare. The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is... forty-two. We're nothing more than cogs in a computer.

[diffrentcolours]

Once you've refamiliarised yourself with Adams' writing, I suggest picking up "The Salmon of Doubt". The few draft chapters for a possibly-Hitchhikers, possibly-Gently novel are less than exciting, but it's full of anecdotes, speeches and articles that Adams wrote over the years, most of which are incredibly worth reading.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

I felt much the same way reading the books, and that's why I liked Mostly Harmless, because it gave the series the depressing end note that it more or less needed.

However, on a more positive spin, with the uselessness and random trite that Dent encounters on his travels, I've always felt that HGTG always captured reality much more eloquently than most books I've read.

Whadda woirld

[ekatarina.livejournal.com]

I was much amused to find myself reading Hitchhikers' when I worked at Butchart Gardens,... as a sandwich maker (if only briefly) and then later while I worked at BCFerries,... where I sometimes,.... uh,... er,....... sanitized telephones. (Hides eyes.)

Stands tall.

And man, sometimes they really REALLY needed it. Ew.

Ekatarina, who now just bitches about her boss.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

However, he gets something _like_ the right question, as Ford predicts.

I always thought it was the answer that was wrong, not the question. Though trying to deduce the right question when it produced wrong answers could be problematical...

I never found the books depressing. But then I found Kafka hilarious, which is apparently how Kafka viewed his works too. It all depends on your mindset, I guess.