Hitchhiker

’s Guide To The Galaxy Essay, Research Paper

To begin with I would like to put the introduction of the book as an beginning:

?Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of

the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded

yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles

is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-

descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still

think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most

of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.

Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these

were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces

of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small

green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and

most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big

mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And

some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no

one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man

had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be

nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a

small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that

had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the

world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was

right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to

anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone-

about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea

was lost forever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some

of its consequences.

It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker’s

Guide to the Galaxy – not an Earth book, never published on

Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or

heard of by any Earthman.

Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.

in fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out

of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor – of which no

Earthman had ever heard either.

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly

successful one – more popular than the Celestial Home Care

Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero

Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of

philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of

God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern

Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted

the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of

all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and

contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate,

it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important

respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words

Don’t Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its

extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these

consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable

book begins very simply.

It begins with a house.?

Pages 1-2 of The Hitchhiker?s Guide to the Galaxy

I?m hoping that this sort of explains the nature of this book. It?s a very funny book with awesome story and great characters .

The book is split into six main stories which have all been published separately (this book is THE ULTIMATE HITCHHIKER?S GUIDE).

The stories are:

The Hitchhiker?s Guide to the Galaxy

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Life, the Universe and Everything

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Young Zaphod Plays It Safe

I?ll only be writing about the first story, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The beginning of the book centers around the live of Arthur Dent which is just your average guy who lives in the house that is talked about in the end of the introduction. The story starts where he wakes up in his bed with the sound of bulldozers outside. He goes out to check out what all the noise is about. There he finds a bulldozer and some people and then he finds out about a plan to build a bypass through his house so they?re going to demolish his house! He had just heard about it the day before and apparently it had been decided 9 months ago that the bypass should be build, but no one had told Arthur about it. Then he just lays down in front of the bulldozer and just waits there. This goes on for sometime but the a friend of Arthur comes, his name is Ford Prefect. Unknown to Arthur is that his friend Ford is not human. He was born on a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed.

Ford had arrived on the planet Earth some fifteen Earth years ago, and had worked hard to blend into Earth society – with, it must be said some success.

Ford was a researcher for that wholly remarkable book, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Ford then asks Arthur to come with him to a near by pub because he is going to tell him something really important and he?ll need a stiff drink when he hear?s it.

When they?re at the pub they order some beer and then Ford tells him that the world is going to end in ten minutes. Then Arthur leaves and finds his house has been demolished. But while he complaining about them demolishing his house, he suddenly looked up and there he saw a really huge fleet of spaceships.

And then the brodcast began:

“People of Earth, your attention please,” a voice said, and it

was wonderful. Wonderful perfect quadrophonic sound with

distortion levels so low as to make a brave man weep.

“This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace

Planning Council,” the voice continued. “As you will no doubt be

aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the

Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route

through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of

those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly

less that two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.”

Then someone must have found away to send messages to the spaceship, (but that message is not printed in the book). But the reply was this:

“There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the

planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in

your local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty 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.”

Then there must have been send another message to the ship because