The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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.

So began the legendary Douglas Adams in his epoch-making, path-breaking, gut-wrenching, brain-twisting Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
The story begins with a house. A house that was to be demolished to make way for a bypass.

Bypasses are devices which allow some people to drive from point A to point B very fast whilst other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people of point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people of point A are so keen to get there.

Arthur Dent, our slow-witted protagonist sees his house get demolished and then his planet. The Earth is obliterated by a Vogon spacefleet to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route ( An Intergalactic Bypass). Arthur's friend, Ford Prefect from Betelgeuse, saves him by hitching a ride on one of the Vogon ships.

What follows is a nightmare, for any reader of science-fiction that is. There's Zaphod Beeblebrox, the President of the Universe, travelling in a stolen spaceship (Heart of Gold) powered by Infinite Improbability Drive in search for the Ultimate Question. Helping him in his ludicrous quest are Trillian, the only other survivor from sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha (Earth) and Marvin, the paranoid android. At the centre lies the Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The book is what its name suggests: Marvels of the Universe for less than thirty Altairan dollars a day.

What is the Ultimate Question? It is something without which the Ultimate answer is incomplete. At this point however, in the mind of the reader the ultimate question is: What is the Ultimate Answer? Well, its the ULTIMATE answer. The answer to Life, Universe and Everything.

The book, if you haven't noticed yet, is full of insightful sentences. Of course, most of the insight is lost to the utter absurdity of the book. I'm including a few quotes from the book here. There is something called copyright infringement, but then imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Here is glimpse of what the book has in store for you:

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

• I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.

• In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move.

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

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

• Vogons 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.

The Hitch-hiker's Guide is a really wonderful book. Un-put-down-able, a word coined by the slang-happy Americans, actually is quite fitting.

PS. The Hitch-hiker's Guide was meant to be a trilogy. The first and most popular book was The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Mostly Harmless was the fifth book in the trilogy of four books. Don't scratch your heads. You'll do that in plenty when you read the book.