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Comments: This blog entry is for the entire Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, a set of five books (yes, a five-book trilogy) that I read about once a year. Really, I enjoy them that much - something about Adams' creativity, dry British humor, and skill with words just resonates with me. (As it does with many engineering-types - in my office, I can call out just about any line into thin air, and someone in a nearby cubicle will immediately respond with the appropriate punch line).
I won't go into the actual plot here, for that you'll just need to read the books. Instead, I'm just going to catalog a few of my favorite quotes, in hopes of giving you a taste of Adams' style:
- Arthur Dent ("This must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays") earth man who discovers that his best friend is actually from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. This pays off when his friend uses his interplanetary hitchhiking skills to get them a lift away from earth shortly before it is demolished by an alien road construction crew.
- Ford Prefect is Arthur's best friend from Betelgeuse, and a roving reporter for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. After fifteen years of research on the planet Earth, he updates its entry in the guide from "Harmless" to "Mostly harmless", explaining that there are a lot of planets to cover and only so much room. (Trivia: fifteen years ago there was actually a British car called a Ford Prefect).
- Marvin ("Life. Don't talk to me about life.") super-intelligent robot, tragically equipped with a prototype human personality that keeps him perpetually depressed. Holds all humans in utter contempt, and whenever he interfaces with another computer it invariably ends up a suicidal wreck.
- Deep Thought is not actually a major character, but is the source of the famous quote ("Forty Two") upon which the entire series is based. It is a massively advanced computer, designed by a super-intelligent race for the specific purpose of finding "the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything". After 7.5 million years of computation, it comes up with the above answer, explaining somewhat sheepishly that, yes, this is definitely the answer - the tricky part is figuring out what the actual question is. Asked to solve this, Deep Thought designs an even more advanced computer, one "so advanced that organic life forms part of its computational matrix". This huge, round, blue-green computer is built and put into operation, but minutes before it is ready to reveal its results, the road construction crew arrives...
So, if you're ever in a group of people trying to answer some tricky question, and some wit suggests that the answer is "forty two", now you can chuckle knowingly. You and the rest of the engineers.
