Why A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is the perfect Pick-Me-Up
Arthur Dent showed us how to ‘choose to see the beauty of this world’ long before Westworld’s Dolores Abernathy did
Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the first science fiction novel I read in my life.
I thought it would make a good birthday present for my older sister. If you were an impressionable eleven year old with a taste for both the lurid and the fantastic, you can understand why a comic book style cover featuring a crocodile headed alien in a space suit clutching two men in his arms, one bizarrely dressed in a morning gown and slippers, appealed to me. It didn’t, however, appeal to my sister and that’s how I got ‘saddled’ with the copy. Secretly delighted at her choice, I started in on A Hitchhiker’s Guide, charmed from the moment I encountered grumpy Arthur Dent running to find his house demolished.
What was now firmly ‘my book’ ended up well-thumbed, with a worn out spine from the number of times I re-read the story. The striking imagery and the iconic lines stayed with me long after-while exchanging jokes in high school with fellow geeks about the ‘answer to life, the universe and everything being 42’ and definitely in French class, when I wished that a Babel Fish would slither into my ear. With Sparknotes and Wikipedia being the go-to resource for students back then (I wonder, is it still?), stealing Ford Prefect’s very own, beat-up version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide sounded tempting.
Adams, who I later learned first concocted the story completely buzzed, lying on a meadow, looking up at the stars in my home country, Austria, originally wrote this comedic romp of a space opera as a series of radio dramas for the BBC. Its wild success led him to refashion it into what eventually became a five book series, spawning an entire franchise consisting of live radio shows, audiobooks, video and computer games, a TV series as well as a thoroughly ill-advised movie adaptation.
There’s really only one reason for A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s breakout success-Arthur Dent. The kind, timid, order-loving as well as tea-obsessed protagonist who spends most of his time bemoaning the end of his world is not your traditional hero. While being thrust into one galactic escapade after the other (which involve being captured by alien invaders, dealing with nuclear missiles and stumbling on the true nature of ‘God’), Arthur doesn’t heroically rise to the occasion. He doesn’t grow into a space-faring warrior like a similarly displaced Paul Atreides-in fact, he spends a lot of time in a daze having things explained to him. ‘So this is it, we’re going to die’ is probably one of Arthur’s most characteristic zingers.
This, combined with a tendency to see the humour in the most otherworldly scenarios, can’t help but endear one to him. Never before has the insignificance of humanity and the gung-ho madness of life (as everyone’s favourite character in the story, perpetually depressed robot Marvin says it best: ‘Life! Don’t talk to me about life!’) been treated with so much refreshing candour and comic irreverence.
There’s one incident in the story that still makes me chuckle.
When told by his friend Ford Prefect that he is ‘safe’ on an alien ship after the imminent destruction of the earth, Arthur says ‘this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn’t previously aware of’. The banality of focusing on the rights and wrongs in the use of terminology over pondering an uncertain future drifting in outer space is both bizarre and oh so realistic.
In school, looking at mathematical equations, and, God forbid, word problems, made me feel as if my mind were similarly unmoored in between all the black print on my textbook. Exams were a nightmare, a series of blanks and red marks. I was so bad, in fact, that on a national placement test I ranked last in my class, somehow having managed to lose some of the 30 points everyone is supposed to be granted from the get-go. I chose to see the irony in that and laugh my heart out with friends-just as I chose to, at a later date, correct the spelling mistakes on a math test paper I ultimately bombed. Like Arthur, I tried to focus on the one thing I knew I still had in the face of imminent failure-the capability of not taking myself, the world or circumstances too seriously and the knowledge that I at least was top when it came to issues of language, grammar, vocabulary and maybe even style.
Douglas wrote his story as a means of getting over a general feeling he had at the time that he was ‘talentless’, his own experience with depression tingeing the plot. His approach in deflecting the apparent pointlessness of existence with humour led to an outpouring of appreciation by fans,the wry commentary upon Douglas’s death via heart attack following a gym workout being that at the end, ‘he knew where his towel was’ (look it up, I’m not going to spoil this!).
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a pop culture phenomenon. It foresaw voice commands-specifically when Ford’s half cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox, the one time Galactic president, told Eddie, the onboard computer ‘Ok, computer, take us in to land’,prefiguring the ‘Ok, Google’ command. For tech aficionados, there’s everything here, from e-books to touch screens. But it’s also a rollicking meditation on the big questions of our life:’why do we live? what makes our lives meaningful? And what does it mean to be ourselves?’. Those weighty questions are asked by a transformed whale musing on the absurdity of its own existence as well as by Marvin, a robot equipped with a brain ‘the size of a planet’ doomed to fulfill inane requests such as to ‘close the door’, instances which renders what should be bleak singularly entertaining.
Personally, I believe the main adage of the story was picked up quite well by Neil Gaiman when he titled his companion book to Adams’ series with the catchphrase ‘Don’t Panic’. Found emblazoned on the fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide in the story, it’s a phrase I have liked to mumble to myself in trying situations-such as a work emergency or a health scare in the family.
Douglas gave us a recipe on how to cope when everything goes wrong and he wrote in a manner that, though improbable, is often hilarious and heartfelt. So do yourself a favour the next time you are feeling blue and pick up A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-it’s the perfect excuse to tell the world to stuff itself as well as to ‘give up and go mad now’.
