The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - A Trilogy in 5 parts - Book reviewed

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts by Douglas Adams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is the ‘Alice in wonderland’ of science fiction. It is outrageous fiction. The author has given free reign to his imagination to fantasise about space and time travel. No holds barred.
The protagonist in this book is Arthur Dent who lives in London leading a rather sedate life when once on a visit to the pub he meets Ford Prefect the alien who has dropped by and tells Arthur that all his earthly problems will end as soon as the earth blows up in a short while. The earth blows up and Ford takes charge of Arthur, takes him along on an incredible journey full of adventure through time and space.
I will give below a few extracts from the book to give you an idea of what to expect from this book.

Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them

It is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin the shape of a chef’s hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone, among his cats on a back stair in Stepney.

A thought seemed to strike the woman. It struck her very slowly. You could watch it coming in like a long wave on a sandy beach.

The moment became a longer moment, and suddenly it was a very long moment, so long one could hardly tell where all the time was coming from.

Just to demonstrate how easy it was he floated away down the alley, fell upwards quite dramatically and bobbed back down to her like a banknote on a breath of wind.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous universe.

Being virtually killed by a virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.

The quality of advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.

Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.

Just because you see something, it doesn’t mean to say it’s there. And if you don’t see something it doesn’t mean to say it’s not there, it’s only what your senses bring to your attention.

An alien race of people dispossessed of their own lives and histories, stuck on a remote post of our solar system and filling their cultural vacuum with our cultural junk.

This is not an unputdownable book. You can put it down any time you want and pick it up to read any time you want. You will not miss any continuity. Took me around 6 months to read this book, maybe because am not the type who generally reads science fiction and this is hard core science fiction akin to nuclear warfare during the epic war between the Kauravas and Pandavas in Mahabharata.
A great one for Star Wars fans for sure! For the others, an opportunity to get an insight into what excites the Sci-Fi fans.
It is a Trilogy in 5 parts. Go figure! All of 733 pages.

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