Spontaneous para-casual literary phenomenon. Review on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The - Douglas Adams

These books were the first attempt to introduce humor into science fiction. derived from a BBC radio broadcast of the same name... they make for good reading in spare time...

There are 5 books in this series namely

• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

  
  




• Restaurant at the end of the universe

  
  




• Life universe and everything

  
  




• So long and thanks for all the fish

  
  




• Mostly Harmless

  
  

The first one is arguably the best of the lot... the standard gradually declines from second book onwards and 'So long...' is almost like any other romance novel set in the british countryside with a few weird characters and events thrown in.

Not ''unputdownable'' kind of fiction and certainly not gripping or fascinating...but enjoyable... these stories came out at a time when science was serious stuff and expectations had been raised infinitely with the publication of several books, the moon landings and Star Trek... so its popularity probably stemmed from the rather ridiculous theories that were giving ridiculous results... things like

''... A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of an inch wide, and quite a lot of million light years from end to end. As it closed up lots of paper hats and party balloons fell out of it and drifted off through the universe. A team of seven three-foot-high market analysts fell out of it and died, partly of asphyxication, partly of surprise. Two hundred and thirty-nine thousand lightly fried eggs fell out of it too, materializing in a large woobly heap on the famine-struck land of Poghril in the Pansel system. The whole Poghril tribe had died out from famine except for one last man who died of cholesterol poisoning some weeks later''

the author creates temporal and spatial phenomenon with a comic frequency and timing with a penchant for hyperbole that mostly makes for good reading but sometimes does get irritating. among the more entertaining bits are the reactions of characters to the events and their actions they take to protect themselves and/or resolve the situations. Perhaps the most entertaining character in the story is a manically depressed Robot called Marvin who surfaces on and off in situations with seemingly very little relevance to the storyline but in the end turns out to be very pertinent.

All in all good reads for spare time and in journeys nothing serious...