Hitchhiking Through The Galaxy

5 Pages 1132 Words

Do you know where your towel is? You’ll need to find it if you plan to join Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect on their crazy adventure through space in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. England resident Douglas Adams wrote this hysterical piece of literature in the late 1970’s after a real hitchhiking experience through Europe. The book differs only in the fact that it is set in space. “Space”, according to the Hitchhiker’s Guide, “ is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly 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. pg 76”

Adams has successfully created some of the most interestingly strange characters to grace the pages of a book. The main, and most unlikely, character is Arthur Dent. Arthur lived in a small house outside Islington, England. His friend, Ford Prefect, takes him off the Earth just moments before it’s destruction. From there you are whisked away to the opposite spiral arm of the galaxy where you meet Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Imperial Galactic Government, and his Earth friend Trillian. Arthur quickly finds himself in desperate need of knowledge so Ford directs him to the Hitchhiker Guide to the Universe. The Guide “is a book. Not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthman. Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book. pg 2.”

You will be propelled through space and time, and much improbability, as you go with Arthur and Ford as they are thrown into the vacuum of space, retrieved by the Heart of Gold’s Infinite Improbability Drive, and then taken to most mythical planet known to not exist, Margrathea. There Arthur will be told how dolphins warned of the attack and how they are second in intelligence only to mice. Soon everything he had known to be true is revealed to have been ...