Author: Douglas Adams
Hostess: Betty
Review of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galax – Don’t Panic
By Betty Pugh
You will either love or hate this book.
If you want a sensible, comfy book, a quiet story progressing rationally from scene to scene, you should pick up a nice cozy mystery featuring tea and scones and cats with psychic powers. Relax quietly with a warm afghan and do not get this book.
If you prefer a manic romp with galactic freeways, depressed robots, and falling pots of petunias (“Oh no! Not again!) then grab the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and buckle your seatbelt. The ride WILL be fast and bumpy.
This book spoofs all Science Fiction and is a parody of itself. It blasts science fiction clichés to bits, fries the bits up with bacon and blasts them again. I laughed out loud the first time I read this book, and laughed aloud again thirty some years later.
A plot exists. Arthur Dent sees first his home and then his planet destroyed and escapes with his buddy on a passing spaceship. The plot is secondary to the adventure, however, and merely a base for a crazed romp. The book’s writing is jumpy and a reader might think pages or explanations are missing. Jittery is apparently just how author Douglas Adams thinks as the style is the same in all his books.
Recall that Hitchhiker was written in 1979. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galax is an electronic book, though, a new concept that inventers were happy to make available to the real world decades later. Like the best fiction, it created its own truth.
I read a lot, so it is rare for me to be surprised by plot or characters, but after thirty years, Hitchhiker still amazes me. If you would enjoy a crazy literary romp, I recommend you read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. As a reviewer on Amazon wrote, “It's like Monty Python and Kurt Vonnegut melted together and spread on toast -- crisp and tangy and a little bit ridiculous.”
