The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is about a man named Arthur and an alien named Ford Prefect, or Ix, from a planet int he vicinity of Betelgeuse. The book begins with Arthur waking up with a hangover and seeing bulldozers come to destroy his home and make a bypass. He tries to stop them by lying in front of the bulldozer but his friend Ford comes and takes him to the bar where he keeps insisting that the world was going to end. No one believes him until giant yellow things appear in the sky and say that they are making a highway and Earth is scheduled for demolition. Earth is destroyed, but Ford and Arthur hitch a ride with the Dentrassis on the Vogon destructor fleet, but the leader Vogon catches them and ejects them into space where they get picked by a ship stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox, (the president of the galaxy and also Ford's semi-cousin) and Trillian, a girl that Arthur once hit on at a party. The ship is so valuable because it has the improbability drive which makes it do the most improbable things possible. Zaphod and Trillian are looking for Magrathea, a mythical planet where they made planets. They find Magrathea, but the weapons system kicks in and two missiles are shot at them, but they go on improbability drive and the missiles turn into a pot of petunias and a gray whale. They land on the planet and Zaphod, Trillian, and Ford go into a tunnel leaving Arthur and Marvin, a depressed robot, to stand guard. Arthur wanders around and meets an old man who shows him a tape about a computer which was tasked with finding the meaning of life, which he does after 2 million years. The answer is 42, but no one understands that, so they make it program another computer which is the earth and it was destroyed 5 minutes before finding out the answer. It was run by white mice who were once humans. Arthur gets back to the others but then the cops come looking for Zaphod and they have to hide, but something cuts off the cops' oxygen and they die. Later it turns out that Marvin, the robot, had a conversation with the cops' ship and it got so depressed it commited suicide. Everyone escapes and they roam the universe. Happily
I think the theme of this book is that not everything is as it seems. One example of this theme is when Arthur hears about the white mice controlling the Earth and humans when he thought that humans controlled white mice. "Ah no," he said "I see the source of misunderstanding now. No, look, you see what happened was that we used to do expiriments on them" (147). Another example is when Arthur had met Zaphod when he gate-crashed a party and took home a girl Arthur had been hitting on, and in real life he actually had three arms and two heads. "Be only had the two arms and the one head, but..." (98). My last example is when the Vogon destructor fleet comes and Ford knows about it because he is an alien. "The contacts of Ford Prefect's satchel were quite interesting in fact and would have made any Earth physicist's eyes pop out of his head, which is why he always concealed them by keeping a couple dogeared scripts for plays he pretended he was auditioning for in the top" (23). I think that the theme of this book is that not everything is as it seems.
I would definitely recommend this book to other people. It is very absurd, so if you want to laugh you will love it. The author, Douglas Adams, was an atheist and it does show through in his writing, so if you're very religious you might not enjoy it. It is extremely funny and usually completely random and is garentied to make you laugh out loud. Overall it is inspired, funny, and over much too soon. I would definitely recommend this book to others.
