The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"This comedic sci-fi classic, exploring artificial intelligence and the nature of existence, fits Lex Fridman's interest in the philosophical implications of AI. It's an expected read for someone exploring the intersection of technology, humanity, and the universe."

"I miss Douglas Adams . He’s been dead since 2001. He occupied that area for me between friend and acquaintance. He was, I suppose, a work friend. The first book I ever wrote that did anything was The Companion to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . I got to work with Douglas on it. Douglas Adams was a genius. A lot of the pleasure in reading Douglas Adams is in jokes that are elegantly and delightfully tuned while also commenting on the human condition. You can open The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy randomly to any page and …. “Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?” “How much?” said Arthur. “None at all,” said Mr. Prosser, and stormed nervously off wondering why his brain was filled with a thousand hairy horsemen all shouting at him. By a curious coincidence, “None at all” is exactly how much suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed. It’s simply that when anybody is using precisely the right words to do precisely the right thing, it’s like the apparent simplicity of a great omelet. The pleasure of seeing something that seems deceptively simple perfectly executed. Douglas was incredibly good at writing, but it made him incredibly miserable. I am nowhere near as good as Douglas was at writing, but it does not make me miserable at all. I see myself in the centre of a spectrum. On my left is Douglas Adams , who had to be locked in a hotel room for weeks to force him to finish a novel that he just couldn’t finish unless he had no alternative. And on my right is Terry Pratchett who would’ve had to be locked away in a room to stop him from writing. And if Terry could’ve found a pen, he probably would’ve written a novel on the wall. I’m definitely capable of not working. But if I do stop writing, my loved ones tend to point out that I’m miserable and grumpy and irritable and no fun to be around. And they tend to ask me to please go off somewhere and write something. And at that point I go off and write."

"The other three are books I read much later in my life, mostly because they were written much later, but I think they are really interesting resources. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy – they always call it a trilogy even though there were four and then five books – they’re classics, especially the first four, everyone loves them. The casual way in which Adams treats the universe as a whole – as something you can just sort of run around in – conveys a sense of excitement about the universe that really appeals to a lot of people. Unfortunately, I think they did quite a bad job with the movie. But it’s not a serious view, that’s the whole point. They’re novels, not textbooks. Good books on cosmology, astrophysics, or outside of my field for that matter, get people excited about the topic. There’s a lot in this trilogy that’s subtle and buried. For example, there’s a lot of talk about the bigness of space that really gives you a sense of the actual size of space in a way that a textbook typically doesn’t. The books play a lot with things like the Big Bang or the end of time in a fun way. I would obviously not even remotely suggest this as a textbook, but it goes part and parcel with the more serious side of physics. If you look at my own book, A User’s Guide to the Universe, the title is very self-consciously similar – you could call it a homage."

"This is the Bible of science fiction. It’s funny and anyone with the remotest interest in science fiction must read it. You know the story, right? It’s the story of Arthur Dent who is lost in space because his planet is demolished and he’s trying to find a purpose in life after this event and to live peacefully somewhere. He’s a nice guy and not special in any way. It’s similar to my first two choices in that it’s about a world changing rapidly, things that were there yesterday are not there today and Dent wants to find a spot for himself and needs to deal with this. Yes."

"Sure. Douglas had already worked on various radio programmes before this, and tried his hand at producing—which he was terrible at, not organised enough, too chaotic—and then he was offered the chance to write something new. Originally he planned it would be many different stories of the ends of the Earth; the Earth was going to finish every week, be blown up or destroyed in some way. But then he got into these characters that he created. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was his idea of an electronic book long before any such thing existed in the real world. That was his notion. It was also used as a narrative device throughout the story. Arthur Dent, his hero, is a very ordinary—dull, some would say—Earth man, who discovers that his house is about to be demolished by bulldozers. As he’s dealing with county council officialdom, a friend called Ford Prefect helps him escape the destruction of the Earth, which is being blown up by alien bureaucrats. It’s one scale up. That’s the joke. Then at that point, you know, we’ve destroyed the Earth. We’ve got no choice: it’s science fiction. We’re off and out into the galaxy. In the TV series, Arthur Dent wanders the galaxy in a dressing gown, because he got up that morning, ran out, and laid in the mud in front of the bulldozer, and so he’s stuck in that dressing gown for the rest of the series. Douglas eventually incorporated that into the novel, so it became canon. It’s hilarious. Some would call it picaresque. Some would say it’s too episodic. But for the novel, he took the first four episodes of the radio show and made them work as a novel with his own unique sense of flair and verve. That sense of humour. People who hate science fiction liked it because they thought it was taking the piss out of science fiction. And people who like science fiction liked it anyway. So it appealed broadly, to different audiences. Primarily, as he said himself, he was a satirist, a comedy writer born of sketch revue at Cambridge. That’s where he first fermented his way of writing, and where, I think, the radio series got that Monty Python -like flavour. I heard someone else observe that the movie was trying to be too real. It was a different generation, and they presented it more as a sort of magical realism, rather than the Python -esque sketch comedy feel. Right. In improv you say ‘yes’ and roll with it. Douglas was writing episodically, he wasn’t planning ahead. Famously, he had the Vogons throw his two heroes out of the airlock in deep space. What will he do next? He said he remembered seeing a television show about judo. It said that if a 16-stone judo expert is flying through the air towards you, turn that into his problem. In other words: roll with it, duck, use his momentum to solve the problem, flip him over. So, what Douglas did was say: okay, well, if I’m throwing them out of the airlock, their survival is completely improbable. So: we’ll have a spaceship powered by improbability. That’s how he got out of that one. Then he had to create a whole backstory to how the improbability drive was invented, how it works, and then that became the thing that propelled them on their adventure. “Primarily, as he said himself, he was a satirist, a comedy writer born of sketch revue” I interviewed Geoffrey Perkins, who produced most of those early radio series—Simon Brett was the first producer, but Perkins did the next 11 episodes—and he said, ‘by episode three, suddenly we had a plot.’ But he was stuck at the time. Douglas had been out of work, unemployed, suffering a bit. And his flatmate John Lloyd got a job producing BBC Radio, where he created The News Quiz , which is still running. Feeling very dejected, but suddenly he was commissioned to write four episodes of Doctor Who and the first six episodes of Hitchhiker , practically at the same time. From his notes, I can’t quite work out which came first, it’s all intermingled. Then he got stuck. So he asked John Lloyd to help. They’d worked together before—a couple of their projects are in our book, and one of Douglas’s job applications—and they wrote the last two episodes of the first radio series together, which is why the novel feels a bit truncated. It stopped when the publishers said stop. Publishers had a lot of trouble getting work out of Douglas. He was a famous procrastinator. That was the line he used again and again, many times over the years. The publisher said: just finish the book. Whatever page you’re on, stop. Or that’s the story—he told stories that were slightly fabricated, elaborations on reality. But part of the problem was that they had been commissioned originally to write the novel together. But then Douglas had some kind of crisis and he decided, no, he wanted to do it on his own. So, he sacked his best mate. John Lloyd has talked about this plenty of times. They patched it up fairly quickly afterward, but he was very upset at the time. He says now that it was the perfect thing for Douglas to have done, because the book has Douglas’s unique turn of phrase, and it was better for it. They went on holiday together, where ostensibly they had been going to write the book together. They still went on the holiday, with a couple of other people, and Douglas would sit there in his room trying to write, before eventually giving up to join them down at the local taverna to play games—which later became The Meaning of Liff. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I first met Douglas that year, 1978. I was just a 17-year-old fan of Doctor Who , and he had just got the job of script editor. I went to interview him. That was when Hitchhiker’s was just taking off. They wanted more of that, he had Christmas special episodes to write and they were talking about a cartoon series—that eventually became the TV show. And he said, ‘Of course, I’ve got this bloody book to write, if only I could finish the bloody thing.’ It’s funny to play that cassette back now. It’s like: No, Douglas, put everything else down! You have no idea. The book became a major, major hit for Pan, the publisher. A huge bestseller. In January of 1984, I went to the ceremony where they presented him with a ‘Golden Pan’ for selling his first million copies. There were several Golden Pans still to come after that. But that was the first big milestone. And again with the deadlines—I remember Douglas’s speech at the event. He said, ‘I’ve known about this award presentation for a few weeks now, and I’m glad to say my acceptance speech is very nearly ready.’"

"Whenever I think of sci-fi I think of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy —it is, as you say, a tale with countless humorous moments, and is so bizarre that I instantly fell in love with it. Even the smallest details have some humorous content: take Ford Prefect, for example, Arthur’s best friend, whose name itself holds comedic value as it refers to a car. Adams is also capable of creating such tension and suspense before relieving it with such a ridiculous outcome that the reader is left laughing and laughing. He’s also able to execute his wacky ideas in such a convincing fashion. Arthur, the main character, helps with this, as he is merely an unsuspecting human being caught up in the whirlwind of space. As readers, we are able to laugh at his reactions and sympathise with his denial and ridiculous behavior."

"To the extent that I have a Bible in my life, I’d say this book is it. It’s a very easy and funny book to read, whatever your philosophical sophistication. But it repays rereading as you grow older. Each time you discover new nuances, just how sophisticated Douglas Adams was in his positions. It doesn’t have a grand overarching thesis, it’s not that type of book. It’s very pointillist. A lot of the wit and the charm is in individual sentences or even word choices that really nail a particular philosophical issue. Like the idea that the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. The question we all go around, asking—the meaning and purpose of life, this whole existential yearning question—just nailing the fact that it’s an extremely ill-posed question by giving this ludicrous answer forces you to do a lot of philosophical soul-searching and understand what it is you’re actually trying to think about. The book has a thousand little things like this, and each of them is six onion layers deep. Rereading this book is a way to reboot your brain anytime you’re feeling stale in your thinking. At fifteen, when my tastes were just starting to form, it struck me at a gut level as fundamentally right, even though I didn’t get the nuances of Adams’s positions. It wasn’t religious, it wasn’t ponderous and philosophical, it was an effective lens to look at the world. It also struck me as deeply scientific in its sensibility. Science is very hard to teach, and most people think of science as this humorless, boring activity where people are all about numbers and proofs. But I think science is a sensibility you adopt in your way of looking at the world. There’s no way this sensibility can be taught. All you can do is recognize it in your native way of thinking and allow it to grow. At a very young age, it was great to see that sensibility in. At forty—I’m almost 42 now, so I’m getting to my Douglas Adams birthday—I often find inspiration for exploring philosophical ideas of interest in very specific pieces of Douglas Adams. A few years ago, I wrote a blogpost called “Learning to Fly by Missing the Ground.” I had a whole riff on intentions, goals and how you unleash serendipity in your life and become playful. It all started with a vignette in one of his volumes, when a character learns to fly. It turns out the trick is you have to miss the ground. The way you end up missing the ground is if someone surprises and startles you just as you’re about to crash into the ground. So on one planet, people hire others to jump out and say surprising things to them just as they’re about to hit the ground. It was a beautiful thought that I didn’t truly appreciate before."

"Much to my high school boyfriend's chagrin, I resisted reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy until about two months ago. Is that a classic now?"