The Hitchhikers Guide to the Glaxy
Review by: Arghya Roy
The
book starts out on planet Earth, when the hero of our story, Arthur Dent, wakes up, and is trying to prevent his house from being demolished for a highway.
While he's lying down in front of bulldozers, his friend, Ford Prefect, asks
him to follow him, but Arthur Dent explains his situation to Prefect, so Ford
Prefect hypnotizes the construction manager, and Arthur follows him. He explains to Arthur that he's an alien, and
that the world is going to end in 2 minutes. Right then, huge ships from the
Vogon Construction Fleet come by, and they obliterate Earth for a galactic
freeway, but Prefect and Dent are teleported on board the ship since the cooks
on the ship like hitchhikers, (which Prefect is [he's a researcher for the
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and he was stranded on Earth]) and it annoys
their masters, who are the Vogons.
The captain of the ship finds out that Ford
and Arthur are on board the ship, so he captures them, and recites poetry to
them (Vogon poetry is the 3rd worst type in the galaxy) Arthur tries to
convince the captain to let them live, but they get thrown into the vacuum of
space, and 29 seconds later, they're saved by the starship, The Heart of Gold, which was stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is
the president of the galaxy and Ford’s cousin.
Heart of Gold is special since it has something known as an
Improbability Drive, which crosses vast distances of space by making the
improbable possible. It has many functions, like saving people deposited from
other spaceships (the probability of you being saved is 2 to the power of
267,709: 1 against.) Together, with a girl named Trillian McMillan and a
paranoid android named Marvin they find the hypothetical planet of Magrathea,
which was famous in the old days of the galaxy for manufacturing planets. When
they entered the atmosphere, an old planetary defense system popped up, and
launched 2 nuclear missiles at the ship. Arthur pulled the Improbability Drive
switch, which turned the missiles into a whale and a flower pot. They land on
the surface and meet a guy named Slartibartfast, who’s an inhabitant of
Magrathea.
Slartibartfast tells them that he designed
Norway (he even received a prize for it), and told them a story, which was how
Earth was created. The mice of Earth actually requested for Earth to be built
as a computer to answer the question of ‘Life, the Universe, and Everything”.
Unfortunately, Earth was destroyed right before it could answer the question,
so the mice of Earth decided that they wanted to build an Earth Mark 2, so
that’s what they did. Then, these intrepid explorers start feeling hungry, so
they go to the Restaurant At the End of
the Universe, and the 2nd book begins.
Out
of 100, I rate this book a 79, due to the fact that I like Sci-fi books, and
this has comedy in it, (which is up there in my list of Favorite genres.) I
also liked the characters, like Marvin the Paranoid Android, who bored The Heart of Gold’s ship computer so
much that it committed suicide. Zaphod is also a good character, since he’s
evil and funny, which is a good combo. The people I would recommend this book
to are non-serious, old-humor, sci-fi lovers, since it has a little bit of
everything in it.
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