By Douglas Adams
Pan Books, 1979
Narrated by Stephen Fry
Genre
Sci-fi, Humor
Awards
- #1 on Sunday Times Bestseller list (1979)
- #1 UK Bestseller List (1984)
- 1,000,000 copies sold - Golden Pan awarded to Douglas Adams (1984)
- #24 on Waterstone's Book/Channel Four's list of "One Hundred Greatest Books of the Century" (1996)
- #4 on BBC's "Big Read" or "Nation's Best Loved Book" (2003)
Review
Arthur Dent thought it would be a relaxing Thursday, but woke up to the Earth about to be destroyed and his house about to be bulldozed! Soon he finds out his best friend, Ford Prefect, is a hitchhiker from another planet. The two are promptly beamed into a Vogon spaceship that Ford flagged down so they could escape the Earth before its destruction. Arthur and Ford later end up in the company of the Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillion, known as Tricia McMillan back on Earth where Arthur tried to have a nice conversation with her before Zaphod showed up with his apparently very successful pickup line, "Why don't you talk to me instead? I'm from a different planet." The four of them, with a depressed robot, on their stolen spaceship powered by an improbability drive allowing them to travel through every point in space simultaneously, travel to the planet Magrathea. Here they discover that the answer to THE question of "life, the universe, and everything" had been discovered millions of years ago by the great computer Deep Thought to be 42. Not understanding the answer because they hadn’t asked the right question, the curious race was turned into mice and commissioned Earth (really an organic computer program used by the mice to study humans to find the real question) to be built. This book full of absurd humor and an imaginative world if brought to life with the wonderful voice acting of Stephen Fry in this unabridged audio book.
Opinion
This is a wonderful book, humorous and fun for middle grade through early high school readers. The absurdity of some of the humor is contrasted by the slight nagging thought that, if the mice were very good at their jobs as experimenters, we would never know if this were all true. This is a great introduction to science fiction with creative characters and a thought provoking overarching theme.
Ideas
This book might be a good way to jump start a creative project about life on other planets, or a creative writing prompt to write about one of the other planets or species that may be in Douglas's world. Otherwise, this would be a great book for a display of classic science fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment