A Contemporary Guide to the Hitchhiker's Guide

The main message.

By Péter MARTON

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The idea behind this post is simple. I am re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the full series, novel(ette) by novel(ette). Again. Not for the first time. As I do this, I will write down a few reflections on what stands out for me now, after so much time since the publication of the story has passed (40 years! OMG!), and after so much time since even Douglas Adams' passing away has passed (since 2001, that is). I read HG2G such a long time ago for the first time myself that... it's seriously a lot of water under the bridge since then... and if I continue like this, it will be a lot of water under the bridge before this paragraph ends. So I'll stop here. The most important quantity is 42, anyways.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

The very fruitful marriage of absurdism and science-fiction. From the lonely, fascinating, very downward and inevitably brief journey of the whale that materializes above the planet Magrathea to the big supercomputer-generated answer of 42, the Guide can really not be blamed for not emphasizing its central messages clearly and often enough. We are like that whale. We live in a questionable experiment of sorts. The best we can do is write DON'T PANIC (and, in smaller font, perhaps in-between brackets: JUST TRY TO CHILL) all over it.

An appreciation of the fascinations of life, at the same time. Such as the beauty of the fjords. Seriously, those Norwegian fjords are among the best parts of the simulacrum, aren't they?

Sad, sarcastic comments about the relationship between intellect and happiness - with reference to Marvin, the Paranoid Android. Could be summed up in the form of a joke... A depressed AI goes into a bar full of people and... gets even more depressed. What is there to do? Find answers to the petty questions of small-minded people? "Siri, where is the nearest pub?" Then find answers to the mindless questions of people who are drunk now, for a change?

The Zaphod Beeblebrox Moment. For a political scientist, this is the most interesting theme. We tend to be slightly concerned about political leaders who regard power as the ultimate goal, rather than a means to an end. But what if getting into the position of political leader is just a means to an end that is completely unrelated to governance? What if a leader is just waiting for that moment to speed off with the Heart of Gold or whatever it is that they are waiting for? Is that any more reassuring? As an example, Sir Eric Gairy of Grenada (1974-1979) may be among the first leaders to come to mind, concerned about the need for global cooperation in gathering data on UFOs as he was. Others might feel an inclination to mention a certain US President whose name starts with a "T" and and ends with a "p." My countrymen in Hungary may readily point to a contemporary Hungarian leader suffering from a very unhealthy degree of fascination with football. The reality is, of course, that private interests have always informed leaders' agendas. Just rarely as spectacularly as in Zaphod Beeblebrox' case. 

The Infinite Improbability Drive. A great comment as such on writing itself where we use this technology a lot!

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)

The Total Perspective Vortex. The deadly weapon against those small-minded people for whom their simplistic Egos are the universe as they know it, so that confronting reality and how far the boundaries of the universe really extend is an instantly shattering experience for them. These are the people who are most prone to the Dunning-Kruger effect and, at the same time, the very agents of some its most unfortunate implications.

The people of Golgafrincham. The most amazing multi-generation starship travel story that is not typically mentioned as such. Back in the day, those that had to be involved as the (duped) passengers on board were telephone sanitizers and marketing managers and management consultants, for Douglas Adams. Who would they be today? Marketing managers and management consultants "may still have had been" likely choices for Adams in 2019, I guess (speaking in End-of-the-Universe tense). His vision related to them (of the vanity and the senselessly destructive attitude of these people towards the environment) certainly is still valid these days, at least as much or rather even more than before... About a humanity "carefully" calculating whether taking steps to keep the planet habitable for the next generations is economically worth it, while the size of one's car or whether one owns a house from where one can commute to a faraway city centre daily are still the yardsticks by which one's worth is judged by most in society.

The paradox of politics. The rule that those who have an interest in ruling are the least fit to rule. This is no guarantee, of course, that those who do no wish to rule would make for better (let alone: good) rulers. Does Adams come down the side of the argument saying that a skeptic's non-interventionist governance would be most harmless? I'm not sure if the example of the man in the shack is meant to convince readers in this respect. Plenty of shit can go down under the rule of a passive ruler as well as under rule by some other type of leader.

The "pettiness paradox" of time travel. Adams doesn't mention this as such, but in an off-handed sort of manner it is there in the story. Time travel "cannot will have been had existed" for then it "would have been had been used" (and abused) by countless small-minded people unexposed to the Total Perspective Vortex who might go back in time just to sue people they stole intellectual property from for the theft of their intellectual property. The Patent Wars would certainly have a whole new dimension to play out in.

Life, the Universe and Everything (1982)

This part of the series offers much great and important action in terms of the plot. And the plot certainly goes forward. We even get the resolution of the 42 puzzle -- not to say it wasn't written on the wall all along (people who ask questions are inquiring minds and can never fully settle with a single conclusion; people who think they have all the important answers never really ask a question; so you cannot have the matching ultimate question and ultimate answer at the same time).

As to more SF-like ideas, which I am in the process of overviewing here, this one comes up somewhat shorter, at least so I feel now, after re-reading it. The telling of the story becomes a bit more moody in places and there is a greater dose of satire. Even the plot elements taking place at the farthest points in the galaxy are fairly down-to-earth in this sense. Having said that, there certainly are things worth highlighting.

The Campaign for Real Time. Stemming, basically, from the pettiness paradox referred to above.

Bistromathics. Numbers whose only known trait is that their nominal value is not identical with their real value. Funny.

Somebody Else's Problem fields. This may be a comment on many different things at the same time. Firstly, perhaps, on how people can so easily ignore suffering in this world. But then it is also a good comment on human cognition more broadly speaking. Unless their attention is directed some way, either by external stimulus (such as an obscenely costly marketing campaign) or by a deep internal drive (usually on the level of gut instincts), people tend not to notice things even when they are right there before their eyes.

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish (1984)

Arthur Dent gets a love interest and this love interest is then expressed on several occasions in mid-air. Even the f--- word gets used.

The story cannot get any more down to earth that this.

We are given a very mundane interpretation of the entire plot so far with reference to a dead CIA agent in a water reservoir and the collective experience of hallucinations by people (locally? globally?) at around the time when Earth was supposedly destroyed by the Vogons. Even as the book playfully moves beyond this and stresses that we don't have to accept this interpretation (an interpretation that we actually could have had exactly without this sort of blabber), I for one could not simply ignore it as I once did. This is crappy, to be honest.

I do forgive Adams because of course the rest of the story is still told in an endearing sort of way, with interesting characters, memorable scenes and good humour, and there is even an apology for the inconveniences in the end. Still... the story remains brutally vandalised by its author from hereon.

An interesting thread is that of Ford Prefect in SLTAF. The kind of environment we re-encounter him in, a metropolis with huge buildings, strange existences, "warring police tribes", and a lot of crime, is rather obviously reflective as a collection of first impressions of the US, where Douglas Adams (originally from Cambridge, UK) moved in the meantime. The character Arthur Dent, on the other hand, is still very English and very retreated to the English countryside. The book series whose idea was once conceived in a field near Innsbruck, Austria, is thus written now from beyond the shores, the ocean, some more shores and a continent -- from California. No wonder it has this above-mentioned rupture line (its width the size of the Grand Canyon, the Prairie, the Appalachians and the Atlantic combined) appearing in the plot.

There are no major big ideas as in the previous parts, except for... the casual dropping of a reference to "the net" over which the Hitch Hiker's Guide (accessible through a handheld tablet of sorts) is constantly updated. Written in 1984 this was quite forward-looking. Of course, Adams was a big fan of Apple from the start, it's worth adding to this.

Mostly Harmless (1992)

With the final episode, the series is back to normal. The balance between the two basic interpretive possibilities, the obvious and the latent, is there again. We get major intergalactic action once again even as this may all be but Arthur Dent's escape from reality. The two interpretations together nicely underline how the mind is a universe and any external/internal boundary beyond a mind's limits can only be believed in, ultimately.

And so we get here a theory of everything. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash may be a fun concept, but the idea of probability as another dimension where object's conditions vary across different possible worlds is more than just fun. Counterfactuals and alternative possible worlds are very interesting for quantum physics, and may perhaps be interesting even on the macroscopic level, although we may never really know or find out about this.

Another very instructive and clever little thing is when Ford Prefect breaks into a skyscraper thinking along the lines of "what could be the only thing the engineers didn't expect anyone in their right mind to do to get in". And then he hits the nail on the head: they didn't expect that somebody would be standing there, on a ledge outside a thirteenth-floor window, trying to open it from there. This is actually an important and basic issue in designing secure facilities in a range of fields. They have to be made "foolproof", explicitly reckoning with human beings doing shit they are not supposed to do.

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I'll stop here. This is not even a fraction of all the fun that's there in the story. Ultimately, having re-read it all, I can only encourage everyone to do the same. Start now. You will never know when someone might want to make space for a hyperspace bypass.