A Rough Guide to the Guide
Hey, there. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm doing recs for this fandom, which involves doing a fandom overview. murderofonerose asked me to post my overview over here, so here it is.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
And so the madness began. This history of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is about as interesting as the Guide, itself, and depending on which version/s you’re familiar with, the story you know may not be the same one that someone else in the fandom might be familiar with. Confused yet? Just wait. This is nothing.
In 1978, BBC radio aired a strange comedy show at a length of six episodes (technically seven and a half, but that’s just further complicating things). The story began with the destruction of the Earth, and followed the adventures of Arthur Dent, the hung-over, pyjama-clad last Earthman, and his friend Ford Prefect, who despite his claims of being from Guildford, was actually from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse (these details may not all actually be true, as you will learn in five paragraphs).
The Primary Phase, as it would later be called, had our heroes, along with the two-headed, three-armed Zaphod Beeblebrox, the last Earthwoman Trillian, and Marvin the Paranoid Android (who, despite his name, was not actually paranoid nor an android, but a severely depressed robot) on the stolen Starship Heart of Gold, which had been fitted with a brand new Infinite Improbability Drive. Having nothing better to do Arthur and Ford join up with Zaphod to find the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, to which the answer is 42.
Over the next undetermined amount of time, they find the legendary planet Magrathea, where they meet up with hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who have taken the form of mice, and who are also looking for the Ultimate Question. It turns out that this question is actually printed on Arthur’s brain wave patterns, but to get at it, they will have to remove his brain (a detail which also may not be accurate, as you will learn in three paragraphs). But by now, the Galactic Police have caught up with Zaphod, and in the ensuing scuffle that occurs, our heroes get sent to Milliways, the restaurant at the end of the Universe.
At Milliways, more trouble is caused, and they decide to steal another ship. Only, it would seem as though this ship has a better idea of where they’re going than they are, and every time one of them would try to operate one of the weird black controls which were labelled in black on a black background, a small black light would light up in black to let them know they’d done it. As it turns out, the ship they’ve stolen was a Haggunenon (who did for Charles Darwin what a squadron of Arcturan stunt apples would have done for Sir Isaac Newton) battleship has been programmed to go into battle against some other ships, and our heroes realise very quickly that they must escape, or else face certain death. They find a teleport on the ship and try to escape, but it would seem as though only Ford and Arthur actually make it, only to find themselves on a different ship which is on a collision course with a planet, which turns out to be Earth, some two million years ago.
Later, the Christmas special aired to reveal Zaphod had also survived, and had found himself at the offices for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the book about which the radio show was meant to be about, before it completely lost focus of itself), where he meets a strange man called Roosta, and is being chased by Frogstar robots. Meanwhile, Arthur and Ford are still on prehistoric Earth, having great difficulty figuring out a way off the planet.
Now, here’s where things get really mental. In the autumn of 1979, a book adaptation was released. The novel had originally set out to simply adapt the story into a book format, and sort of failed at that. That is not to say that the novel was no good. Quite to the contrary, actually. But what it failed at was retelling the story. It wildly contradicted the radio show, changed key plot points, and stopped halfway through the story, ending just after they left Magrathea. Several months later, a second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was released, as a novelisation of the last few episodes, and also wildly contradicted the radio drama. Around the same time, a second series of the radio drama aired, and went off on a totally random tangent about shoe event horizons, bird people, clones, and a man with a cat, and ended with Arthur stealing the Heart of Gold with his new girlfriend (maybe? It was never very clear on that matter, actually), Lintilla.
About a year later, the series was again adapted into a six-episode television series, staring Simon Jones as Arthur and David Dixon as Ford. It managed to more or less mirror the radio drama, but still did some strange things to change the story around a bit. After this, a third book, Life, the Universe and Everything was released, which blatantly ignored the second radio series, and any new details mentioned in the television show (and even, at times, seemed to disregard certain details in the books, if you paid really close attention). This is probably because the book was not supposed to be a Hitchhiker’s project at all, but had originally been written as a Doctor Who script. When it wasn’t used, Douglas Adams changed a few names and details, and released it as a novel about genocidal robots (sound familiar?), the dangers of time travel (also sounds a bit familiar), and a crazy man in an equally crazy time-and-space travelling ship (really, now. He didn’t even try to change some of these details).
Not long after, there was another book, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, which doesn’t feel like a Hitchhiker’s book at all. Arthur finds his way back to Earth, falls in love, tries to figure out why all the dolphins vanished, and takes his girlfriend out to see God’s Final Message to His Creation. There’s a bit more to it than this, of course, but the pace was much more slower than the other books, and a bit more cerebral and introspective (and, I feel I should add, was my favourite book of the trilogy). This was followed up by a short story, Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, which strongly suggested that Ronald Regan would cause the end of the Universe, and a fifth book, Mostly Harmless, which played around with the perils of travelling across probability and to different universes, and gave Arthur a daughter, Random. Somewhere in this mess, they also released the original radio scripts, a spin-off towel, some comic books, an illustrated version of the first book, a few records, a stage production or three, and even a computer game (which is impossible to beat, and I dare you to prove me wrong).
Then, for a long time, nothing happened. When Douglas Adams, the creator of this entire mess, died suddenly in 2001, everybody expected the series to die with him. This was quite wonderfully proven wrong when, in 2004, the Tertiary Phase of the radio drama was aired, which reunited the entire original cast from the Primary and Secondary phases. This phase completely wrote the Secondary Phase out of existence by Trillian claiming the whole thing to be one of Zaphod’s psychotic episodes. It wound up more or less adapting Life, The Universe, et al, but true to Hitchhiker’s form, totally changed it up.
In 2005, the film was released, and had (up until recently) been considered by some to be the worst adaptation yet (I don’t care what anyone says; I adored the hell out of it). Starring Martin Freeman as Arthur and Mos Def as Ford (seriously, that was the biggest WTF for me, but I thought he pulled it off rather well, once I saw the film), it sort of adapted the first book. And boy howdy, did this annoy the book-only fans, who had completely missed the joke. Around the same time as the film release, the Quandary and the Quintessential Phases of the radio drama aired, which - you guessed it - more or less, but not quite, adapted the fourth and fifth books.
And then, it was finally over. Only not. Late in 2009, Eoin Colfer had been given permission to take manuscripts for an unfinished sixth novel, And Another Thing..., and finish them. I... frankly don’t remember anything about it. I read it, and promptly forgot it, but that’s okay, because so did most fans, apparently. Which means you don’t really have to know anything about it to enjoy any of the fanfic. Unless it happened while I was asleep, this book has not yet been adapted into another format. I’d say that it probably won’t ever happen, but stranger things have happened, so I’ll just keep that speculation to myself.
Okay, now that all that is out of the way, you will now understand why the fics I will be reccing this month will bear little to no resemblance to one another outside of the characters they feature (and which you should not expect to portray consistent characterisation between authors, especially where Ford is concerned).
And speaking of the characters, let’s talk about them for a bit.
Arthur Dent
Simon Jones (damn near everything, minus the film and Illustrated Guide; also read the last audio book - right), Martin Freeman (film; also read a great deal of the audio books - left)
Arthur is a very simple man with very simple needs. The story starts with him (usually, or at least seeming to be) hung-over, and trying to stop some bulldozers from knocking over his house in order to make way for a new bypass. Over the course of one very confusing Thursday lunchtime, he has his house bulldozed, finds out his best friend is from outer space, has his planet demolished by green bug-eyed aliens, gets thrown into the vacuum of space, and finds himself chasing after the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
He spends most of this particular Thursday just trying to find some tea to drink, but with the Galaxy being what it is, there doesn’t seem to be any tea to be had. As the series progresses, he seems to settle into his role of Galactic Hitchhiker quite well, and even starts having his own adventures by the fourth book.
Rather unfortunately for Arthur, the Universe does seem to hate him, though, and every time things finally start to look like they might actually start going his way, another planet gets demolished, or another race of nasty aliens or pan-dimensional beings, or just plain old cock-ups decide to just make life miserable all over again.
Previous to the destruction of Earth, Arthur worked in local radio, doing... something. It might have been mentioned at one point just exactly what it was, but his constant nervousness about everything had always put it in my mind that he was a night technician whose job was more or less to make sure that the station didn’t burn down or something, rather than actually doing anything on the air.
Ford Prefect
Geoffrey McGivern (radio), David Dixon (television - left), Mos Def (film - right)
In case you’re wondering, no. Ford Prefect is not his actual name. Well, it sort of is. According to the radio scripts, he had his name legally changed to Ford Prefect in such a way that his original name (which was in an obscure, unpronounceable Betelgeusian dialect) had been systematically removed from the very fabric of spacetime, and replaced so that his name had always been Ford Prefect. This is an odd little detail that only appears as a footnote in the scripts, and was completely undone in the film when Zaphod addresses him, and later introduces him as Ix, which means ‘Boy who is not able to satisfactorily explain what a Hrung is, or why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven.’
This is a name that was given to him in school, and had later caused Ford’s father to die of shame.
Odd name aside, Ford can only really be described as dangerous, possibly psychotic, amoral, and a complete kleptomaniac. Despite (or possibly, because of) all this, he’s still one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is.
Again, the film sort of undid a lot of his more recognisable character details, making him rather sweet and very sympathetic toward Arthur - two things that cannot be said to be particularly true of any other version of canon (while he is, and always has been a friend of Arthur’s, most versions of canon have him frequently getting quite annoyed at Arthur’s complete lack of Galactic knowledge).
Ford is a field researcher for the Guide, and had originally come to Earth to fix up the entry for the backwater little planet, which read simply ‘Harmless.’ He’d hitched a lift with a teaser (rich kids with nothing better to do, so they go land on some isolated planet, find someone out in the middle of nowhere, and strut around in front of them making ‘beep beep’ noises) with the intention of staying for a week. Rather unfortunately, he’d misjudged just how backwater and isolated this particular planet is, and wound up getting stuck for fifteen local years. In most incarnations, he met Arthur about five or six years before the story begins, although the film strongly suggests that Arthur is the first person he met whilst on Earth. It later goes on to suggest that the only (or at least, the main) reason Ford rescues Arthur from the destruction of Earth is because Arthur had rescued Ford from being run over by a, wait for it, Ford Prefect.
Zaphod Beeblebrox
Mark Wing-Davey (radio and television - left), Sam Rockwell (film - right)
The semi-half cousin (brother?) of Ford (they share three of the same mothers), Zaphod is the President of the Imperial Galactic Government, a title which is completely meaningless in several ways. To start the Emperor has been nearly dead for many centuries, and has only been kept alive through means of stasis, and any heirs he might have had have long since died off. More importantly, however, the President doesn’t hold any power. Instead, his job is to draw attention away from the power.
Who better to do this than Zaphod Beeblebrox, who was apparently elected because people thought they were actually voting for the worst-dressed sentient being (or he had been voted that. Seriously, you cannot keep details straight with this canon. I’ve pretty much spent this entire fandom guide lying to you out of my own confusion, and have probably made some of this up without even realising it).
ANYWAY, semi-half cousin, president, terrible sense of fashion. Are we caught up? Good. Zaphod, as it turns out, is so good at his job at being distracting and completely mental that at a christening ceremony for the Starship Heart of Gold, he declared that he would like to steal the ship, and then stole it about five seconds later. Now, that takes brass. By a staggering coincidence, the girl he’s travelling with happens to be human. Not only is she human, but she is the same human woman that Arthur had completely failed to get off with at a party in Islington some six months before the Earth was demolished. In fact, it was at this party in Islington where Zaphod had met and picked up Trillian.
Zaphod, now armed with sexy space cadet Trillian and the Starship Heart of Gold, has gone on a mission to find the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Included in this quest (depending on the version of canon you’re enjoying) is also finding out who actually runs the Universe. Given the nature of the rest of this series, you can probably imagine how well it goes.
Now, you’ve probably noticed something rather, uhm... glaring about Zaphod. The man is described as having two heads and three arms. Great! That sort of thing his hilarious, until you bring live-action actors and film into the equation. And then it’s just sort of... hilariously bad. The film did a fairly decent job at getting around this, but frankly, the comic did it best. The television show does at least have the excuse of having been made in 1981, but even then, Zaphod’s second head was notorious for not working correctly, and his arms were just sort of lacking.
In the film, Zaphod was rewritten as having had part of his brain carved out so that he could become president. But since he needed those particular brainmeats to carry out his intended mission, he had them implanted into a second head, just below his first. Still, even with a rewritten backstory and better SFX, comic!Zaphod will always be my Zaphod, at least on a mental picture level (Sam Rockwell did completely steal the show in the film, it does have to be said).
Trillian
Susan Sheridan (radio), Sandra Dickinson (television - right), Zooey Deschanel (film - left)
Tricia McMillan, now Trillian (and eventually Trillian Astra - Hey! I use that IM client!), is a young astrophysicist that Zaphod had picked up at a fancy dress party in Islington, while she was talking to Arthur. Using the simple chat up line of “want to see my space ship?” he managed to get her to leave the planet with him, and eventually apparently got her to help steal the Heart of Gold.
She seems to generally enjoy running about the Galaxy until she learns of Earth’s destruction, which has pretty much made her and Arthur an endangered species. Depending on the version of canon you happen to be enjoying, at this point she either gets rather sympathetic of Arthur, or more frequently, becomes, well. A bit of a bitch, actually.
In Life, the Universe et al, she walks out on Zaphod and winds up at a flying party, where she winds up doing some almost questionable things with Thor (yes, that Thor). She only leaves because Arthur is fed up of everything and pretty much drags her back to the Starship Bistromath, where she sticks around long enough to help save the universe from genocidal robots.
Trillian resurfaces in Mostly Harmless to reveal that she’s become a very successful news reporter for the Sub-Etha, and also that she’s had a kid, with semen that Arthur had donated to pay for starliner tickets. Having bestowed the child with the completely unhelpful name of Random Frequent Flyer Dent, she tells Arthur that it’s time he take responsibility, and leaves Random in his care (it should be mentioned that by now, Arthur has been badly injured in a crash, and seems to have a bit of trouble walking).
Meanwhile, an alternate universe version of Trillian who is American and blonde meets a race called the Grebulons, and helps them work out their horoscopes. This version of Tricia, as she’s still called, since she never left Earth, is likely a reference to Sandra Dickinson, who played Trillian in the television show, and was very much American, and very much blond. Apparently the television show set an expectation for Trillian to be American after that, although I do have to admit that I had a far easier time believing that film!Trillian had a degree in astrophysics than I did tv!Trillian.
Marvin
Stephen Moore (radio and television), David Learner (television; costume), Alan Rickman and Warwick Davis (film; voice and costume respectively)
Oh, Marvin. Where do we even start with him? Well, he’s a menial service robot, who apparently came as standard equipment with the Heart of Gold. He’s also been equipped with GPP - Genuine People Personalities - and is a personality prototype (you can tell, can’t you?). Apparently the good folks at Sirius Cybernetics thought that it would be a good idea for a menial service robot to hate everything about existence, be hideously depressed, and be able to actually fell pain in all the diodes down his left side.
While Marvin is one of the more hilariously adorable characters from the series, none of the other characters really seem to like him. Although, you do start to feel rather sorry for the poor thing when he winds up falling from a low planetary orbit, getting stranded on other planets for millennia, shot into suns on spaceships, and through all the nonsense the other characters put him through, winds up being 37 times older than the Universe itself.
His final appearance was in So Long and Thanks, at God’s Final Message to His Creation, until the Quintessential Phase came along, and found a way to write him back into existence with hilarious results.
Other characters of significance (seriously. These are all characters):
The Guide (Peter Jones - radio and television; Stephen Fry - film) - Arguably the central character, and the narrator of the entire series. Also happens to be the book for which Ford Prefect is a writer.
Fenchurch (Jane Horrocks) - Although she technically does first appear as the girl in the cafe in Rickmansworth, she’s treated as an entirely incidental throw-away. Until, that is, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, where she appears on a new version of Earth Arthur happens to find. Upon seeing her in the back seat of a car, Arthur immediately falls in love with her, and through a series of insane coincidences, winds up dating her for a while. Until, that is, Adams went and dropped a bridge on her. But that’s okay, because the Quintessential Phase of the radio drama realised that this was a stupid thing to do, and changed that.
Random (Sam Béart) - Arthur’s teenage daughter (with Trillian) in Mostly Harmless and the Quintessential Phase of the radio drama. She’s quite angry with everything, and has issues feeling like she fits anywhere. This has much to do with the fact that she was born in hyperspace, never knew her father until very recently, and grew up in day care because her mum was busy having a life of her own. Hard to blame Random for hating everything, really.
The Whale (Stephen Moore - radio and television; Bill Bailey - film) - A totally incidental character who has since come to be regarded as one of the very symbols of the series. High above Magrathea, two missiles are very improbably turned into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias. The whale, whilst falling to the planet below, goes on a rather long and comical bit of existentialist pondering, while...
Agrajag/Bowl of Petunias (Douglas Adams... apparently) - simply thinks, “Oh no. Not again.” It is speculated that if we knew why the bowl of petunias thought that, we might know a lot more about the universe. As it happens, the reason it thought this was because it’s a life form that seems to have been reincarnated countless times, only to be killed by Arthur Dent. He uses his last body - that of a horrible deformed bat thing - to try to kill Arthur. Guess how well that goes.
Mice (Peter Hawkins and David Tate - radio; David Tate and Stephen Moore - television; Garth Jennings and Zoe Kubaisi - film) - Hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who projected themselves onto the Earth in the form of mice, which was a massive computer that was meant to figure out the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Wanted to remove Arthur’s brain.
Deep Thought (Geoffrey McGivern - radio, Valentine Dyall - television, Helen Mirren - film) - The computer that calculates the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Of course, since it was only given those parameters to calculate, it came up with the answer 42, but didn’t know the actual question. Designed the Earth.
Slartibartfast (Richard Vernon - radio and television, Bill Nighy - film) one of the designers of Earth, and had even won an award for the coastlines of what we know as Norway. Explained some of those more niggling questions to Arthur before delivering him to the mice.
Lintilla and her clones (Rula Lenska) - An archaeologist (and several million clones thereof) who has discovered evidence of a shoe event horizon. At the end of the Secondary Phase, makes off with the Starship Heart of Gold with Arthur. She was completely and utterly written out of every other version of the series.
Roosta (Alan Ford) - Someone who Zaphod had apparently conspired with before becoming president. He knew quite a bit about the plan to find out who really rules the Universe, and when Zaphod went to the Guide head office, Roosta had apparently been waiting for him, and had taken him to Zarniwoop’s office. His full involvement in the plan is never really detailed (or if it is, I’ve forgotten that bit).
Vogons (too many to list) - Not necessarily evil, but mean, officious, callous, and bad tempered. Would not even lift a finger to save their grandmother from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders first signed in triplicate, lost, queried, subjected to public enquiry, lost again, and buried in soft peat moss for three months before being recycled as fire lighters. The best way to get a drink from a Vogon is to stick your finger down its throat, and the best way to annoy one is to feed its grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. Under no circumstances should you let a Vogon read you poetry.
Man in the shack (Stephen Moore) - A strange man in a shack in the middle of nowhere. He lives with a cat, and although he doesn't know it, apparently runs the entire Universe.
Wonko the Sane (Christian Slater) - A marine biologist in California who is really called John Watson. One day, he looked at the instructions on a box of toothpicks and had declared that the world had gone mad, so he built the Outside of the Asylum. That is to say, he built a house that is inside out. He’s also the only person who knows what happened to the dolphins, and is frequently visited by angels with golden beards and green wings, and who wear Dr Scholl sandals, ride scooters, eat nothing but nachos, and do lots of coke. Personally, I’ve always pictured him as looking rather like Stephen Merchant, as he is described in So Long and Thanks with ‘he was tall and he gangled,’ as well as with a very mind-warping David Bowie description.
Dolphins - The second most intelligent creatures on Earth. They had long since known of the coming destruction of Earth, and when humankind failed to do anything about it, the dolphins left the planet by their own means. It is revealed in the Quintessential Phase that they left by means of a nifty trick taught to them by the Babel Fish, which involves shifting themselves through spacetime. Or reality. Or something. It was sort of complicated, actually.
Eddie (David Tate - radio and television, Thomas Lennon - film) - The computer of the Starship Heart of Gold. He was always excited about everything, except for when Zaphod changed his personality to that of an overbearing parent, which only made him more annoying. At one point, he was eventually restored to his default personality.
Things that also get mentioned quite frequently:
Towels - About the single most massively useful thing a hitchhiker can have.
Heart of Gold - Spaceship stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian. One of the best in the Galaxy.
Sub-Etha/Sub-Etha Sens-o-Matic - The Sub-Etha is pretty much the internet, but on a Galactic scale. A Sub-Etha Sens-o-Matic is used to detect Sub-Etha signals, primarily from nearby spaceships.
Electronic Thumb - A small piece of technology that allows one to hitch a lift on an unsuspecting or unwilling spaceship. Was originally a long, black piece of metal, and over the course of several decades’ worth of canon reboot, has shrunk considerably to a small ring worn on the hitchhiker’s thumb.
Janx Spirit - Very strong liquor popular throughout the Galaxy.
Jinnin Tonix - A drink that exists in every Galactic culture in one way or another. They’re all spelt differently, but they all sound exactly the same (many authors like to have fun with the spelling, often to hilarious effect).
Pan Galactic Garble Blaster - A drink which has the effect of making you feel like you’ve just had your brain smashed with a piece of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick. Invented by Zaphod Beeblebrox
Milliways - The restaurant at the end of the Universe. It exists in a time bubble, so that patrons can watch the Universe end without being taken with it.
Jaglan Beta - a planet with at least three moons. Often referenced, though no one ever seems to go there.
Betelgeuse - A red giant star which forms the right shoulder of the constellation Orion, and is something in the ballpark of 640 light years away. In-universe, it has a system of at least seven planets. Ford and Zaphod are from Betelgeuse V.
Magrathea - legendary planet said to hold the key to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Its inhabitants also make custom planets.
Ursa Minor Beta - A lovely beach planet where it is perpetually Saturday afternoon, just before the bars all close. Home of the Guide head offices.
Sirius Cybernetics - Sort of like Microsoft, only less reliable. Most of the tech in-universe is manufactured by Sirius Cybernetics, and almost all of it is defective or faulty, it seems like.
And a few words that make no sense out of context, but which you are bound to come across at least once:
Belgium - Excuse my language, here. This is the single worst word a person can say. It’s offensive for unfathomable reasons, and only really allowed to be used in serious screenplays.
Zark/ing - Derived from Zarquon, who was a religious prophet. Used as a sort of all-purpose swear word.
Photon - Can also be used as a swear word.
Sass - To know, be aware of, have sex with. Past tense: sussed (can also be used to mean ‘figured or worked [a problem] out’).
Hoopy - a really together guy.
Frood - A really, amazingly together guy.
Why is it more successful than both the Encyclopedia Galactica and the Celestial Home Care Omnibus?
This is science fiction on acid, but not in a Stanley Kubrick sort of way. The science in this series is, at points, some seriously hard-core stuff, but it’s presented in such a wonderfully playful way that if you don’t already know about the concepts being thrown about, you really would just think Adams was making stuff up to sound clever. If you’re a science geek, you’ll love it. If you’re not a science geek, you’ll still love it.
The main character, Arthur Dent, is your sort of everyman who is rather unexpectedly thrown into a world of hyperspace travel, green bug-eyed monsters, and terrible poetry. His best friend is a field researcher for something called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is exactly what it sounds like; a digital book that contains information on just about everything and everywhere in the Galaxy. The President of the Galaxy is a man who is wanted for theft of a ship that can be at every conceivable point in every conceivable universe at the same instant, and there’s a manically depressed robot sulking all the time. The world building that went into this series is fantastic, and takes you everywhere from England’s West Country to the sparkling jewelled beaches of Santraginus V. It’s terribly smart, random in an oddly-structured sort of way, and quite possibly one of the funniest pieces of writing out there.
Now, everything that I have just told you? You can pretty much forget or ignore all of it, because everybody more or less has their own headcanon which they go by anyway, and true to the spirit of the series, it’s largely contradictory of canon. So, there we go. I’ve pretty much wasted your time and mine, and this is probably why no one has ever driven for this fandom before. At least we had fun. Or will have. Or willan on haven...? Oh, zark it. I need a drink.
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