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(This started as a short book review on Facebook, but I couldn't give such a great book such a short treatment. It pertains to the leather-bound edition to The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide by Douglas Adams.)
Adams' humor has been described as quirky and irreverent, and I find this an innaccurate phrasing. The words "quirky" and "irreverent" both denote a deviation from the norm, and his writing makes one thing crystal clear: Douglas Adams never lived in a conventional world. How can one deviate from that in which he never lived?
This volume contains the five books of the Hitchhiker's Guide "trilogy." Arthur Dent is the last (so he believes) surviving remnant of the irrelevant planet Earth which is demolished for a routine space roadworks project, having been rescued by incognito alien and friend Ford Prefect. Ford is a field researcher for the hallowed, indispensable and irreverent reference book, "The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy." Ford and the reluctant Arthur travel together in vagabond fashion through the cosmos. Arthur discovers that "Life, The Universe and Everything" is not only much larger than was fathomable on the dust mite that is (was) his home planet, but is also infinitely more complex, and the word "weird" has no right to exist in this or any other dimension.
Creating new worlds and realities from purely fantastical ideas, Adams pulls his readers into an etheral plane of existence that is so much fun to experience that even the most jaded science fiction reader won't realize that he has left conventional logic and laws of physics far and gleefully behind himself. The Ultimate Answer To Life, the Universe and Everything is, without question, 42; that is to say, in the absence of a proper Ultimate Question, the universe's numerical value is 42. Propulsion systems powered by improbability, and learning to fly (throw yourself and the ground and miss by becoming distracted at the last second) are presented with such poker-faced verisimilitude that the reader is forced to accept the author's rules of logic. I use "forced" in the sense that a politician is forced to accept million dollar bribes -- if one scoffs at an absurdity in Adams' world, then you will miss the next absurdity.
The result of this truly unique approach to science fiction is a remarkably effective (if unorthodox) vehicle for the ultimate goal of all great sci-fi writers: To present a philosophical viewpoint more palatable through "what-if" situations. The great classic sci-fi writers such as Heinlein, Asimov and LaGuinn developed intricate universes to strip away perceived "useless" traditions in their characters in order to present their own views and possibilities of philosophical reasoning.
Rather than using as-yet-developed-but-plausible scientific hypotheses as entertainment, Adams uses absurd and wildly funny logical jumps to loosely tie his universe together. From world to world, the rules of society and even physics change, unashamedly abandoning continuity in favor of tongue-in-cheek "eddies in the flotsam and jetsam of the Space-Time Continuum" in which you can almost hear the author giggle.
Behind the sniggering madness, the reader can hear underlying and serious threads of political and social satire interwoven with a general theme of a God-less Universe. Adams, a publicly outspoken atheist, seems to ask: What god, if so loving, compassionate and focused to His greatest creation mankind, would stick such a fragile "masterpiece" in this meat grinder of a universe with such tumultuous, unforgiving forces like gravity, entropy and random chance? After all, even the author as a mortal human being can think of better systems governing physics that would be more beneficial to the "favorite child."
All-in-all, this is a fantastic book series that I can and have read over and over again for the better part of 25 years. The new leather bound edition with gold leaf and bookmark is appropriately reminiscent of a family Bible. This edition is worthy to pass down from generation to generation both for it's beautiful binding and it's time-tested literary content.
Adams' humor has been described as quirky and irreverent, and I find this an innaccurate phrasing. The words "quirky" and "irreverent" both denote a deviation from the norm, and his writing makes one thing crystal clear: Douglas Adams never lived in a conventional world. How can one deviate from that in which he never lived?
This volume contains the five books of the Hitchhiker's Guide "trilogy." Arthur Dent is the last (so he believes) surviving remnant of the irrelevant planet Earth which is demolished for a routine space roadworks project, having been rescued by incognito alien and friend Ford Prefect. Ford is a field researcher for the hallowed, indispensable and irreverent reference book, "The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy." Ford and the reluctant Arthur travel together in vagabond fashion through the cosmos. Arthur discovers that "Life, The Universe and Everything" is not only much larger than was fathomable on the dust mite that is (was) his home planet, but is also infinitely more complex, and the word "weird" has no right to exist in this or any other dimension.
Creating new worlds and realities from purely fantastical ideas, Adams pulls his readers into an etheral plane of existence that is so much fun to experience that even the most jaded science fiction reader won't realize that he has left conventional logic and laws of physics far and gleefully behind himself. The Ultimate Answer To Life, the Universe and Everything is, without question, 42; that is to say, in the absence of a proper Ultimate Question, the universe's numerical value is 42. Propulsion systems powered by improbability, and learning to fly (throw yourself and the ground and miss by becoming distracted at the last second) are presented with such poker-faced verisimilitude that the reader is forced to accept the author's rules of logic. I use "forced" in the sense that a politician is forced to accept million dollar bribes -- if one scoffs at an absurdity in Adams' world, then you will miss the next absurdity.
The result of this truly unique approach to science fiction is a remarkably effective (if unorthodox) vehicle for the ultimate goal of all great sci-fi writers: To present a philosophical viewpoint more palatable through "what-if" situations. The great classic sci-fi writers such as Heinlein, Asimov and LaGuinn developed intricate universes to strip away perceived "useless" traditions in their characters in order to present their own views and possibilities of philosophical reasoning.
Rather than using as-yet-developed-but-plausible scientific hypotheses as entertainment, Adams uses absurd and wildly funny logical jumps to loosely tie his universe together. From world to world, the rules of society and even physics change, unashamedly abandoning continuity in favor of tongue-in-cheek "eddies in the flotsam and jetsam of the Space-Time Continuum" in which you can almost hear the author giggle.
Behind the sniggering madness, the reader can hear underlying and serious threads of political and social satire interwoven with a general theme of a God-less Universe. Adams, a publicly outspoken atheist, seems to ask: What god, if so loving, compassionate and focused to His greatest creation mankind, would stick such a fragile "masterpiece" in this meat grinder of a universe with such tumultuous, unforgiving forces like gravity, entropy and random chance? After all, even the author as a mortal human being can think of better systems governing physics that would be more beneficial to the "favorite child."
All-in-all, this is a fantastic book series that I can and have read over and over again for the better part of 25 years. The new leather bound edition with gold leaf and bookmark is appropriately reminiscent of a family Bible. This edition is worthy to pass down from generation to generation both for it's beautiful binding and it's time-tested literary content.