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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Overview

Arthur Dent is rescued from Earth seconds before it is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, by his friend Ford Prefect, who turns out to be a researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book whose cover bears the words "Don't Panic". They fall in with Zaphod Beeblebrox, two-headed President of the Galaxy, Trillian, and Marvin the Paranoid Android, and learn that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is forty-two, and that nobody knows what the question was. Adapted from Adams' 1978 radio series.

Notes

Adams was an atheist, a friend of Dawkins, and a better philosopher than he let on. The Babel fish passage, in which a creature so useful that it proves God's existence thereby causes him to vanish in a puff of logic, is a parody of the Ontological Argument that is sharper than most of the serious rebuttals. Forty-two is the best joke anyone has made about the expectation that the universe owes us a meaning. It has not got worse with age, which is rare for comedy.

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