Reviews of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and related work
- Sequel: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
- Sequel: Life, the Universe and Everything (1982)
- Sequel: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984)
- Sequel: Mostly Harmless (1992)
- Adaptation: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979
)
Douglas Adams (writer).
Zanier and more funny than the similar The Sirens of Titan (1959). Personally, I believe that “42” is the answer to the question “What is the longest and craziest chapter of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan?”
References here: Welcome to the Space Show (2010).
‣ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
Douglas Adams (writer).
Adams felt this was the best of the novels, and he’s probably right; it does cohere with and conclude the original and it reworks the end of the radio series well enough.
‣ Life, the Universe and Everything (1982)
Douglas Adams (writer).
Adams loses the plot, such as it was.
‣ So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984)
Douglas Adams (writer).
According to Adams’s biographer, Nick Webb, Adams hated the process of writing to such an extent that he wrote this book in a hotel suite with his editor, Sony Mehta. The result is predictably bad. The romance is particularly unappealing. The good ideas just aren’t there.
References here: Weathering with You (2019).
‣ Mostly Harmless (1992)
Douglas Adams (writer).
By this point, the horse is dead.
‣ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005
)
Douglas Adams was just this guy y’know?