Sunday, February 06, 2005

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy


A good combination of humor and sci-fi. Humour I can take, Sci-Fi, not my genre. I have always felt that you need a much more intellectual and imaginative mind to appreciate sci-fi. I had read a couple of “Doctor Who” series during my college days and wasn’t able to appreciate it even a wee-bit. “But hitchhikers..” was a different thing altogether. Maybe the humor was what got me thru.

Its basically a story of how Arthur, an earthman is saved by his friend Ford Prefect, an out-of-work actor from Betelgeuse, just seconds before earth is completely destroyed..

I did not understand the initial part of the book, but the ideas presented later on are really good. Consider this, there is a long lost planet called Margartha, and the main occupation of the citizens was to create custom made planets and Earth was one of them, custom made for the mice. The humans have always assumed that they were the ones experimenting on the mice, but actually it was the other way round ;-P!! Earth was basically created in an attempt to find the ultimate Q to the ultimate answer (answer: forty two !!!!!?????), but unfortunately it was just destroyed by the Vogons couple of seconds before the calculations were complete.
Arthur then meet Zaphod, Ford’ cousin who has stolen the “Heart of Gold” which is a space ship that runs on improbability, the greater the improbability, more the power!! And so on…


The book ends pretty abruptly making way for a sequel and I am told there four more books in the series. Although I personally did not enjoy the book I would recommend it for people who enjoy sci-fi… others can give it a try!!

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