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What if the world ended tomorrow--where could you get your favourite beverage? That is the situation faced by Arthur Dent, totally normal English man (favored drink: Tea). Arthur is not a fanatic--he is really pretty dull--but once Earth is destroyed, Arthur is thrust into a series of mad adventures which he is totally unprepared for.

That might sound as a catastrophe (after all, Earth is where our favourite food is made), but take it out of us: it is totally a humor.

To know The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we need to know something about Douglas Adams: he was really tall. Additionally, he was British, thus his character models were British sketch comedy authors such as Monty Python alum John Cleese--who, in 6'5", was also quite tall.

Obviously, even when you laugh at the face of death and destruction, that doesn't fix anything: you can laugh, however, folks are still going to die. This sets the amusing and dark tone for Hitchhiker's Guide. It gives it a gallows comedy that attempts to always look on the bright side of life--relativelytalking, that's. Even when Adams's characters confront certain death, they always have sufficient time to determine just how ridiculous and absurd the situation is.

What you also will need to know about The Hitchhiker's Guide is that it did not start its life as a novel. To begin with, it started as a tadpole. (We are accountable for that dreadful joke and we are going to confess that nothing we write here will probably be as humorous as what Douglas Adams wrote.)

And then listing all the various versions to demonstrate that you are far smarter than they are.

Particular aspects of Hitchhiker's Guide get tweaked in version to version, but in most of the versions, Arthur's adventures in distance are with a great deal of mad digressions and anecdotes on the medial side. That is a huge part of what makes this book what it's--the numerous asides and digressions. For example, while Arthur is attempting to live in space, we also get digressions about philosophers contending with computers about the presence of God; an alcoholic beverage that feels just like having "your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick" (2.3); super-intelligent dolphins telling people "So long and thanks for all the fish" before leaving the Earth; a guy who believes all dropped ballpoint pens reside on a ballpoint planet; and a lot more.

Though it was quite digressive and bizarre (or maybe because it was quite bizarre), Hitchhiker's Guide became a massive hit in virtually all versions. (Alright, maybe not the film version.) The very first book was recently rated number four at a listing of British people's favourite books, also it has offered a large number of copies. We have seen "14 million" tossed around, and we all know for sure that it sold 250,000 copies in its first 3 months (Source), that was much back in the 1970s, when people still used pigeons to send books around Britain.

There's even a fifth book in the series, written by another writer after Douglas Adams passed away in 2001.

Adams did create other work: he was a writer and story editor for the British science fiction series Doctor Who at 1979-1980 (see our discussion on "Genre"); he composed another show about a bizarre detective named Dirk Gently who kept getting involved with time travel and Norse gods; plus he also composed nonfiction such as Last opportunity to See (1990) about endangered species--normally jeopardized because of human folly and absurdity. (So even when Adams was working on distinct genres, his themes stay largely the same.) However, the Hitchhiker's Guide series is most likely his best known work--and his only plain best work.

A great deal of folks have read this book, also in-jokes out of it's seeped into culture and everyday life.

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