Douglas Adams ~ 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'

Have been hearing of the sci-fi comedy genre for quite some time now. It is yet unknown territory to me. Mostly. The only one worth its name which can serve as standard-bearer for the genre in my reading domain is the famed pTerry's (Terry Pratchett for the uninitiated) Night Watch. It was good fun while it lasted but I did not get sucked in like I was by the first Harry Potter book.

A friend who is a major addict has been making snide comments about my apparent lack of interest in this area and adult-abusing me. I do so hate to be labelled an adult! I am determined to prove him wrong. Not determined to like against my inclinations but determined to find out the reach of my inclinations. So here I am with the first book of the Hitchhiker series.

Started it last evening. The beginning is good. The writer's subtly pungent style suits me fine. Here, let me quote a bit from the opening of the novel. You will see what I mean if you have taste for that kind of humour.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.


Let's hope the tide doesn't turn. :-)

~

21-09-08


As I continue, I am finding the humour to be kind of offbeat, but it is incredibly funny all the same if you get a hang of it.


"Ford," said Arthur, "would you please tell me what the hell is going on?"

"Drink up," said Ford, "you've got three pints to get through."

"Three pints?" said Arthur. "At lunchtime?"

The man next to Ford grinned and nodded happily. Ford ignored him. He said, "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

"Very deep," said Arthur, "you should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you."


~

Did I say get a hang of things? Well, that's just it. Because all else seems hell-bent on leading you on a mad merry dance and you are left wondering just where you dropped off your wits. Things couldn't be this loony, could it!

Then there was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious whisper of open ambient sound. Every hi-fi set in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder, every woofer, every tweeter, every mid-range driver in the world quietly turned itself on.

Every tin can, every dust bin, every window, every car, every wine glass, every sheet of rusty metal became activated as an acoustically perfect sounding board. Before the Earth passed away it was going to be treated to the very ultimate in sound reproduction, the greatest public address system ever built. But there was no concert, no music, no fanfare, just a simple message.

"People of Earth, your attention please," a voice said, and it was wonderful. Wonderful perfect quadrophonic sound with distortion levels so low as to make a brave man weep. "This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council," the voice continued. "As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you."

The PA died away.

Uncomprehending terror settled on the watching people of Earth. The terror moved slowly through the gathered crowds as if they were iron fillings on a sheet of board and a magnet was moving beneath them. Panic sprouted again, desperate fleeing panic, but there was nowhere to flee to. Observing this, the Vogons turned on their PA again.

It said: "There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now."

The PA fell silent again and its echo drifted off across the land. The huge ships turned slowly in the sky with easy power. On the underside of each a hatchway opened, an empty black space. By this time somebody somewhere must have manned a radio transmitter, located a wavelength and broadcasted a message back to the Vogon ships, to plead on behalf of the planet. Nobody ever heard what they said, they only heard the reply.

The PA slammed back into life again. The voice was annoyed. It said: "What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven's sake mankind, it's only four light years away you know. I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs that's your own lookout.

"Energize the demolition beams."

So this is what I have got till now. Work for hyperspatial express routes requires a pathway to be cleared and Planet Earth unfortunately falls in that path and must be demolished. And so it is! An intergalactic hitchhiker (actually doing field research for the new revised edition of the most useful of tomes, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Ford Prefect, who had been spending the last few Earth years living with Earthlings, takes this moment to hitch a ride from a spaceship. But along with him, he takes along a human he had befriended on Earth, Arthur Dent. To what purpose, I have got no clue yet. I am hoping to find out. As madcap as this ride is, it is not failing in the 'fun' department. So I have had no cause to complain yet.

He helped Arthur to some peanuts. "How do you feel?" he asked.

"Like a military academy," said Arthur, "bits of me keep on passing out."

Ford stared at him blankly in the darkness.

"If I asked you where the hell we were," said Arthur weakly, "would I regret it?"

Ford stood up. "We're safe," he said.

"Oh good," said Arthur.

"We're in a small galley cabin," said Ford, "in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet."

"Ah," said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of."

~

24-09-08


Well! So I have finished it. And I am feeling rather at a loss. Because I can't quite figure out how I feel. I can conceive how different people would react to the book. Some might find its quirkiness past all levels of bafflement. Some might think of it as just a lot of silly business. And some might be deeply regaled by the whacky humour tinged with some actual deep satire (at times too deep I felt). But what about me! *taps impatiently on keyboard*

I went through various stages of response... I think. More or less three stages. To begin with, I was totally clueless what I was being led into but my facial muscles got plenty of exercise with the laughter that bubbled out at spontaneous intervals. The funny caustic note that Adams strikes with his style of writing was responsible. Then came the second stage where a plot, a definite plot, began to take shape as the space travellers neared the supposedly long-dead long-lost planet of ancient space-lore. Also as the plot strengthened, the fun element decreased. But what with the white mice and the ultimate question and the ultimate answer and the improbability drive and the improbable probabilities, my mind was in a positive tizzy and I could not be much bothered. It was only as I approached the finish that it all began to take some fathomable shape in my brain.

As far as my limited experience goes, this is very unlike orthodox science fiction. It plays around wildly (and I mean wildly) with concepts and even in the make-believe world of sci-fi it can make things real whacky (my stock of adjectives seem to be running low). However underneath it, there were some subtle aims too. Satire for one. With making fun of humans and the poking around with ultimate questions and answers and even some doses of literary criticism with the incomparable Vogon poetry. There were a couple of real sparks of 'sense and sensibility' (ahem!) too like when Arthur finds it hard to come to grips with the fact that the Earth no longer exists and his family and all he knew are gone but the thought that every Bogart movie had disappeared without a trace and that there will no longer be a McDonald's hamburger leaves him shaken.

So in the end it wasn't just about mindlessly fanciful concoctions but still the whimsicality got a bit too much for me at times. The saving grace, as I have been harping throughout, was the humour. And that is the one thing that does not make me regret picking up this book. The wildness when it came to ideas like the Babel fish and the new-age radios was welcome. And then however offbeat or delivered oh-so-matter-of-factly, lines like these were fun:

"Zaphod," she said patiently, "they were floating unprotected in open space ... you wouldn't want them to have died would you?"

"Well, you know ... no. Not as such, but ..."

"Not as such? Not die as such? But?" Trillian cocked her head on one side.

The icing though was definitely provided by Marvin, the forever depressed robot with the people personality.


On an endnote, I was checking out some of the videos of the movie that was made on this book and I kind of feel that watching the movie will be much more fun than reading this book. Of course they swerve here and there from the storyline but that's part of their trade basics. Despite that or rather because of that there is more of action in the movie which might draw away one's mind from the bafflingly whimsical ideas when they do surface. Besides the humour in the dialogue can be enjoyed fully while reading but more of the whackily funny stuff (the robot's dejected monotones, the appearance of the Vogons, the poetry torture) are better appreciated when presented visually. The trailer definitely shows promise in that direction.





If my above droning proves to be over-strenuous for the readers' constitutions or if the randomly lifted and quoted extracts do not please as much as they do me, I am hopeful that this video will at least evoke some genuine interest in Douglas Adams' work and go a little way to redeem this blog post of mine.

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