The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (novel)

The novel opens with an introduction describing the human race as a primitive and deeply unhappy species as well as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which provides info on every planet in the galaxy. Earthman Arthur Dent awakes in his home in West Country, England, to discover that the local planning council is trying to demolish his house to build a bypass and lies down in front of the bulldozer to stop it. His friend Ford Prefect—an alien researcher for Guide from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse who has been posing as an out-of-work actor from Guildford for 15 years—convinces the lead bureaucrat Mr. Prosser to lie down in front of the bulldozer for Arthur so that he can buy him six pints of beer at the pub. The construction crew begins demolishing the house anyway, but stop when a fleet of alien spaceships arrives on Earth undetected by human space agencies. The Vogons, a callous race of civil servants running the fleet, announce that they have come to demolish Earth to make way for a hyperspace expressway. Ford and Arthur hitch a ride from the Dentrassis, who serve as the cooks on the fleet, and are allowed onto a spaceship traveling to Barnard's Star. They are quickly discovered by the Vogons, who torture them by forcing them to listen to their poetry and then toss them out of an airlock.

Meanwhile Zaphod Beeblebrox, Ford's cousin and the President of the Galaxy, steals the spaceship Heart of Gold at its unveiling with his human companion Trillian. The Heart of Gold is enabled with an "Infinite Improbability Drive" that allows it to travel instantaneously to any point in space by simultaneously passing through every point in the universe at once. After being tossed into space Arthur and Ford are rescued by the Heart of Gold as it travels with the Infinite Improbability Drive. Zaphod takes his passengers—Arthur, Ford, a depressed robot named Marvin, and Trillian—to a legendary planet known as Magrathea. Magrathea was said to have been a planet whose inhabitants specialized in custom-building planets for others, but caused themselves to become rich as the rest of the galaxy became poor and disappeared. Although Ford initially doubts that the planet is Magrathea, the planet's computers send them warning messages to leave before firing two nuclear missiles at the Heart of Gold. Arthur inadvertently saves them by activating the Infinite Improbability Drive improperly, causing the Heart of Gold to remain in Magrathea and for the missiles to transform into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias. The whale, which unsuccessfully tries to make sense of its existence at it falls to the surface, opens a passage underground on its impact. As the ship lands Trillian's pet mice Frankie and Benjy escape.

On Magrathea, Zaphod, Ford, and Trillian venture down to the planet's interior while leaving Arthur and Marvin outside. Arthur is met by a man named Slartibartfast, who explains that the Magratheans have been in stasis for tens of thousands of years to wait out an economic recession. The Magratheans temporarily reawakened to reconstruct a second version of Earth commissioned by mice, who were in fact the most intelligent species on Earth. In the factory workshop Slartibartfast shows Arthur that in the distant past a race of "hyperintelligent, pan-dimensional beings" created a supercomputer named Deep Thought to determine the answer to the "Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything." Two philosophers representing a trade association, Majikthise and Vroomfondel, arrived and complained that the computer would remove uncertainty and end their jobs and demanded its deactivation. However, Deep Thought revealed that it would take 7.5 million years to complete calculations and reasoned that during that time they could argue over what the computer's answer will be. 7.5 million years later the philosophers' descendants asked Deep Thought for the answer, which it announces is the number 42. Deep Thought tells its creators that the answer makes no sense to them because they didn't know what the "Ultimate Question" had been in the first place, so he suggested designing an even greater computer to determine what the Ultimate Question was. This computer is actually the planet Earth, which was constructed by the Magratheans, and was five minutes away from finishing its task and figuring out the Ultimate Question when the Vogons destroyed it. The hyperintelligent superbeings participated in the program as mice, performing experiments on humans while pretending to be experimented on.

Slartibartfast takes Arthur to see his friends, who are at a feast hosted by Trillilan's pet mice. They reject the idea of building a new Earth to start the process over and offer to buy Arthur's brain in case it contains the question, leading to a fight when he declines. Zaphod saves Arthur from having his brain removed as police from the planet Blagulon Kappa arrive to arrest Zaphod. The mice, hoping to start a lucrative career on chat shows and the lecture circuit in their home dimension, decide to pretend that the Ultimate Question was "How many roads must a man walk down?" After the police repeatedly shoot at Zaphod they suddenly die when their life-support systems short-circuit. Suspicious, Ford discovers on the surface that Marvin became bored and explained his view of the universe to the police officers' spaceship, causing it to commit suicide. The five leave Magrathea and decide to go to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

The Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a specially designed book made in 1994. It was first printed in the United Kingdom by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and in the United States by Harmony Books (who sold it for $42.00). It is an oversized book, and came in silver-foil "holographic" covers in both the UK and US markets. It features the first appearance of the 42 Puzzle, designed by Adams himself, a photograph of Adams and his literary agent Ed Victor as the two space cops, and many other designs by Kevin Davies, who has participated in many Hitchhiker's related projects since the stage productions in the late 1970s. Davies himself appears as Prosser. This edition is out of print – Adams bought up many remainder copies and sold them, autographed, on his website.

The deliberately misnamed Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "Trilogy" consists of six books(a hexology), five written by Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984) and Mostly Harmless (1992). On 16 September 2008 it was announced that Irish author Eoin Colfer was to pen a sixth book. The book, entitled And Another Thing..., was published in October 2009, on the 30th anniversary of the publication of the original novel.[4]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was never titled "trilogy." It was called that by readers, but the word "trilogy" doesn't appear on the cover of the first three books and was not used until the publication of the fourth book.

Greg Costikyan reviewed The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in Ares Magazine #6 and commented that "The Hitchhiker's Guide is written with superb English wit, far more humorous than any American sitcom."[5]

The "Babel fish", a creature used in the novel that feeds on brainwaves and can instantly translate alien languages, inspired the name of Babel Fish, the first free online language translator, which launched in 1997.[6]

When Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster was launched into space on the maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket in February 2018, it had the words DON'T PANIC on the dashboard display and carried amongst other items a copy of the novel and a towel.[7][8]

• Number one on the Sunday Times best seller list (1979)
• Author received the "Golden Pan" (From his publishers for reaching the 1,000,000th book sold) (1984)
• Waterstone's Books/Channel Four's list of the 'One Hundred Greatest Books of the Century', at number 24. (1996)
• BBC's "Big Read", an attempt to find the "Nation's Best-loved book", ranked it number four. (2003)

• Spelling of Hitchhiker's Guide for variations in the spelling of the title.

• Hitchhikers Guide easter egg in Wolfram Alpha