But evergreen insights about subjects such as bureaucracy abound. ‘Ford Prefect’ was a British car popular at the time, for instance. It’s true that there are plenty of digs at life in 1970s Britain. Like all the best science fiction, The Hitchhiker’s Guide says more about our times than about the distant future. Physics: The time lord and fellow travellers Credit: Kenneth Stevens/Fairfax Media via Getty The fungus moth Erechthias beeblebroxi and fish Bidenichthys beeblebroxi, meanwhile, both bear patterns that mimic extra heads, to confuse predators.) There are hyper-intelligent ‘mice’ and a supercomputer, Deep Thought, which famously construes the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Universe and everything as 42.ĭouglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the radio series on which it was based. (Among their real-world namesakes are asteroid 18610 Arthurdent. The plot of The Hitchhiker’s Guide centres on permanently bemused human protagonist Arthur Dent, who wanders the Universe after the destruction of Earth with alien travel writer Ford Prefect and a crew of oddities including two-headed galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox, an unhappy robot named Marvin and Trillian, an astrophysicist. The scientific community teemed with fans, including the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who provided the voice of the titular Guide in a 2018 radio reboot of the story. Before he died in 2001, the 5 books had between them sold more than 15 million copies. The Hitchhiker’s Guide began life as a BBC radio comedy in 1978, a year before the first book was published. As ecosystems are destroyed to make way for roads, artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to get seriously unruly and the Universe continually reveals it’s a lot more complicated than we thought, Adams’s creation and its deadpan surreality never seem to fade. Yet the themes of the book have hardly dated. We’ve since replaced digital watches with smartphones and virtual assistants, and we rarely describe them as “neat”. Astonishingly, it is 40 years since Douglas Adams published The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
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