The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Extremely funny . . . inspired lunacy . . . [and] over much too soon.”—The Washington Post Book World

Now celebrating the pivotal 42nd anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

It’s an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent . . . until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur’s best friend has just announced that he’s an alien.

After that, things get much, much worse.

With just a towel, a small yellow fish, and a book, Arthur has to navigate through a very hostile universe in the company of a gang of unreliable aliens. Luckily the fish is quite good at languages. And the book is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . . . which helpfully has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover.

Douglas Adams’s mega-selling pop-culture classic sends logic into orbit, plays havoc with both time and physics, offers up pithy commentary on such things as ballpoint pens, potted plants, and digital watches . . . and, most important, reveals the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Now, if you could only figure out the question. . . .©1980 Serious Productions Ltd; (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

Don't panic! Here are words of praise for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

"It's science fiction and it's extremely funny...inspired lunacy that leaves hardly a science fiction cliche alive."

Washington Post

"The feckless protagonist, Arthur Dent, is reminiscent of Vonnegut heroes, and his travels afford a wild satire of present institutions."

Chicago Tribune

"Very simply, the book is one of the funniest SF spoofs ever written, with hyperbolic ideas folding in on themselves."

School Library Journal

"As parody, it's marvelous: It contains just about every science fiction cliche you can think of. As humor, it's, well, hysterical."

Perfect :-)

Two of my favourites cooperate here: Douglas Adams and Stephen Fry.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a classic one hardly needs to praise anymore.

And I never miss a book that Stephen Fry reads - he is perfect :-)

Don't miss this great treat !

Geek classic holds up well

Like most junior high school kids inclined toward geek enthusiasms in the early 1980s, I was a huge fan of this book and its sequels, and tried to copy Adams' writing style (in 1983, not in this review). The book holds up well, if its not quite as brilliant as I remembered. Having discovered P.G. Wodehouse in the interval, I realize how much Adams emulated his writing style, particularly the hilarious descriptive analogy. If you like one, you'll probably like the other; Arthur Dent and Bertie Wooster inhabited very different physical environments, but the way in which they are swept through life, with the protagonist as primarily a reactor to events as opposed to an initiator of them, and their reliance on others to get them out of scrapes, is similar. Both authors are very funny although at this point I give the edge to Wodehouse. On the other hand, while both have ridiculous plot twists, there is more "stuff" going on - points being made, philosophy explored, etc - in Adams' work (at least that's my take). The book is a classic now of course so the real point of this is to commend Stephen Fry as the narrator, who does a wonderful job.

It's very odd that audible has the first book done by Fry, and the second by Martin Freeman. Both are incredible pros and do a great job, but I would have preferred that they pick one or the other! I thought Fry nailed Zaphod Beeblebrox, then Freeman came in with a totally different take that wasn't necessarily any less valid, but was a jarring contrast. I got used to it and it seems that they stick with Freeman for the rest of the books. For what its worth both men do a very fine job with the material.

Draws the whole family in

I have a hard time getting my family to enjoy Sci-Fi audiobooks, they always say they're too hard to follow. Douglas Adams breaks that mold, any time when the whole family is in the car the kids excitedly ask to continue listening to HHGG. Must buy!

wonderful

I loved this edition! what a great production. I plan to get everyone of the books in the series

As weird and delightful as it gets.

delightfully weird, an interesting rationalization for the chaos of the universe. TLDR: the mice are to blame.