There’s science fiction and there’s science
fiction.
And then there’s the adorable, zany, laugh-out-loud
fictional world created by Douglas Adams.
I recently re-read the late author’s Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy—after more than 30 years. Not only did I find it fresh
as ever, I liked it even more this time around. You can say I’ve grown up—or
maybe down—a bit, I don’t know.
What I know for sure is that the crazy characters
conjured up by Adams immediately cast their spell on you and wouldn’t let go
without tickling you senseless. Merely reading the wacky names can send ripples
of laughter down your spine.
Let’s try out a few:
Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Slartibartfast.
Vroomfondel.
Lunkwill and Fook.
Oh my dog, what a book!
I do not intend to make this post into a book
review—there must be gazillions of them out there already.
What I’m doing here, instead, is picking out some
of the most delicious excerpts and serving them up for your linguistic taste
buds.
Now, this Zaphod guy is the President of the
Galactic Government. Adams describes him as “roughly humanoid except for the
extra head and third arm.” There’s a scene in which he is addressing a press
conference to unveil a new starship. One particularly comic sentence about
Zaphod’s peculiar body stands out:
“The robot camera homed in for a close-up on the
more popular of his two heads and he waved again.”
The more popular of his two heads…hahaha!
The Vogons from the planet Vogsphere depicted in
the book are a weird lot. This passage about Vogon and other galactic poetry
will have you in splits:
Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the
Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation
by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small
Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of
his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the
Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.
Grunthos is reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception,
and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My
Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt
to save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and
throttled his brain.
In case you are wondering about the worst poetry,
Adams conferred that honor on a human:
The very worst poetry of all perished along with
its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, in
the destruction of the planet Earth.
At one point, the protagonist of the book, Arthur
Dent, is talking with Ford Prefect, his co-traveler from another planet, just
before the duo is about to be thrown out from a Vogon spacecraft:
"You know," said Arthur, "it's at
times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from
Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish
I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen.”
As you can see, Douglas Adams’s ability to create
humor out of thin air is nothing less than stellar—pun intended.
And it’s not all mindless humor (though you
wouldn’t mind it for the fun element): Adams sometimes takes digs at issues
afflicting earthlings in the real world. Sample the satire about over-tourism
spoiling the environment:
The introduction [to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy] begins like this:
"Space," it says, "is big. Really
big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I
mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's
just peanuts to space. Listen..." and so on.
(After a while the style settles down a bit and it
begins to tell you things you really need to know, like the fact that the
fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative
erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between
the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically
removed from your body weight when you leave: so every time you go to the
lavatory there it is vitally important to get a receipt.)
Brilliantly imagined satire, isn’t it?
This one is an absolute favorite of mine. The scene
is that Slartibartfast, a designer of planets, is met by Arthur Dent at a
crater on the surface of Magrathea (where new planets are made on demand). A
robot by the name of Marvin is also with Arthur but it is a bit far and
Slartibartfast is not sure if the two of them are together.
He [Slartibartfast] pointed down into the crater.
"Is that robot yours?" he said.
"No," came a thin metallic voice from the
crater, "I'm mine."
Imagine a robot saying: “I’m mine”!
(For all you know, ChatGPT might soon disown being
owned by Sam Altman or OpenAI!)
In the same scene, old Slartibartfast, too,
delivers a snarky punch that will make you chuckle with delight.
“Come,” called the old man, “come now or you will
be late.”
"Late?" said Arthur. "What
for?"
"What is your name, human?"
"Dent. Arthur Dent," said Arthur.
"Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent,"
said the old man, sternly.
Besides the humor, you also marvel at how Adams
describes certain things in his own unique way. The concept of bigness and
infinity, for instance.
"I should warn you that the chamber we are
about to pass into does not literally exist within our planet. It is a little
too ... large. We are about to pass through a gateway into a vast tract of
hyperspace. It may disturb you."
Arthur made nervous noises.
Slartibartfast touched a button and added, not
entirely reassuringly, "It scares the willies out of me. Hold tight."
The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had
a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.
It wasn't infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks
flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into
infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber
into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very
very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than
infinity itself.
And here’s the last one for this post—another gem
from Marvin, the robot aptly described as an “electronic sulking machine”:
Ford stayed, and went to examine the Blagulon ship.
As he walked, he nearly tripped over an inert steel figure lying face down in
the cold dust.
"Marvin!" he exclaimed. "What are
you doing?"
"Don't feel you have to take any notice of me,
please," came a muffled drone.
"But how are you, metalman?" said Ford.
"Very depressed."
"What's up?"
"I don't know," said Marvin, "I've
never been there."
I didn’t get this one on first reading, but then it
dawned on me and I couldn’t help but smile.
That’s it for now, fellow earthlings. Do keep
smiling and laughing.
Thank you for reading!
