…I loved the idea that exploring the universe didn’t have to be the preserve of heroic characters like Flash Gordon and Luke Skywalker. Any ordinary schmuck could grab a bag and a towel, and thumb a ride to Alpha Centauri or The Restaurant at the End of the Universe…
Get comfortable. Loosen your belt. Put Disney on for the kids.
Welcome to my Unabashed Science Fiction Rant.
The other day, when I was at Chalice Festival, I got a sticker that said ‘don’t panic’. It reminded me of one of my favourite books, so I stuck it on my phone.
When I was ten years old I read a book that changed my life.
The bible? No.
The koran? Nope.
‘The Art of the Deal’? Hell no.
The life changing book I read as a kid was ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’.
The basic premise of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, is this: intelligent extraterrestrial life exists everywhere in the universe and it is just as confused and crazy as we are.
The universe is a bewilderingly complex place. If you are going to try and travel across it on the cheap, then you will need plenty of advice.
That’s where ‘The Guide’ comes in. It’s a pocket sized electronic book, constantly updated, with articles covering every planet and culture in the universe. It’s the interstellar backpacker’s best friend.
At the beginning of the novel’s story, Arthur Dent, a typically ignorant human, is unexpectedly catapulted into the life of a galactic hitchhiker.
Like most earthlings, Arthur Dent is blissfully unaware that the universe is buzzing with civilisations and cultures far more complex and bizarre than our own. In the first few chapters he meets aliens, is blown up, arrested, tortured with poetry, condemned to death, and then rescued by a man with two heads.
The only way he manages to cope with this series of traumatic events is by clinging to his copy of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
As well as being a great writer of comedy, Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, turned out to be a prophet. The way he describes ‘The Guide’ reads like a marketing pitch for Wikitravel. A tiny electronic device, linked to the world wirelessly, and able to summon all the information about every place imaginable at the touch of a button. In Douglas Adams’ own words:
‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. Perhaps the most remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor… More popular than The Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? It’s already supplanted the Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for two important reasons. First, it’s slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC printed in large friendly letters on its cover…’
When I first read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in 1983, I never dreamed that I would one day own a device nearly as amazing as ‘The Guide’.
Things like smartphones were still science fiction in the eighties.
Reading The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy planted seeds in my brain.
I didn’t know what hitchhiking was until I read Douglas Adams’ books.
I loved the idea of thumbing a ride, and careening randomly through time and space.
I loved the idea that exploring the universe didn’t have to be the preserve of heroic characters like Flash Gordon and Luke Skywalker. Any ordinary schmuck could grab a bag and a towel, and thumb a ride to Alpha Centauri or The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
In Douglas Adams’ book, hitchhiking is a lot more than just a way to see the universe on the cheap. Intergalactic hitchhikers are pilgrims to the unknown.
Arthur Dent, the central character of the book, begins his journey across the universe as a timid, materialistic introvert. His random journeys through space change him in profound ways. He becomes detached from ownership. He learns to accept confusion and be comfortable with the unknown. Arthur never truly conquers his fear, but he does gain the courage to confront it.
Like most pilgrims, Arthur has a guru. He meets Ford Prefect on Planet Earth, never suspecting that Ford is an alien, and not actually from Guildford, as he claims.
Ford Prefect is a contributor to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. He is a seasoned traveler, having hitchhiked through space from planet to planet for years. He has seen the sun rise on distant planets, had sex with a dozen different life forms, and got blind drunk in more seedy space ports than he can count.
Ford was sent to Earth on assignment to write an article, but got stuck there. At first he was frustrated to be stranded in a cultural backwater like Earth, but in time he acquires a certain affection for humans and their innocent, naive ways.
Ford and Arthur become travel companions, and while Ford does his best to be patient with Arthur’s anxiety and ignorance, he often loses his temper with him. The cultural and intellectual gulf between them is just too massive to bridge sometimes.
Now I’ve been hitchhiking around planet Earth for several years, my love for Douglas Adams’ book has grown like the love for an old friend.
His book has literally traveled the world with me, in my smartphone, as an audio book.
I love the symmetry of that.
The science fiction that created the yearning in me to wander has started to become reality in my lifetime and early enough that I have time to enjoy it.
Generation x might be the first generation to experience that sort of speedy change of epoch.
In a strange way, my relationship with The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy and, by proxy, my relationship with it’s author Douglas Adams is a lot like the relationship between Arthur and Ford.
Douglas Adams compelled me, through the power of his writing, to seek the kind of adventure that random travel offers.
I was drawn instinctively to the idea that philosophical understanding of our bizarre, chaotic and endlessly changing world was most likely to be found in random movement.
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Get your FREE e-book: The Travel Hackers Handbook.
I think the paradigm of the hitchhiker can be the ideal observation point for navigating an inexplicable universe.
Einstein teaches us that time and space are relative concepts, right? – defined by the observer’s position?
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy taught me that meaning and culture are relative concepts, defined by the observer’s position on the roadside.
Even something as fundamental as existence ceases to be definite if you hitchhike far enough across space. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, but it also puts life in perspective and when you’re dealing with interstellar distances, that perspective can really give you shaky knees, I guess.
I think about this book a lot.
Sometimes I think that like most adventure stories, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is ultimately about the quest for happiness.
The original book became a series of five.
Through all of the books we see Arthur Dent, the human at the centre of the story, striving to find his way home to the Earth.
Not just Earth in general, but his specific, unique version of it, at the exact moment in his life that he left it.
Arthur Dent’s quest for meaning and belonging seems doomed to be forever, but he does acquire some level of happiness in the end, by realising that happiness, like everything else, is a matter of perspective.
In my favourite of the five ‘Hitchhikers Guide’ books there is a scene where Arthur meets a profoundly unhappy truck driver.
Arthur has been wandering in time and space for years at this point, and he has given up hope of ever finding his way home to planet Earth. Then, completely by coincidence, he is able to get a ride right back to where he started: England in the twentieth century.
It’s pouring with rain, and Arthur stands on the roadside, soaked to the skin, with his thumb out. A truck stops and Arthur gratefully climbs in.
The truck’s driver, Rob McKenna immediately begins to complain about the weather, almost in a rage.
‘It always rains’ he rants.
Arthur objects that surely it can’t always be raining, even in England.
Yes it can, says the truck driver. It always rains. Always.
He shows Arthur a log book he keeps describing the weather each day. Every day’s entry shows rain.
Arthur is baffled, but Douglas Adams explains the truck driver’s dilemma for us, the readers, like this:
‘And as he drove on, the rain clouds dragged down the sky after him, for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.’
As a kid, I just thought this scene was hilarious. Here is this poor guy, trying to do his job, driving his truck, and he just never gets a break. Never a sunny day.
Now, as a grownup, I see all kinds of dimensions to this chapter that I think are philosophically profound and quite sad in a way.
Rob McKenna’s problem isn’t the rain itself, it’s his lack of understanding. He doesn’t know the clouds love him, and want to nurture him, he just feels wet and irritable.
The solution to his problem isn’t dry roads. The rain is always going to fall. If he could only understand his power as a rain god, he could quit truck driving and become a farmer.
He’s a prisoner of his narrow paradigm, as are we all.
I love telling people I meet about Douglas Adams and his awesome books. Especially people I meet hitchhiking.
It’s so nice to share a book you love isn’t it?
Not only is this book funny, exciting, poignant and unique, it also has a lot to say about who we are as a species, and where we are going on this hurtling, inexplicable journey through time.
Douglas Adams died in 2001. He lived long enough to know that Arthur C Clark was an optimist, but not long enough to see the iPhone become a reality and discover how prophetic his own books were.
Even now, fifteen years after the death of their author, Douglas Adams’ books are still completely relevant satire, and fascinating futurism.
I’ve read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books at least a dozen times already, and I know I’ll read them again. Just like a good friend, I keep finding new things about them that I love, and discovering new puzzles in them to solve.
I hope cryogenics and space tourism keep moving forward apace, because one day I’d like to take my hitchhiking beyond this little blue planet and see the rest of the galaxy.
BTW:
Another thing Douglas Adams describes in his book is the ‘babel fish’, a small animal which lives in a persons ear:
‘The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.’
Sound familiar?
Theres a tech startup developing an in-ear device that does the same kind of thing right now. I’ll be getting myself an electronic babel fish ASAP.
I am living in the future, and it looks a lot like my favourite science fiction story. Yeah!
BTW BTW:
For the H.G.G. fan-boys-and-girls:
I’m 42 years old.
Eddie the shipboard computer estimates the likelihood of my progressing beyond the maturity of a ten year old at an improbability factor of 452 million to 1 against.
