Hitchhiker's

I've noticed that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has come up several times in recent threads - and it seems with mostly negative responses, which I have to admit surprised me a little. I thought maybe it deserved its own thread, so... Well, what do y'all think? Funny, not funny, science fiction, not science fiction, great literature, or Philistine non-humor?

Not science fiction. Not great literature. Funny, especially the first two books, making fun of stuff that ought to be laughed at.

>2

It might be argued Hitchhiker's is more science fantasy than science fiction, but I disagree that its not great literature (probably has something to do with what we considered great literature is). Its probably one of the most entertaining novels I've ever read, and certainly the ONLY novels that have actually made me laugh out loud while I read them.

If I remember correctly, and that gets rarer every year, Doug Adams was a script writer for Dr. Who before writing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I have to say that I think it is science fiction, great literature, and one of the funniest books ever.

>4

I certainly second your opinion. I only suggested it might be science fantasy because the whole premise of the thing is the utter improbability of everything thats happening. I always considered science fiction to be inherantly based on the premise that 'its possible.' Still, awesome awesome literature, and really its the funniest thing I've ever read.

Hitchhiker's didn't really impress me. Lazy writing, full of coincidences, many important plot points introduced with little forewarning and less subtlety, and poorly-drawn characters.

It was funny, certainly (I laughed aloud more than a few times reading the first four books) but I don't see why I have to accept sub-par writing in a humour book.

6: Weren't you the person who said that the flying in Book 4 was a sudden unexpected surprise?

Yes. Suddenly found out how to fly, swooped into a set of clouds, and just happened to encounter several other party members, who had been missing for several chapters.

EDIT: Whenever Adams decides to write an entry from his Guide, you know that it will be an important plot point the next chapter. Two, if Adams is feeling subtle.

#4

Not quite.

Douglas Adams first (accepted) script for Doctor Who was The Pirate Planet which was broadcast 30th September 1978. The first episode of HHGG was 8th March 1978.

1) Of course Hitchhiker's Guide is science fiction. To argue otherwise is just ludicrous. I mean, sure, there are some small-minded people who may not think that it fits their description of what science fiction may be. These people amuse me. Is it real? No. Therefore, it is fiction. Does it deal with things that require science to achieve--such as flying through space. Yes.

2) Is it funny? It's hilarious.

3) Douglas Adams was just a great author all around, one of the more creative authors around.

#10

A great author all-round? Do you think he had, for example, well-developed characters?

It's been awhile since I have read the books, but if I remember properly, then yes. I mean, if you consider a well-developed character one that you can actually get in to and actually care what happens to them. I don't know of any other author who would have thought to have a depressed robot, which I thought was thoroughly creative.

And the way he would keep having things that seemed to be insignificant at the time reappear at odd times throughout the series just showed a creativity that so far as been untouched in the humorous science fiction genre to date.

#12

I loved Marvin, and the jokes surrounding him.

But in saying this, he wasn't a well-developed character - his character was a combination of an stereotypical smart robot, and the stereotype of a depressed person.

But at least Adams combined two rather odd stereotypes to make Marvin - most characters were very two-dimensional.

#10: kingoftheicedragons "there are some small-minded people who may not think that it fits their description of what science fiction may be."

Guilty.

"flying through space"

Space opera.
Except in cases like Alastair Reynolds books, where there is some consideration of the science of interstellar travel. (No touchstone, so here.)

The Infinite Improbability Drive is meant as a joke, and a very clever one it is too.

Marvin is a science-fiction-y idea though.

I think that when we talk about the books that make up H2G2 (a trilogy in 5 parts, or 6 parts if we count The Salmon of Doubt), we must remember that they were based on, and grew from, the original 1978 radio play. As they were not conceived as "literature", IMHO it is unfair to judge them as such. And nor do I think Douglas Adams ever intended them as such! Unfortunately however, we can not ask him since he tragically died of a heart attack in 2001 at the very young age of 49. RIP.

What we do know of the original radio series is that it was the first comedy series produced in stereo, and that a very large part of its budget was spent on sound effects. You can head over to Wikipedia for the full lowdown on production firsts, but suffice to say here, translating a performance piece into book form is not without its difficulties.

As for "is it SF?", that it was the first radio series nominated for a Hugo Award I thinks speaks volumes. And by the very definition of SF, as noted by a previous poster, then yes again - it is SF.

As to whether it is "funny". Well, that is a subjective question, but what we can not deny is its international success. A success that spawned the books translated into over 30 languages (1979-2001), a TV series (1981), a computer game (1984), a 3-part comic book adaption (1993-1996), a new radio series (2004-2005) and a movie (2005). And that's not including stage adaptions, LPs, etc...

Personally, I love the original radio series of 6 episodes. The rest, not so much. I also love the first 3 books. The rest, not so much. I love the 1981 TV series too, and have them on good ol' VHS. The movie was somewhat of an embarrassment and I won't be watching it a second time.

Take it for what it is. Pure, unadulterated fun and if you're looking for great literature pick up something by Proust ;)

Just my 2 cents

#14 But "space opera" is still science fiction. Science fiction is a huge category, and if you want to break it down into subcategories, that's fine. That does not make any of it any less science fiction than another.

Just as the concept of art has many avenues and styles, so does science fiction. You may like art, but not a style of art or a particular artist, it is still art, just not a type of art that you appreciate.

The same is true of science fiction. Just because it's not something that you like or would be in to does not change the fact of what it is.

I see this applied to things like "warp speed" from Star Trek regularly--that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, so therefore Star Trek cannot be science fiction, but some sort of fantasy. Well, that nothing can go faster than light is only a theory, and may only be a theory for a long time. It can become science fact, or it could become science fact that faster than light speed is possible. We just don't know. Faster than sound travel was once thought of as an impossibility as well. And that's what my major beef is with people saying that some science fiction is so unbelievable, turning it into science fantasy or other verbage to describe it. There is no one way of interstellar travel that is more believable than another.

"Faster than sound travel was once thought of as an impossibility as well."

No it wasn't. At least, not by anybody who knew minimal physics. Are you also going to tell us that everybody except Columbus thought the Earth was flat?

"There is no one way of interstellar travel that is more believable than another."

Generation ships, to name but one.

#9 I am amazed, I should have been intelligent enough to realize that here is the States my exposure to the two shows might not be the original sequence. The thing is I always saw Hitchhiker's as a parody of Dr.Who with Ford Prefect (sp?) standing in for the Doctor and everyone else a companion. Still, if Adams grew up watching the show I could still be on the right track there.

>6 The coincidences and suddenly appearance of plot points are a result of the origins of the work. Adams has claimed that he had no plot for the original radio series and that he was making it up as he went along. Lots of things that later became important were thrown in for a quick joke or to get Adams out of a corner he had written himself into. Zaphod having two heads was a throw away; the character of Marvin was meant to be dumped after a single episode. The improbability drive was made up solely to rescue Ford and Arthur after they were thrown out of the airlock. The list goes on.

>15 I entirely agree. The best material in the books is the stuff taken directly from the radio plays. In my head, the radio plays, their scripts, and even the TV shows are much better than the books. When I want to read "Adams" I reach for the radio scripts. This was really Adam's medium and I don't think he would have ever authored a book if Hitchhiker’s hadn't been such a phenomenon.

Fans BTW should check out The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts. It includes production footnotes to each show which are very interesting and often funnier than the scripts themselves.

I don't think I can add anything to that, but just to make my 'vote' count, I loved the book. It's one of my favorites. I can't say that about the whole series though, IMO first book was the best.

Though I have heard a lot about original radio series, I guess I should try to find it and give it a try.

I can't be objective. I unconditionally love The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Yes, the radio series and the original film were great. My early post may have been misunderstood: "Not science fiction. Not great literature. Funny, especially the first two books, making fun of stuff that ought to be laughed at."

"Not science fiction": mere classification. There is lots of good stuff that's not science fiction, and everybody knows that 90% of science fiction is crap. (So what?)

"Not great literature." None the worse for that. Proust, I suppose, produced great literature. Have I the slightest inclination to read Proust? NO. (Maybe after five years of solitary confinement with nothing to read.)

#23

ITYM original TV series. It was a six part BBC TV series and not a film (yes I know the DVD has the credits cut on one of the options but you can still watch the episodes individually).

#24: andyl

(I'm not sure what ITYM means.) You may well be right (YMWBR?) that what I think of as the "real" film is just the TV series run together.
The Dish of the Day was marvelous.

I have the TV series on VHS. IIRC I bought it as soon as it came out. A little sad to see how dated it looks, yet how cutting edge it was at the time.

I went to see the movie with great trepidation. After what Jackson did to The Fellowship of the Ring, and knowing that Simon Jones would, of course, not be playing Arthur, my hopes were hovering around the storm drains. To my astonishment, however, I found it utterly delightful. Can't think why, I'm ordinarily a rigid purist, but something about the movie captivated me. Maybe it's because the Hitchhiker concept has always been fluid: the original radio series, the TV series, the books... I never got t he LP or saw the West End show, but heard about the show. And, I donno, the movie, despite all the agregious changes, captured for me the spirit. That's just me. I know other people found the movie appalling, and I can grasp that. It just wasn't my personal experience.

> 15 and 23

Well, of course, more than a few things that are considered literature today (even great literature) started out as plays or serials (some of which were written as the authors went along), etc. Shakespeare, naturally, wrote for a medium that was not so far away from our movies or television but we all read him in English classes (and with good reason!). Not that I'm claiming The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is great literature - just that I don't think we should exclude the possibility because of its origins.

For what it's worth, by the way, while I like the radio series, I do actually prefer the book. Both are good though! (And much, much better than the movie. Never seen the TV show.)

The original radio series boxed set, includes a disc of history an a disc of an interview with Douglas.

I enjoyed reading the series and a few other books by Adams. That's what really counts for me. I guess knowing where the books are at in the bookstore would be helpful. The first time I looked for them they were in fantasy, the next they were in science fiction. I'm not sure, but I don't think I've ever seen them in the literary classics section. To be fair though, I only went in that section when I had to.

I'm pretty excited about getting my hands on the radio series.

#17 Nope, generational ships are not believable. they would not be able to be built big enough to actually be sustainable, unless you're going to build them at least the size of the moon. You would need to have ways to grow enough crops, have enough food and water and space to grow. You could build smaller ships and call them generational, but soon you would run out of space. Generational ships are in no way believable. Sorry, try again.

8: Which just tells me you didn't read the books very well. Dent began flying in Book 3. Prefect and Dent talked about how to fly in Books 1 and 2. I'm thinking that the fact that things suddenly seemed to appear when you read the book wasn't the fault of the author, but rather a sloppy read through.

#31: kingoftheicedragons "Nope, generational ships are not believable"

Context! They were in answer to ""There is no one way of interstellar travel that is more believable than another.".

Can you perhaps grant that they are more believable than John Carter's way of getting to Mars at the beginning of Princess of Mars?

For books that are clearly intended as comic, a little bit of leeway is granted when it comes to the finer points of physics.

I found the frist 2 very funny, 3 and 4 less so, and 5 really quite funny, providing it is read with the knowledge that DNA didn't really want to write any more HH books and was really looking for a way to properly end it all beyond any editors desire to ressurect the series.

Mostly it's the ideas that a good, as mentioned above, the pacing, plot, dialog, and characters aren't brilliant - good enough, but not brilliant - the ideas however are wonderful.

I still can't get the hang of Thursdays.

#32

I'm not planning to read Hitchhiker's again for a long time, so I'll acquiese to your knowledge that there might have been one or two mentions of flying before that. If that was the only problem with the book, I would be quite happy.

But the flying is not the only problem. The problem was the huge coincidences that plagued the book. Party gets into trouble, through huge set of coincidences, splits up, and rejoins later, through another set of huge coincidences. Rinse, repeat for the first three books. The fourth book starts with a completely unexplained deus ex machina, and then Dent has a set of adventures.

In regards to the SF-ness of Hitchhiker's, I think it is. I don't think it is particularly brilliant SF. It's funny, certainly, but the series has so many problems that when you strip the humour away, little is left that is worth reading.

#33

I have not read Princess of Mars, so I can't speak to that.

None of the ways of space travel in science fiction is really believable. It's an escape, and all require the suspension of disbelief. And if an author goes to great lengths to try to come up with some clear cut method of trying to make "science fiction" believable, that tends to ruin the story altogether, making it dry, boring, and a waste of my time. I read science fiction for the escape of it--if I wanted to read a physics book on what it would take to fly through space, that's what I would read. The escape of science fiction is what makes science fiction enjoyable. The idea of man traveling to any other world, how we'd get there, what we'd find and do once we got there, and how we'd get back is all science fiction right now, and no one way of doing it is really much better than another. Hopefully in my life time, we will put a man on Mars and bring him home safely, and that's feasible. But even that is still years and years off.

I'm sure that many would consider Star Trek to be fluff science fiction. That's fine, but despite that fluff, many things that were inconceivable in the 60s have evolved to the point that it's being explored as maybe becoming science fact, and even things like a flip cell phone were inspired by Star Trek.

When one way of travelling through space becomes feasible that Earth--or a country of Earth--has a fleet of interstellar vehicles, and every other method has been eliminated as a possibility, only then can we determine which is the most believable way of space travel. Until then, we need to keep an open mind.

#36: kingoftheicedragons "I have not read Princess of Mars, so I can't speak to that. ... The escape of science fiction is what makes science fiction enjoyable."

You would probably like Princess of Mars then. You can read it here.

35: Flying wasn't merely mentioned, it was done in earlier books. That's why claiming it was so surprising in Book 4 is silly.

The coincidences are a natural part of the existence of the Improbability Drive (including the opening of Book 4). I don't see how this is unexpected either. That's how the Improbability Drive works.

From your comments it just seems like you skimmed through them.

Why did it take Prefect and Dent three books to learn to fly? Don Juan flew in the first book!

Odd, I thought hitchhikers used SF as a thinly disguised vehicle for social commentary & satire. Hard to mistake the "Vogons" laughable bureaucratic red tape for anything else.

Adams loose style and seeming continuity errors , according to some, were in sharp contrast to the first run of Star Trek. ST was rigid, carefully choreographed didactic tales of human interactions {or human traits in aliens} with a "lesson to be learned" for most every episode as I remember.

I liked both immensely and consider one style preferable to the other only under certain circumstances. As far as I can tell Adams himself never wandered away from his chosen genre & style with anything that didn't fit and hilariously so.

> 35

I guess I see it a little differently. I don't think that Adams was very concerned with careful plotting in these books. Part of the reason actually could be satirical - making fun of stories where that happens (sort of like the old Batman TV show, where the way the cliffhangers was resolved was always ridiculous, parodying presumably the very comics it was based on). Or, maybe Adams just didn't care much about that - I mean, the style of the book makes the plot not so important. Which is fairly common in satire and parody. I guess if you don't find them funny of course, the rest of the book will not keep you entertained.

Character was another dimension of the stories that has been mentioned as weak. Even if that's true, I think it's a symptom of the genre (satire, not science fiction), and really shouldn't be counted against it. The point isn't to write a good story here, the point is to lampoon society (war, politics, religion) and science fiction (as was also pointed out in #40).

Adams makes me think a little of Gilbert and Sullivan. I can't think of any real character development in the Pirates of Penzance, etc. but that doesn't make it less funny or biting.

Of course, now perhaps I'm taking the whole thing WAY too seriously :)

32: Maybe I shouldn't have deleted my message on that point. Arthur stays on Kricket at the end of Life, the Universe and Everything, among other things, learning to fly. I'm always surprised and disgusted by the obvious points that people miss when they're reading. OTOH I have been known to miss saliant points from time to time myself, so maybe I shouldn't throw stones. Still, really!

33: LOL Practically *anything* would be more believable than John Carter's method. And yet, for him, it works. *grin*

ZAP!

#38

Book four was silly for entirely other reasons, the deus ex machina at the start in particular. I don't single out the flying here.

Flying was first used (as I recall) in either book two or three, where Arthur and Ford Prefect suddenly fly to escape an avalanche, land on top of a cloud roaming a planet, where a party has been going on for umpteen many years. Again, I will concede that I might have missed flying in the earlier books (as I can't be bothered to search the books) as that was only a small problem, the main problem being the huge coincidences required to resolve the plot.

#35

Parody poor plot resolution, coincidences and inconsistencies in earlier SF by... doing the exact same thing?

43: You mean the deus ex machina that was wholly and utterly predictable given plot devices such as the Infinite Improbability Drive?

#45

The Deus Ex Machina that occured without foreshadowing in the first three books, nor had a resulting explanation in the rest of the book that followed.

If someone says it was resolved in book five, I'll take their word for it.

46: You mean the fact that the Earth is back in place? The reason for that is resolved in Book 4. I can only, once again, speculate that you didn't do much more than skim through the books.

Side note: This plot point drives much of the story of the fifth book, but book five is probably the weakest of all the books by a considerable margin. Not because of this plot point, but because the book's humorous tone gave way to a depressing and despairing one. This might be explained by the fact that Adams was dying when he wrote book five.

#47

I do recall some speculation about why it might all have been put back. It wasn't really an authoritative explanation to me, though, more speculation and guesses than anything else.

#47 - A side note to your side note ;)

"This might be explained by the fact that Adams was dying when he wrote book five."

The 5th book, Mostly Harmless, was published in 1992. Adams died of a heart attack in 2001.

I'm intrigued as all I can find is what's on good ol' Wikipedia...

"In an interview reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt, Adams expressed dissatisfaction with the "rather bleak" tone of this book: "People have said, quite rightly, that Mostly Harmless is a very bleak book. And it was a bleak book. I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number; six is a better kind of number."

For the downbeat tone of the novel, Adams blamed personal problems, saying "for all sorts of personal reasons I don't want to go into, I just had a thoroughly miserable year, and I was trying to write a book against that background. And, guess what, it was a rather bleak book!""

49: Ah, I had the right symptom but misremembered the cause.

48: Whether you considered it authoritative or not, it was in there. And it turns out to drive the plot of Mostly Harmless.

> 44

Not to be obstinate, but, yes, why not? The more outrageous the coincidences, of course, the funnier it becomes. Of course, as I said, I tend to think this sort of thing is allowable in humorous writing, especially of this sort, whereas you may not feel that way, apparently.

There are certain stylistic features in a lot of satire that I think are throwing off people who are more familiar with Science Fiction styles than with satire in particular.

A lot of the disjointedness, the throw-away (often seeming non-sequiter) comments and analogies, all of these things are very common in satire in general.

Interestingly, I just read Micromegas, satire and science fiction written by Voltaire in 1752 (the text can be found here: http://www.wondersmith.com/scifi/micro.htm), and it has a LOT of the same stylistic character as Hitchhiker's Guide. Consider the following passage:

"They landed on Jupiter itself, and remained there a year, during which they learned some very remarkable secrets which would now be appearing in the press, were it not for certain censors who find them too hard to swallow."

No further comment about Jupiter, or the censors or the secrets, is ever offered. It's a throw-away joke, poking fun at something the author deserved being poked at, but otherwise unrelated to the plot or characters. Remind you of anything? Of course it does.

Great link! I have heard of the title but not had a chance to read it.

Hitchhikers has to be one of the funniest books I've ever read. I saw the BBC version as a child before I read the books and it was fantastic as well. There aren't many books that have me laughing out loud several times a page as well as throwing in a few philosophical nuggets (who can forget the Total Perspective Vortex or God's final message to his creation?).

(In answer to 35.) But why would you strip away the humour? What drives the writing is the humour.

It's like saying what would Tess of the D'Urbervilles be without the misery: a very short book.

#55

Some parts of Hitchhikers were funny, I will agree. But reading entire chapters without so much as a smile raised is not my idea of a humorous book, though.

However, I'm not going to argue about this anymore. I plan to read the Hitchhikers quadrilogy again (if there is a fifth book by Adams, I'll read that, too) and I'll review the lot of them at once, in great detail. But that will have to wait until I am in more of a machoistic mood, though.

DA's work was incredible. Yes, some of it seems, "poorly written" such as the way he throws words around (ie. tenses used for time travelers' verbs).

He was intentionally writing that way for comedic effect.

Horribly overrated, is what it is.

Cult books frequently are 'overrated' by their very nature, but that's hardly their fault. nor should it detract from their true value.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was of it's time unique and revolutionary.
I was one of many people who probably contributed to it's hype back in the day. I lapped it up lock-stock; listened to the radio plays and drooled over the BBC television series when it arrived.
Between school lessons we would recite whole chapters from memory, while another kid checked for accuracy against the actual book (we made very few slip-ups).
I've not re-read it in well over 25 years but have no burning desire to revisit it for the time being.
The film was great in that it added some new content to the story; and on the whole I liked it.

Over the years, I've developed the theory:

HHGG is a great book, if you discover it on your own before you've had people telling you how great it is for years.

This is true of so many books.

(((60)))
An astute theory, for that I can vouch and give empirical evidence in bounds.

61> There is an important corollary:

That thing I said before, only with Monty Python in it instead.