Table Of ContentA Del Rey ® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, copyright © 1979 by Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, copyright © 1980 by Douglas Adams
Life, the Universe and Everything, copyright © 1982 by Douglas Adams
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, copyright © 1985 by Douglas Adams
Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, copyright © 1986 by Douglas Adams
Mostly Harmless, copyright © 1992 by Serious Productions
Foreword copyright © 2002 by Neil Gaiman
Introduction copyright © 1986 by Douglas Adams
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. This edition was previously published by
Random House Value Publishing as The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide and also in separate volumes.
Grateful acknowledgment is given for lyric excerpts from “You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Richard
Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright 1945 by Williamson Music, Inc. Copyright renewed.
All rights managed by T. B. Harms Company c/o The Welk Music Group. International copyright
secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House,
Inc.
www.delreybooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-30749846-5
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword: What Was He Like, Douglas Adams?
Introduction: A Guide to the Guide: Some unhelpful remarks from the author
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Life, the Universe and Everything
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
Young Zaphod Plays It Safe
Mostly Harmless
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Foreword:
What Was He Like,
Douglas Adams?
He was tall, very tall. He had an air of cheerful diffidence. He combined
a razor-sharp intellect and understanding of what he was doing with the
puzzled look of someone who had backed into a profession that
surprised him in a world that perplexed him. And he gave the impression
that, all in all, he was rather enjoying it.
He was a genius, of course. It’s a word that gets tossed around a lot
these days, and it’s used to mean pretty much anything. But Douglas was
a genius, because he saw the world differently, and more importantly, he
could communicate the world he saw. Also, once you’d seen it his way
you could never go back.
Douglas Noel Adams was born in 1952 in Cambridge, England (shortly
before the announcement of an even more influential DNA,
deoxyribonucleic acid). He was a self-described “strange child” who did
not learn to speak until he was four. He wanted to be a nuclear physicist
(“I never made it because my arithmetic was so bad”), then went to
Cambridge to study English, with ambitions that involved becoming part
of the tradition of British writer/performers (of which the members of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus are the best-known example).
When he was eighteen, drunk in a field in Innsbruck, hitchhiking
across Europe, he looked up at the sky filled with stars and thought,
“Somebody ought to write the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Then
he went to sleep and almost, but not quite, forgot all about it.
He left Cambridge in 1975 and went to London where his many
writing and performing projects tended, in the main, not to happen. He
worked with former Python Graham Chapman writing scripts and
sketches for abortive projects (among them a show for Ringo Starr which
contained the germ of Starship Titanic) and with writer-producer John
Lloyd (they pitched a series called Snow Seven and the White Dwarfs, a
comedy about two astronomers in “an observatory on Mt. Everest”—The
idea for that was minimum casting, minimum set, and we’d just try to
sell the series on cheapness”).
He liked science fiction, although he was never a fan. He supported
himself through this period with a variety of odd jobs: he was, for
example, a hired bodyguard for an oil-rich Arabian family, a job that
entailed wearing a suit and sitting in hotel corridors through the night
listening to the ding of passing elevators.
In 1977 BBC radio producer (and well-known mystery author) Simon
Brett commissioned him to write a science fiction comedy for BBC Radio
Four. Douglas originally imagined a series of six half-hour comedies
called The Ends of the Earth—funny stories which at the end of each, the
world would end. In the first episode, for example, the Earth would be
destroyed to make way for a cosmic freeway.
But, Douglas soon realized, if you are going to destroy the Earth, you
need someone to whom it matters. Someone like a reporter for, yes, the
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And someone else … a man who was
called Alaric B in Douglas’s original proposal. At the last moment
Douglas crossed out Alaric B and wrote above it Arthur Dent. A normal
name for a normal man.
For those people listening to BBC Radio 4 in 1978 the show came as a
revelation. It was funny—genuinely witty, surreal, and smart. The series
was produced by Geoffrey Perkins, and the last two episodes of the first
series were co-written with John Lloyd.
(I was a kid who discovered the series—accidentally, as most listeners
did—with the second episode. I sat in the car in the driveway, getting
cold, listening to Vogon poetry, and then the ideal radio line “Ford,
you’re turning into an infinite number of penguins,” and I was happy;
perfectly, unutterably happy.)
By now, Douglas had a real job. He was the script editor for the long-
running BBC SF series Doctor Who, in the Tom Baker days.
Pan Books approached him about doing a book based on the radio
series, and Douglas got the manuscript for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy in to his editors at Pan slightly late (according to legend they
telephoned him and asked, rather desperately, where he was in the
book, and how much more he had to go. He told them. “Well,” said his
editor, making the best of a bad job, “just finish the page you’re on and
we’ll send a motorbike around to pick it up in half an hour”). The book,
a paperback original, became a surprise bestseller, as did, less
surprisingly, its four sequels. It spawned a bestselling text-based
computer game.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sequence used the tropes of science
fiction to talk about the things that concerned Douglas, the world he
observed, his thoughts on Life, the Universe, and Everything. As we
moved into a world where people really did think that digital watches
were a pretty neat thing, the landscape had become science fiction and
Douglas, with a relentless curiosity about matters scientific, an instinct
for explanation, and a laser-sharp sense of where the joke was, was in a
perfect position to comment upon, to explain, and to describe that
landscape.
I read a lengthy newspaper article recently demonstrating that
Hitchhiker’s was in fact a lengthy tribute to Lewis Carroll (something that
would have come as a surprise to Douglas, who had disliked the little of
Alice in Wonderland he read). Actually, the literary tradition that Douglas
was part of was, at least initially, the tradition of English Humor Writing
that gave us P. G. Wodehouse (whom Douglas often cited as an
influence, although most people tended to miss it because Wodehouse
didn’t write about spaceships).
Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time
went on. He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who
had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of
crafting novels. He loved talking to audiences. He liked writing
screenplays. He liked being at the cutting edge of technology and
inventing and explaining with an enthusiasm that was uniquely his own.
Douglas’s ability to miss deadlines became legendary. (“I love
deadlines,” he said once. “I love the whooshing sound they make as they
go by.”)
He died in May 2001—too young. His death surprised us all, and left a
huge, Douglas Adams-sized hole in the world. We had lost both the man
(tall, affable, smiling gently at a world that baffled and delighted him)
and the mind.
He left behind a number of novels, as often-imitated as they are,
ultimately, inimitable. He left behind characters as delightful as Marvin
the Paranoid Android, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Slartibartfast. He left
sentences that will make you laugh with delight as they rewire the back
of your head.
And he made it look so easy.
—Neil Gaiman,
January 2002
(Long before Neil Gaiman was the bestselling author of novels like
American Gods and Neverwhere, or graphic novels like The Sandman
sequence, he wrote a book called Don’t Panic, a history of Douglas
Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)
T
Introduction:
A GUIDE TO THE GUIDE
Some unhelpful remarks from the author
he history of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is now so
complicated that every time I tell it I contradict myself, and
whenever I do get it right I’m misquoted. So the publication of this
omnibus edition seemed like a good opportunity to set the record
straight—or at least firmly crooked. Anything that is put down wrong
here is, as far as I’m concerned, wrong for good.
The idea for the title first cropped up while I was lying drunk in a field
in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1971. Not particularly drunk, just the sort of
drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff Gössers after not having
eaten for two days straight, on account of being a penniless hitchhiker.
We are talking of a mild inability to stand up.
I was traveling with a copy of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to Europe by Ken
Walsh, a very battered copy that I had borrowed from someone. In fact,
since this was 1971 and I still have the book, it must count as stolen by
now. I didn’t have a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day (as it then was)
because I wasn’t in that financial league.
Night was beginning to fall on my field as it spun lazily underneath
me. I was wondering where I could go that was cheaper than Innsbruck,
revolved less and didn’t do the sort of things to me that Innsbruck had
done to me that afternoon. What had happened was this. I had been
walking through the town trying to find a particular address, and being
thoroughly lost I stopped to ask for directions from a man in the street. I
knew this mightn’t be easy because I don’t speak German, but I was still
surprised to discover just how much difficulty I was having
communicating with this particular man. Gradually the truth dawned on
me as we struggled in vain to understand each other that of all the
people in Innsbruck I could have stopped to ask, the one I had picked
did not speak English, did not speak French and was also deaf and
dumb. With a series of sincerely apologetic hand movements, I
disentangled myself, and a few minutes later, on another street, I
stopped and asked another man who also turned out to be deaf and
dumb, which was when I bought the beers.
I ventured back onto the street. I tried again.
When the third man I spoke to turned out to be deaf and dumb and
also blind I began to feel a terrible weight settling on my shoulders;
wherever I looked the trees and buildings took on dark and menacing
aspects. I pulled my coat tightly around me and hurried lurching down
the street, whipped by a sudden gusting wind. I bumped into someone
and stammered an apology, but he was deaf and dumb and unable to
understand me. The sky loured. The pavement seemed to tip and spin. If
I hadn’t happened then to duck down a side street and pass a hotel
where a convention for the deaf was being held, there is every chance
that my mind would have cracked completely and I would have spent
the rest of my life writing the sort of books for which Kafka became
famous and dribbling.
As it is I went to lie in a field, along with my Hitch Hiker’s Guide to
Europe, and when the stars came out it occurred to me that if only
someone would write a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as well, then I for
one would be off like a shot. Having had this thought I promptly fell
asleep and forgot about it for six years.
I went to Cambridge University. I took a number of baths—and a
degree in English. I worried a lot about girls and what had happened to
my bike. Later I became a writer and worked on a lot of things that were
almost incredibly successful but in fact just failed to see the light of day.
Other writers will know what I mean.
My pet project was to write something that would combine comedy
and science fiction, and it was this obsession that drove me into deep
debt and despair. No one was interested, except finally one man: a BBC
radio producer named Simon Brett who had had the same idea, comedy
and science fiction. Although Simon only produced the first episode
before leaving the BBC to concentrate on his own writing (he is best
known in the United States for his excellent Charles Paris detective
novels), I owe him an immense debt of gratitude for simply getting the
thing to happen in the first place. He was succeeded by the legendary
