Book Review: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

-- Douglas Adams

This review may be very redundant, considering that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Douglas Adams are almost a cult, well before I learnt alphabets. But then, there are late starters. And, I believe, starting late is never a sin.

While reading The God Delusion, I came across this witty and intriguing quote by Douglas Adams "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too ?" And, I naturally picked this book during my next visit to the Landmark.

The story is set at an astronomical scale, where earth is just an experimental planet that came out of a factory that manufactures customized planets to order. Earth is made by some supercomputer to find/verify answer to the great question on "The Life, Universe and Everything". When the experiment is just about to get over, earth gets demolished to make way for a hyper-spatial express route through our star system. One human escapes from the Earth, just before its destruction, by hitchhiking a spaceship along with an alien who lives on earth for sometime. The human, along with the alien, travels through the space and gets thrown out of the spaceship, as the captain doesn't like hitchhikers. Another spaceship rescues them while the ship is in improbability drive. They, along with the residents of this new spaceship, go on exploring another planet that manufactures customized planets to order. This new ship escapes an attack, again through improbability drive.

The story sounds like, it meets an abrupt end here. Probably, because, it is part-1 of 5 books. I am not a lover of science fiction. But, it sure did arouse enough interest in me to check out the remaining stuff too.