Escaping Earth just before it is demolished to make way for a new galactic highway, reluctant galactic traveler Arthur Dent embarks on a series of off-beat and occasionally extraterrestrial journeys, accompanied by a variety of unusual companions. Reissue. 80,000 first printing. (A Walt Disney Pictures film, releasing June 2005, starring Martin Freeman, Mos Def, John Malkovich, Zooey Deschanel, & Sam Rockwell) (Science Fiction & Fantasy).
Earthman Arthur Dent is rescued by his friend, Ford Prefect—an alien researcher for the titular Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an enormous work providing information about every planet in the universe—from the Earth just before it is destroyed by the alien Vogons. After being tossed out of the Vogon ship that they hitched a ride on, Arthur and Ford are rescued by the Heart of Gold, a spaceship driven by Zaphod Beeblebrox, Ford's semi-cousin and the President of the Galaxy. The ship's crew—Arthur, Ford, Zaphod, a depressed robot named Marvin, and a human woman named Trillian—embark on a journey to find the legendary planet known as Magrathea, known for selling luxury planets.
On Magrathea, the five are taken into the planet's centre by a man named Slartibartfast. There, they learn that in the distant past a race of "hyperintelligent, pan-dimensional beings" created a supercomputer named Deep Thought to determine the answer to the "Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything", which Deep Thought determined to be the number 42. Deep Thought tells its creators that the answer makes no sense to them because they didn't know what the "Ultimate Question" had been in the first place, and offers to design an even greater computer to determine what the Ultimate Question was. This computer is revealed to have been the planet Earth, which was constructed by the Magratheans, and was five minutes away from finishing its task and yielding the Ultimate Question when the Vogons destroyed it. Trillian's mice, actually part of the group of hyper-intelligent superbeings, reject the idea of building a second Earth to redo the process, and offer to buy Arthur's brain in the hope that it contains the question, leading to a fight when he declines. Zaphod saves Arthur from having his brain removed, the fivesome escape Magrathea, and the group decides to go to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, screenwriter, essayist, humorist, satirist and dramatist. Adams was author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which originated in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime and generated a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and in 2005 a feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.Adams also wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983), The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990), Last Chance to See (1990). He wrote two stories for the television series Doctor Who, co-wrote City of Death, and served as script editor for its seventeenth season in 1979. He co-wrote the Monty Python sketch “Patient Abuse” which appeared in the final episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. A posthumous collection of his selected works, including the first publication of his final, unfinished, novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.
Adams was an advocate for environmentalism and conservation, a lover of fast cars,[2] technological innovation and the Apple Macintosh, and a self-proclaimed "radical atheist".
