No, Let's Be Positive: Miscellaneous Redux and Life, the Universe, and Everything · 1:03am Nov 6th, 2020
Blog Number 113: Constructive Not Destructive Edition
As per the saying: If you can't find a happy place, make one.
OK, so let's try this "miscellaneous" blog update once more, and this time mix and match with a smile! 
In this phase, let's talk about a series which does "miscellaneous" things: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
Currently rereading the books of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm on the third one, which doesn't get as much appreciation as the other two, but I still love it. It's essentially a recycled Doctor Who script, this time with manic xenophobes who tried to wipe out the universe before and who are trying to wipe it out again (and whose actions incidentally inspired, via racial memory, the sport of cricket).
A reminder that this is a series which blows up Planet Earth in its first entry for stupid reasons.
What I mean is that H2G2 as a whole is a surprisingly callous sci-fi universe*: like Futurama with its crazily overcomplicated technology and apathetic citizens, but filtered more through British absurdism than American social/political satire and jerkass comedy.
* A lot of people didn't like the fifth entry, Mostly Harmless, for its downer ending. While I can't say the fifth book doesn't have problems, I think that at least does fit into the broader cynicism of the series. It's just more blatant about it.
The famous philosophical inquiry into Life, the Universe, and Everything - for instance - from the first book (which produced everyone's favourite memetic number, "42") was actually done for largely venal reasons: because the philosophical angst was spoiling the civilization's leisure time (of Brockian Ultra-Cricket**) and because it'd be worth a lot of money on a chat show (even the philosophers, sages, luminaries, and other professional thinking persons who object to it on demarcation grounds end up chasing gravy trains). Even the main cast just sort of stumble onto all this backstory with nary any higher interest.
** Hence a potential continuity snarl with the third book's grim explanation for the origin of normal cricket: a leftover cultural memory of a historical bloody war of extermination. The potential snarl is addressed there, though, and as you can imagine, it's largely used as an excuse to show how bad this universe is. In this case, by showing the civilization who plays Brockian Ultra-Cricket to be insensitive jerks no one likes but no one can get rid of anyway.
Needless to say, there's still some jerkass comedy. The characters don't always get along: Zaphod Beeblebrox, the President of the Galaxy, insists on finding new ways of calling Arthur Dent from Earth "monkeyman", for no apparent reason but possibly because of a petty rivalry over a girl at a party. That's how the two of them first met, after all. And everyone hates Marvin, the Paranoid Android, which is fine because he hates them too in his own sullen way.
As he puts it: "Life. Don't talk to me about life."
One thing I quite like about the series (apart from the fact that it is just unashamedly weird, and not just weird but weird in a distinctly sci-fi way: need I say any more than that a simple laser gun is called a "Kill-O-Zap" gun***?) is the philosophical satire.
*** The Kill-O-Zap is described thusly:
The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. “Make it evil,” he’d been told. “Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sorts of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with.”
The first book's philosophical satire is obvious: the two quests regarding first the Answer (42) and then the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, and the Earth's role in that as a dedicated supercomputer, with multiple pseudo-intellectual digressions throughout using extracts from the Guide.
For instance, when the concept of a "bypass" is mentioned, the book veers off and explains the concept using Point A and Point B, and then goes off talking about the irritated opinions of people living at Point C (directly in the middle of it), before continuing with a character wanting to be at Point D (a long way away from the other points) or better yet at Point E (which is the nearest pub to Point D).
Not all the digressions are as random as they look: a digression about telephone numbers ends up factoring into a freak cast union (or, as it turns out, reunion: they've all met before) due to the exact figures used in the Infinite Improbability Drive****, and a seemingly random Earth bystander mentioned as having come to an epiphany in the first chapter ends up taking on a whole new significance in light of what the Earth's actual purpose was.
**** Basically a randomness generator converted into a propulsion device: think Discord if he was a spaceship.
The second book focuses on a conspiracy (one the government is trying to stop) to find the Man Who Rules The Universe, who turns out to be a complete solipsist, and along the way there's a device that destroys your soul just by showing you how infinitely insignificant you are compared to the entire cosmos, an animal in a restaurant genetically engineered to get around animal welfare issues by saying it wants to be eaten, and an ethical dilemma in which - in order to escape a doomed spaceship - one member has to stay behind to operate the escape teleporter (they take all of five seconds to pick the manically depressed robot Marvin).
The third book focuses on a more traditional race-to-stop-the-end-of-the-world plot, but you could read it as a commentary on pointless existential xenophobia and Mutually Assured Destruction, given the way it plays out.
There's also a bit of a dig at the unlikely amount of heroism needed to tackle such a plot: Ford Prefect, for instance, constantly undermines any confidence in their pulling it off by pointing out that each and every one of them is absolutely unremarkable ("dilletantes, eccentrics, layabouts, fartarounds if you like"), and therefore not the kind of character designed to go around saving universes. He even nearly tempts the one character trying to prove him wrong into throwing in the towel.
And the fourth book focuses on life satisfaction: Arthur Dent - the everyman dragged into all this chaos - finding a significant other to settle down with and share his weirdness with (because she turns out to be just as weird in her own ways), followed by locating God's Last Message to His Creation and finding peace with that.
I won't necessarily comment on the quality of any one of these works (a lot of people view the third book and especially the fourth book as not as good as the first two). I've omitted the fifth book largely due to personal preference, though it does have a throughline of hopeless deterministic futility and Arthur Dent trying to find a new spiritual purpose in a universe where he's suddenly all alone again.
There are still some bits I like even about that book: Arthur's semi-religious quest about what he should do with his life involves him having a simultaneously ridiculous and enlightening talk with a man who sits on top of a pole; Ford ends up doing unethical things to a robot's emotion chip to make it ecstatically happy to help him break the law; and everything in a way comes full circle once you realize it's all a Vogon plot to finish the job from the very beginning of the series i.e. to blow up Earth and every iteration of Earth in every reality.
Regardless, the thing about the philosophical angle is that it makes the books more than just a lot of silly sci-fi (which, to be fair, they absolutely are, both very silly and very sci-fi). They're specifically about genuinely deeper aspects of life, and why we're probably ill-equipped to deal with them.
After all, life in the H2G2 galaxy is hedonistic, self-distracting, and sometimes randomly tragic for no apparent reason. The President of the Galaxy is nothing more than a distraction (the bigger, wilder, and more scandalous, the better) from the real source of power, who operates in complete secret and whose existence would probably be far more outrageous and worrying if anyone in the galaxy could actually be motivated enough to care.
Massive technological marvels like the Restaurant at the End of the Universe are wasted on mundane utilities (it's basically just a restaurant with a gimmicky show), or horribly weaponized (the Total Perspective Vortex, the Supernova Bomb), or are so dysfunctional that the company who makes them earns more profit from its complaints department than from its actual products (pick anything made by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation).
Ultimately, this universal dysfunctionality means that the only people remotely interested in Life, the Universe, and Everything for its own sake A) are a bunch of drifters pinballed from Point A to Point B very fast, B) repeatedly stumble across their information rather than actually make much effort to piece it together, C) repeatedly lose the trail because of bad luck (the program gets corrupted by Golgafrinchan cast-offs, the Vogons blow it up five minutes before it can be completed), and D) turn out to be wasting their time. As Slartibartfast says at one point:
Perhaps I'm old and tired... but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.
And yet, at the same time that it's so overwhelmed and defeated by its own attempts at cosmic philosophy, the book is crammed with amusing trivia, some pretty neat sci-fi concepts, and enough amusing digressions that, far from feeling down or cheated by all this, I actually find the book strangely uplifting. Because while the destination turns out to be a dud, the journey is anything but.
There's the obvious: it's funny as all hell. But there's also the relatability of it all: yeah, as the relentless pursuit of physics and science and philosophy point out, it's insanely hard to figure out what's really going on at a higher level. We're all in the same boat as the characters in the book.
There's the cool and creative mish-mash of sci-fi concepts: banal as the Restaurant at the End of the Universe is, doesn't it also sound like a really gee-whiz idea from the giddier end of speculative fiction? Even the darker ones - like the Total Perspective Vortex - capture the imagination.
There's also the regularity of the narrative digressions, to remind us that there is an awful lot of stuff in the universe, and every one feels like stumbling across some (amusing) trivia, just on a bigger and more absurd scale.
There's also the reliable satirical element: faulty and annoying technology will be with us for a while yet, even if we only have mundane "smart" lifts and don't have overly chatty Happy Vertical People Transporters, so when the characters get annoyed with them too, we're right there nodding our heads and going, "Yes, that's life."
Lastly, there's the cast of characters to go with it: Arthur Dent is a bewildered English everyman trying to make some comfortable sense out of an uncomfortable and nonsensical universe; Ford Prefect has been there before, and is simultaneously jaded by his experiences and happy to drown them in good times; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the aforementioned President of the Galaxy who's larger than life and exactly the venal kind of jackass to try to capitalize off the Ultimate Question... when he can be bothered to take an interest beyond himself; Marvin the Paranoid Android, a misguidedly-upgraded robot who, as a result of his Genuine People Personality, would have to take six tons of anti-depressants just to feel merely wretched.*****
***** Admittedly, Trillian is usually left out in the cold by comparison despite being the only other survivor of Earth (she'd already left long before its demolition, and has mostly adjusted to the universe's quirks by the time she shows up in the story proper), either just being one of the crowd or ending up the smartest person present (for instance, she's the one who figures out the plot in the third book), so her role has less resonance in the grand scheme of the books.
Not forgetting the huge roster of characters who either appear briefly or who are mentioned in bizarre throwaway digressions:
- Eddie the annoyingly chipper and nearly entirely useless shipboard computer, who at one point gets totally distracted from all vital functions just trying to figure out how to make tea;
- Slartibartfast, the designer of Norway's fjords who, despite playing an important role in bringing Arthur up to speed, is just a low-level specialist with vaguely good intentions;
- Gag Halfrunt, the secretly scumbag psychiatrist who keeps insisting "Zaphod's just zis guy, you know";
- Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, a bureaucratic jerk more interested in paperwork and easy bribery than in the ethics of killing billions of people;
- Gargravarr, a disembodied grim custodian of the Vortex going through what's effectively a messy divorce between his mind and his body;
- Agrajag, the constantly-reincarnated-and-constantly-killed-off butt of the universe;
- Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, whose response to the malaise of immortality is to go around systematically insulting every living thing he can find;
- the people of Krikkit, who'd be amazingly swell guys and singers to rival the Beatles if it wasn't for their maniacal and bottomless hatred of all other organic life;
- Rob McKenna, a disgruntled trucker who hates rain (so naturally he turns out to be a Rain God who keeps attracting it wherever he goes);
- Wonko the Sane, a (possibly mad) marine biologist who regards the rest of civilization as insane and who readily believes dolphins are far more intelligent than humans;
- and, of course, Deep Thought, the computer who takes seven and a half million years to figure out that the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is, in fact, 42. This despite the fact he already predicted - starting from cogito ergo sum and working up - the existence of rice pudding and income tax in much less time.
It's just so much goodness. Crazy, imaginative, playful, never taking itself too seriously despite how easily its philosophical angle could make it so, hilarious and yet thought-provoking, imagination-stirring, smile-inducing, and never hiding the grimmer or bleaker aspects behind the flash-bang sci-fi fun.
I can only describe all this using Douglas Adams' words himself, from another context (talking about science) but which suits my purposes just as well:
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful. And … the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.
For me, spending time reading H2G2 is, in its own unorthodox way, a mind-bogglingly finite fraction of that time very well spent.
Impossible Numbers, out.
To be fair, it wasn't how to make tea that occupied his every processor cycle. It was why anyone would want it.
But yes, H2G2 is a truly fantastic series, even if Adams's depression kind of leached into the later books. Still equal parts brilliance and hilarity. I actually used it in a college essay. We had to argue that an artificial being in fiction was conscious, and you don't get much more conscious than Marvin.
5392924
That's actually a difference between the books and the radio series. In the radio series, Eddie is trying to work out why anyone would want to drink it (as an unintended result of Arthur asking a rhetorical question). In the books, though, Arthur explains the concept of tea and Eddie subsequently gets roped in by the drinks dispenser, which has decided it will need some help with this one.
Remember, Adams liked to tweak details a lot between different adaptations. I was practically raised on the radio series, so the differences in the books stand out more.
The sad part was that he admitted as much and wanted to continue the series (The Salmon of Doubt might have been converted to a H2G2 series book instead of a Dirk Gently series book), but 2001 had other ideas.
Well, no one said consciousness was a good thing.
I wish I had an anecdote as cool as your college essay argument, but my own experiences with the series were largely mundane. First the two radio phases, then four of the books, then the later radio phases, and then the fifth book. I've never seen the TV show, I've only seen the film a couple of times (and largely ignore it), and there's probably something else I'm forgetting.
Have you read Eoin Colfer's ...And Another Thing? If not, I quite liked it. The extreme bleakness of the fifth Hitchhiker book was, Adams said after he'd written it, a reflection of how he was in a bad emotional place for several years. But he was improving his outlook and mental health, and planned to write a sixth book to not end the series on such a down note.
Then he died. And Colfer was brought in to take what (apparently very little) Adams had left and turn it into a book.
Now, I won't say that Colfer did perfectly with the unenviable task of wrapping up a much-beloved series coming off a downer book with minimal guidance. The humor doesn't have that Ademsian wryness, often feeling rather twee to me, and there's rather more focus on moving the plot forward than I think has any place in a Hitchhiker book. But in terms of re-finding the tonal core of the series, I consider it a rousing success. And that return (and the way Colfer weaves it into the events of book 5, rather than just ignoring the "depressing stuff" like some authors would've) retroactively gave me more appreciation for the later books in the series, too. At the least, they let me read them as part of the series, and not as an unfortunate addendum.
I find the radio series:
To be so wonderful, I never really got into the books. I'm fairly sure I've read them all, but they don't stand out in my mind the way the radio series does...
Mike
5392948
Mm, no, I have to admit I've been leery enough to avoid it. Part of the appeal with stuff like that is feeling a connection with the author, and the purist in me isn't gung-ho about someone else "finishing" a project that isn't theirs, even if it's understandably because the original author has passed away. I'll take an author being confessedly bleak over someone else trying to jolly up their series for them.
Besides, as much as I like bits of Mostly Harmless, I tend to simply cut it out of my mental canon. It's, at best, a curiosity on par with The Salmon of Doubt. Hence I've felt no particular need for closure on that front.
See, this is the sort of thing I'd be leery of. Good or not, seeing the imperfections in someone else's style is like seeing someone put on a friend's clothes and muck up pretending to be them. It just feels uncannily wrong to me, regardless of the quality of their impression (but especially when it's not perfect). It's one reason I tend to dislike remakes when the original is a beloved entry of mine.
I appreciate what you're saying about closure and so on, and I'm trying not to be closed-minded about this, but it's only honest of me to admit I'm not particularly interested, either.
5393087
Understandable: I myself started with the radio series, so I didn't automatically get into the books in the same way I got into the radio version. But over time, I've warmed up to both as remixes of each other and have been happy enough just flitting back and forth as the fancy takes me.
Did you know they continued the first two phases with a tertiary phase, quandary phase, and quintessential phase? Adapted from the last three books in the series? (Although it seems like the last two have been rejigged into two halves of a single large story now). I can't say I'm a huge fan of the last two, but I do like the tertiary phase and the approach they took to adapting it from the third book, and all three phases have some great voice acting, jokes, production value, and little bits of genius here and there.
5393114
Well, no sense spending time on something you don't want to read in the first place! Goodness knows, there's enough books in this world without wasting time on ones you already can tell aren't the kind of thing you're looking for. ...And Another Thing happened to be what I wanted/needed for that series, but it's definitely not Adams; I can totally understand why that'd be a deal-breaker.
5393161
5392934
The rumour going around at the time was that SoD was supposed to be a crossover between Dirk Gently and HHGttG. Likely apocryphal (or at least wildly inaccurate), but the idea certainly has its appeal.
5393163
Over half of my books are still in storage, because I simply do not have sufficient room in my house for them.