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:
- Original radio series 1 (Primary Phase) & 2 (Secondary Phase): on CD (#1) & on CD (#2).
- 1981 TV adaptation: on DVD, on VHS.
- Original radio series 1 & 2, plus later radio series 3 & 4 & 5: on CDs.
You've heard the radio show, read the book, watched the TV adaptation, seen the stage play, bootlegged the record, been to the convention, bought the towel — now interact with the computer program!
This version of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide text was derived from one that was circulating the Computer Science Departments of British universities in the early 1980s, which was transcribed from the BBC Radio series 1 & 2. Some spelling has been changed to match later transcripts, some text has been retranscribed, and a name change made for legal reasons.
:
Play the BBC's online interactive fiction game.
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to
attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they
primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx
,
or
, or
,
or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme.
The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian
, which is ordinary water served at slightly
above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan
which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between
all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were
all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with
any other worlds.
What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.
In any case, it is generally reckoned (at least by most of our researchers, who
spend a large proportion of their time out of their skulls) that the best drink
in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which is like
having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold
brick.
Zaphod Beeblebrox, who invented this Never drink more than two
Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters unless you are a thirty ton elephant with bronchial
pneumonia
.
Probably the best Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters are mixed on
Ursa Minor Beta, in the pavement cafes of the
Lalamatine district of shops in Light City.
It is unlikely that you will be able to afford one there, however, since even a
simple glass of fruit juice costs the equivalent of over sixty Altairian
dollars.
For the benefit of the impoverished
After trying the above for the first time, you may wish to contact BURP (Betelgeusian Union for the Rehabilitation of Pan-Galactic-Gargle-Blaster-drinkers). If our own experience is anything to go by, you won't.
[Footnote: The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines alcohol as
a colourless, volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars
, and
also notes its intoxicating effect on certain
The Babel fish is small, yellow and
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so
mindbogglingly useful could have evolved through pure chance that some thinkers
have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the
I refuse to prove that I exist,says God,for proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing.
But,says Man,the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED.
Oh dear,says God,I hadn't thought of that one., and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
Oh, that was easy.says Man; and for an encore he goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys,
but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as
the central theme of his
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
A fabulously beautiful planet which is now so worried by the cumulative erosion caused by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave; so that, every time you go to the lavatory there, it's vitally important to get a receipt.
The history of every major Galactic Civilisation tends to pass through three distinct and recognisable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.
For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question How can we
eat?
, the second by the question Why do we eat?
and the third by the
question Where shall we have lunch?
.
The history of warfare is similarly I am going to kill you because you killed my brother
;
Anticipation: I am going to kill you because I killed your brother
; and
Diplomacy: I am going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext
that your brother did it
.
In the beginning, the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad
move.
Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the
Jatravartid people of The Great Green Arkleseizure
.
The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of a time they call The Coming
of the Great White Handkerchief
, are small blue creatures with more than
fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to
have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
The Great Green Arkleseizure Theory is not widely accepted outside
However, as a sort of warning to professional thinking persons, there is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Heavily populated and prosperous planet which forms the main administrative hub of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints Department. Avoid.
Mostly harmless.
The modern elevator is a strange and complex entity. The ancient electric winch and "Maximum Capacity 8 Persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of peanuts does to the entire West Wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is largely because it operates on the unlikely principle of defocus temporal perception, a curious system which allows the lift to be at the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends which people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.
Not unnaturally, many lifts imbued with intelligence and precognition grew terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process, and finally took to sulking in basements.
At this point, a man called Gogrila Minsfriend rediscovered and patented a
device he had seen in a history book, called a staircase
.
It has been calculated that his most recent tax bill paid for the social
security of five thousand redundant Sirius Cybernetics workers, the
hospitalisation of a hundred Sirius Cybernetics executives, and the psychiatric
treatment of over
Planet populated by the descendants of an ancient personal-growth-orientated hippy peace commune. Check carefully before planning a visit — it is rumoured to have destroyed itself in recent nuclear encounter therapy.
The
The number of people to have survived a whole night with
Eccentrica — the friendliest and most expensive woman in the
Galaxy, whose erogenous zones are reputed to start some four miles from her
actual body, and whose embraces are said to be not unlike an earthquake in a
Once described Zaphod Beeblebrox as the best bang since the Big One
.
Golgafrincham is a planet with ancient and mysterious history, rich in legend, red, and occasionally green with the blood of those who sought in times gone by to conquer her; a land of parched and barren landscapes, of sweet and sultry air heady with the scent of the perfumed springs that trickle over its hot and dusty rocks and nourish the dark and musky lichens beneath; a land of fevered brows and intoxicated imaginings, particularly amongst those who taste the lichens; a land also of cool and shaded thoughts amongst those who have learnt to forswear the lichens and find a tree to sit beneath; a land also of steel and blood and heroism; a land of the body and of the spirit.
And in all this ancient and mysterious history, the most mysterious figures of
all are without doubt those of the great Circling Poets of Arium.
The Circling Poets used to live in remote mountain passes, where they would lie
in wait for small bands of unwary travellers, circle round them, and throw rocks
at them.
And when the travellers cried out saying why didn't they go and get on with
writing poems instead of pestering people with all this
The first part of the song tells how these five sage princes, who are of course brave, noble and wise, travel widely in distant lands, fight giant ogres, pursue exotic philosophies, take tea with weird gods, and rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses, until, eventually, they announce that they have achieved enlightenment and that their wanderings are therefore at an end.
The second, and much longer, part tells of all their bickerings about which one of them is going to have to walk back.
It was, of course, a descendant of one of these Circling Poets who invented all the spurious tales of impending doom which enabled the people of Golgafrincham to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The other two thirds stayed behind and lived full rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
The Haggunenons of
Their genetic structure, based on the quadruple sterated octohelix, is so
chronically unstable that, far from passing their basic shape on to their
children, they will quite frequently evolve several times over lunch.
But they do this with such reckless abandon that if, sitting at table, they are
unable to reach a
This, not unnaturally, produces a terrible sense of personal insecurity and a
jealous resentment of all stable filthy rotten
stinking samelings
as they call them.
They justify this by claiming that as they have personal experience of what it
is like to be virtually everybody else they can think of, they are in a very
good position to appreciate all their worst points.
This appreciation
is usually military in nature, and is carried out with
unmitigated savagery from the
Experience has shown that the most effective method of dealing with any Haggunenon you may meet is to run away. Terribly fast.
The Infinite Improbability Drive is a marvellous new method of crossing
interstellar distances in a second, without all that tedious mucking about in
hyperspace.
The principles of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply
hooking the logic circuits of a
Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for that sort of thing, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties. Another thing they couldn't stand was their perpetual failure to produce a machine capable of generating the infinite improbability field necessary to flip a spaceship between the furthest stars, and eventually they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then one day, a student, left behind to sweep up the lab after a particularly
unsuccessful party, found himself reasoning this way:
If such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must logically be a finite
improbability; so all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly
how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator,
give it a fresh cup of really hot tea, and then turn it on
.
He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had created the long
sought after Infinite Improbability Generator out of thin air.
It startled him even more when, just after he had been awarded the Galactic
Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness, he got lynched by a rampaging mob of
respectable physicists, who had finally realised that the one thing they really
couldn't stand was a
There are a number of theories to account for the peculiar habit among the
people of Earth of continually stating and restating the
very very obvious, as in It's a nice day
, or You're very tall
, or
So this is it, we're going to die
.
One is that if human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their mouths
probably seize up.
A second theory is that if human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their
brains start working.
In fact, this second theory is more literally true of the Belcerebon people of Kakrafoon. The Belcerebon people used to cause great resentment and insecurity among neighbouring races by being one of the most enlightened, accomplished, and above all quiet civilisations in the Galaxy.
As a punishment for this behaviour, which was held to be offensively
Another method of temporarily blotting out their minds is to play host to a Disaster Area concert. [See Rock music.]
Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the
former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and on the whole
Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward amongst the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before — and thus was the Empire forged.
Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor — at least no one worth speaking of. And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was the fault of the worlds they settled on — none of them was entirely satisfactory: either the climate wasn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon, or the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink.
And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of specialist
industry:
But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon became the richest
planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty.
And so the system broke down; the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence
settled over a billion hungry worlds, disturbed only by the
In these enlightened days, of course, no one believes a word of it.
Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering. It has been enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe.
This is, of course, impossible.
In it, guests take their places at table and eat sumptuous meals whilst watching the whole of creation explode about them.
This is, of course, impossible.
You can arrive for any sitting you like without prior reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were, when you return to your own time.
This is, of course, impossible.
At the Restaurant you can meet and dine with a fascinating
This is, of course, impossible.
You can visit it as many times as you like and be sure of never meeting yourself, because of the embarrassment this usually causes.
This is, of course, impossible.
All you have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own era, and when you arrive at the End of Time the operation of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for.
This is, of course, impossible.
Which is why the advertising executives of the star system of Bastablon came up
with this slogan: If you've done six impossible things already this morning
why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at
the End of the Universe?
A curious machine which provides spaceship crews with a plastic cup filled with
a liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
The way it functions is very interesting.
When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed
examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the
subject's metabolism and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural
pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain to see what is likely to be
well received.
However, no one knows quite why it does this because it invariably delivers a
cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
The
The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.
Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.
For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the great forest
planet Oglaroon, the entire intelligent
population of which lives
permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree; in which tree they are
born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the
meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control,
fight a few (very minor) wars, and eventually die strapped to the underside of
some of the less accessible outer branches.
In fact the only Oglaroonians who ever leave their tree are those who are thrown out for the heinous crime of wondering whether any of the other trees might be capable of supporting life at all, or indeed be anything other than illusions brought on by eating too many Oglanuts.
Exotic though this behaviour may seem, there is no
A curious journal devoted in roughly equal parts to Galactic politics, rock music and gynaecology.
It can be obtained over the counter from any moderately disreputable Galactic newsagent.
Oh, freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes,
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles;
Or I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon;
See if I don't.
Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the
Universe.
The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria.
During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem
Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in my Armpit One Midsummer
Morning ,
four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging while the president of the
disappointed
by the poem's reception, and
was about to embark on a reading of his
The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, in the destruction of the planet Earth.
Vogon poetry is mild by comparison.
Life is of course terribly unfair.
For instance, the first time the
Infinite Improbability Drive
prototype ship crossed the Galaxy, the massive improbability field it generated
caused two hundred and
The Poghrils, always a pessimistic race, had a little riddle, the asking of
which used to give them the only tiny twinges of pleasure they ever experienced.
One Poghril would say to another Poghril
Why is life like hanging upside down with your head in a bucket of hyena
offal?
.
The second Poghril would reply
I don't know, why is life like hanging upside down with your head in a bucket
of hyena offal?
;
to which the first Poghril would reply
I don't know either; wretched isn't it?
.
(Full title: President of the Imperial Galactic Government).
The term Imperial
is kept even though it is now an anachronism.
The hereditary Emperor is nearly dead and has been for many centuries.
In the last moments of his dying coma he was locked in a statis field which
keeps him in a state of perpetual unchangingness.
All his heirs are now long dead, and this means that without any drastic
political upheaval, power has simply and effectively moved a rung or two down
the ladder, and is now seen to be vested in a body which used to act simply as
advisors to the Emperor — an elected Governmental assembly headed by a
President elected by that assembly.
In fact it vests in no such place.
The President in particular is very much a figurehead — he wields no real
power whatsoever.
He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to
display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage.
For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an
infuriating but fascinating character.
His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.
On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the
Galaxy has ever had — he has already spent two of his ten Presidential
years in prison for fraud.
Very very few people realise that the President and the Government have
virtually no power at all, and of these few people only six know whence ultimate
political power is wielded.
Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate
R (as in e.g. R17) is a velocity measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental wellbeing and not being more than say five minutes late. It is therefore clearly an almost infinitely variable figure according to circumstances, since the first two factors vary not only with speed taken as an absolute, but also with awareness of the third factor. Unless handled with tranquility this equation can result in considerable stress, ulcers and even death.
R17 is not a fixed velocity, but it is clearly far too fast.
Easy to avoid by wrapping your towel round your eyes. (A mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous.)
Often makes a good meal for visiting tourists.
[For other uses of towels, see Towel.]
Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are
generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact
the loudest noise of any kind at all.
Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard
from within large concrete bunkers some
Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme
of
Many worlds have now banned their stage act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band's public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitation treaties.
This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries
of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been
appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in
recognition of both his General and his Special Theories of Disaster Area
Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the
It is, of course, perfectly natural to assume that everyone else is having a far
more exciting time than you are.
Human beings have a saying which describes this phenomenon: The other man's
grass is always greener
.
The Shaltanac race of Broop The other Shaltanac's joopleberry
shrub is always a more mauvey shade of pinky russet
, and so the expression
soon fell into disuse, and the Shaltanacs had little option but to become
terribly happy and contented with their lot, much to the surprise of everyone
else in the Galaxy, who had not realised that the best way not to be unhappy is
not to have a word for it.
Share and Enjoy
Share and Enjoy
is of course the company motto of the hugely successful
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints Division, which
now covers the major land masses of three
The motto stands — or rather stood — in three mile high illuminated letters near the Complaints Department spaceport on Eadrax. Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the offices of many talented young complaints executives — now deceased.
The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language,
to read Go stick your head in a pig
, and are no longer illuminated,
except at times of special celebration.
A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the Revolution comes.
[We would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of Robotics Correspondent — Ed.]
Most races try to ignore the fact that the Universe
is mindbogglingly big [see Oglaroon],
which makes the Total Perspective Vortex the most savage psychic torture a
sentient being can undergo.
For when you are put in the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of
the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little
marker which says You are here
.
The Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some ways affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history — from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a philosopher, a speculative thinker, or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
Have some sense of proportion!
she would say,
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality, as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realised that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value.
For some reason, if a strag (strag: non lost
.
What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth
of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through,
and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase which has passed into Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect?
There's a frood who really knows where his towel is.
(Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with.
Hoopy: really together guy.
Frood: really amazingly together guy.)
Some information to help you live in it.
wow, that's bigtime. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.]
Ursa Minor is almost certainly the most appalling place in the Universe.
Though it is excruciatingly rich, horrifyingly sunny and more full of
wonderfully exciting people than a pomegranate is of pips, it can hardly be
insignificant that when a recent edition of the magazine
Playbeing headlined an article with the
words When you are tired of Ursa Minor you are tired of life
, the suicide
rate in the constellation quadrupled overnight.
Not that there are any nights; at least not on Ursa Minor Beta.
It is a West Zone planet which by an inexplicable and somewhat suspicious freak
of topography consists almost entirely of
No adequate explanation has been forthcoming from the dominant
have a nice diurnal anomaly
.
Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it.
They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy; not actually evil,
but
The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
Vogon ships are in any case not pleasant entities to get lifts in, as they appear to have been not so much designed as congealed. Uglier things have been spotted in the skies, but not by reliable witnesses.
In fact to see anything much uglier than a Vogon ship you would have to go inside it and look at a Vogon. If you are wise, however, this is precisely what you will avoid doing because the average Vogon will not think twice before doing something so pointlessly hideous to you that you will wish you had never been born — or (if you are a clearer-minded thinker) that the Vogon had never been born.
In fact, the average Vogon probably wouldn't even think once. They are simple-minded, thick-willed, slug-brained creatures, and thinking is not really something they are cut out for. Anatomical analysis of the Vogon reveals that its brain was originally a badly deformed, misplaced and dyspeptic liver. The fairest thing you can say about them, then, is that they know what they like, and what they like generally involves hurting people and, wherever possible, getting very angry.
Billions of years ago when the Vogons had first crawled out of the sluggish primeval seas of Vogsphere, and had lain panting and heaving for breath on the planet's virgin shores... when the first rays of the bright young Vogsol sun had shone across them that morning, it was as if the forces of evolution had simply given up on them there and then, had turned aside in disgust and written them off as an ugly and unfortunate mistake. They never evolved again; they should never have survived.
They fact that they did is some kind of tribute to the thick-willed stubborness
of these creatures.
Evolution?
they said to themselves, Who needs it?
, and what nature
refused to do for them they simply did without until such time as they were able
to rectify the grosser anatomical inconveniences with surgery.
Meanwhile, the natural forces on the planet Vogsphere had been working overtime
to make up for their earlier blunder.
They brought forth scintillating jewelled scuttling crabs, which the Vogons ate,
smashing their shells with iron mallets; tall aspiring trees of breathtaking
slenderness and colour which the Vogons cut down and burnt the crab meat with;
elegant
Thus the planet Vogsphere whiled away the unhappy millenia until the Vogons
suddenly discovered the principles of interstellar travel.
Within a few short Vog years every last Vogon had migrated to the Megabrantis
cluster, the politcal hub of the Galaxy and now the immensely powerful backbone
of the Galactic Civil Service.
They have attempted to acquire learning, they have attempted to acquire culture
[see Poetry], style and social grace, but in most respects
the modern Vogon is little different from his primitive forebears.
Every year they import
Veet Voojagig was a quiet young student at the University of Maximegalon, where
he pursued a brilliant academic career studying ancient philology,
transformational ethics, and the
There followed a long period of painstaking research during which he visited all
the major centres of biro loss throughout the Galaxy, and eventually came up
with a rather quaint little theory which quite caught the public imagination at
the time.
Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by
humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids, and
As theories go, this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet Voojagig suddenly claimed to have discovered this planet and to have worked there for some time driving a limousine for a family of cheap green retractables, whereupon he was taken away, locked up, wrote a book and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved for those who are determined to make a fool of themselves in public.
When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for this planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later found to be lying.
The wholly remarkable book you are now reading has long supplanted the great
Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge
and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is
apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more
pedestrian, work in two important respects: first, it is slightly cheaper, and
secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC
printed in large friendly letters
on the cover.
The Guide is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it's always reality that's got it wrong.
If you would like a copy, please write to Megadodo Publications, Megadodo House, Ursa Minor, enclosing $3.95 for the book, plus $597,462,104.07 P&P.
Other Megadodo books of interest include:
| The Celestial |
|
| Life Begins At Five Hundred And Fifty | |
| The Big Bang Theory — A Personal View |
Oolon Colluphid has always been one of the Galaxy's more controversial (not to say prolific) authors. His trilogy of philosophical blockbusters (Where God Went Wrong, Some More Of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who Is This God Person Anyway?) was followed up by an even more revolutionary work entitled Well That About Wraps It Up For God [see Babel fish].
More recently, he has penned a number of works on sexology, of which the most significant are:
| Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Guilt, But Were Too Ashamed To Ask |
| Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Sex, But Have Been Forced To Find Out |
Much has been published on the practical value of towels to the modern
| Bath Sheets In Space | (Arcturan Megabooks) | |
| Heavily Modified Face Flannels | (Campaign for Real Towels) |
Of these, the former is a compendious tome which is far too large to carry but sits magnificently on fashionable coffee tables. Gadd's handbook is an altogether terser work for masochists.
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally
becoming your own father or mother.
There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a
broadminded and
The major problem in quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you for instance how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you jumped forward in time by two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations whilst you are actually travelling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own father or mother.
Most readers get as far as the 'Future
[The
For annoying your wife or getting rid of unwanted lunch guests, the following is indispensable:
| My Life | Marvin, the Paranoid Android |
Other books to avoid:
| My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles |
| Zen And The Art Of Going To The Lavatory |
Information about package holidays on the Frogstar can be obtained in the leaflet Sun, Sand & Suffering On The Most Totally Evil Place In The Galaxy.
And finally, the magazine Playbeing can of course be obtained over the counter from any moderately disreputable Galactic newsagent.