Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Review

                                    

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Genres: Science Fiction, Humor, Adventure

        This story begins on Earth a few minutes before the Earth is to be destroyed.  No, this story is not about the people who save it.  In fact, the Earth isn't saved.  It's destroyed by Vogons, a terrible race of aliens Even though the Earth has been destroyed, there is one survivor: Arthur Dent.  Saved from the destruction of Earth by his friend Ford Prefect, only to be taken captive by the Vogons.  On the other end of the story, Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the galaxy, steals the most technologically advanced and perhaps the most impossible ship ever.  It also runs on improbability.  So, Zaphod runs off in this ship with a depressed robot and his human girlfriend who had escaped the Earth months ago.  Along their way to find the most impossible planet in the universe, Zaphod and his crew pick up Arthur and Ford, and together they race against police and Vogons as they discover things about mice, dolphins, themselves, and places they have called home.  Not to mention they discover the answer to life, the universe, and everything.  No spoilers.      

I picked up this book mostly because it was a science fiction classic and I felt the need to read it so I would be properly versed in the area of scifi novels.  When I first started reading it, I wasn't sure how I felt about the style of writing.  It was very technical in my opinion, and so different from the things I was used to reading.  I quickly warmed up to it though, when I realized how much it helped connect different areas of the story.  Throughout the book I was intrigued with the story.  I never got tired of the plot but there were a few spots where it got kind of slow and took more effort to read through.  I was almost angry because of how often they didn't lose when they should have only because of some completely improbable thing, but Adams played it off in a way that made it acceptable.  Overall, I enjoyed this book enough to know that I will read the next one, and will probably read it again one day.

This book was mostly clean.  I remember about three times when someone cursed.  There was also some talk of evolution and something that disproved God, but the reasoning behind the disproving of God was really far out.  It was actually very silly.

author/Amazon