A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

What It Is

A comic science fiction novel, published by Pan Books on 12 October 1979 and adapted by Douglas Adams from the first four episodes of his BBC Radio 4 series, broadcast the year before. It is short. About 180 pages, two or three hours.

It does not behave like a novel, because it was not conceived as one. The shape is radio: sketches, digressions, sudden lurches of scale, and the Guide itself interrupting to deliver an encyclopedia entry on something nobody asked about. Adams was famously, cheerfully honest about missing deadlines. He said he loved the whooshing noise they made as they went by.

The satire is pointed at bureaucracy, at English politeness, at the machinery of officialdom, and at science fiction's own habit of self-importance.

Why It Matters

Comic science fiction before Adams was mostly parody. He used the genre for something harder: jokes about meaninglessness that are, underneath the silliness, entirely sincere. The universe of this book is vast, indifferent and administratively incompetent, and the response it proposes to that condition is unfailingly, absurdly English.

It also put words into English. Phrases from it are still quoted daily by people who have never opened it. And the Guide itself, a portable electronic reference that updates itself and is confidently wrong, described the device in your pocket two decades before anyone built it. Adams saw where that was going: in 1999 he founded h2g2, a collaborative online encyclopedia, before Wikipedia existed.

Neil Gaiman wrote the companion volume, Don't Panic, in 1988, and the line of English comic fantasy that runs through Terry Pratchett would look different without this book.

The jokes are engineered. Read a paragraph twice and you can see the load-bearing clause.

Before You Read

The easiest book on this list. An evening.

Read it fast. The comedy is cumulative and the timing depends on momentum, so this is one of the rare books that is better gulped than sipped. The digressions are not interruptions; they are where the best material lives.

Do not read the five books back to back. The sequence gets darker and less funny as it goes, and Adams was increasingly reluctant and unhappy writing the later ones. Readers who work through the omnibus in a fortnight often come out sour on a book they loved on page one. Leave a year between them.

No preparation needed. A little familiarity with British radio comedy helps, and you will pick it up as you go.

Which Edition to Read

• The standalone paperback of the first novel, Pan Macmillan in Britain, Del Rey in America — recommended. The right way to meet this book: on its own, thin, in a coat pocket, over one evening. The complete text, endlessly reprinted, cheap. The cost: the cover design changes every few years and some of them are ugly. That is the only complaint anyone has. View on Amazon →
• The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Del Rey omnibus, 1997. All five novels plus the short story Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, in one volume, at roughly the price of two paperbacks. The best value, and a genuine trap: the cost is that it invites exactly the binge that ruins the sequence.
• The Folio Society editions, illustrated by Jonathan Burton. Seventy illustrations across the five volumes, cloth-bound and slipcased, and the limited edition of 750 signed sets published on Towel Day 2023 sold out. The finest-made version by a distance. The cost: a collector's object, not a first-reading copy, and you will not take it to the beach.

Buy the single paperback. Buy the omnibus only if you already know you want the rest, and then ration it.

On audio: the 1978 radio series is not an adaptation of the book; the book is an adaptation of it, and the two differ. Stephen Fry's unabridged recording is the best audiobook of the novel.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the Guide's own entries slowly and everything else at speed. Adams's most concentrated writing is in those little digressive definitions, and they reward a second pass in a way the narrative does not need.

Listen to the radio series afterwards. It is a different thing, and in places a better one, and hearing what the BBC did with sound in 1978 explains half of the novel's construction.

Do not read it as science fiction and do not ask whether the physics holds. It does not, and it is not trying to.

The other common mistake is to file it as a book for teenagers because it is funny and short. It is a book about cosmic indifference written by a man who meant it. Read it again at forty and the jokes are still working, which is more than can be said for most of what made you laugh at seventeen.