“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” turns 42 | Hacker News Reader

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” turns 42

economist.com

315 pointspama72 comments

And for those of you who would like to hear the original Radio Series again, it's being repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra right now: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000g55m

I wonder if they will have the original Pink Floyd music when they land on Magrathea, or whether it will be edited out, as it was in the BBC recordings due to rights issues.

Thanks for sharing!

I think I still have casette tapes of the original run.

Heh, when it was first broadcast here, I taped it off the radio, but I think my tapes are long gone.

I still have the C90s somewhere

You can download the episodes with https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer

I have them too, both series.

The game is also on the bbc, for anyone feeling nostalgic for the BBC Micro game. I spent many frustrated hours dying in that game as a child.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN...

Archive.org also has a less-fancy version of it: https://archive.org/details/HitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxyMacin...

Just listened to Fit the Third: Marvin hums up some Floyd. Maybe just this once sanity ruled.

This is also an excellent version, read by Stephen Moore: https://soundcloud.com/peter-welch-623266680/sets/the-hitchh...

(Albeit the audiobook, not the radio play)

I really enjoyed it, and couldn't tell you if I preferred it to the one read by Douglas Adams himself.

I recently reread Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan" and was really surprised to notice to what degree Adams drew inspiration from that book. He did acknowledge it as an influence [1], but some ideas my naive self had attributed to Adams are closer to well-done rearrangements/retellings of elements from Sirens of Titan (which certainly wasn't written in a vacuum either) in a different comedic voice. Both works are fantastic, though.

[1] http://www.darkermatter.com/issue1/douglas_adams.php

Loved those interviews. Thank you.

I read Sirens for the first time just recently, and I'm now frustrated with myself for not spotting the similarities... but then it's been nearly two decades since I last read H2G2...

I had the same feeling when listening to the audio version of Robert Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles. (Recommended!)

“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.”

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

While I’ve never heard this before, I did have a rather unfortunate chemically-induced experience that viscerally explored this idea in more detail.. :-)

If you've never heard this before, you NEED to read it.

> The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

We need those telephone sanitizers now.

In modern culture, they'd be touchscreen kiosk sanitizers.

It's quite fitting that we have Zaphod Beeblebrox clones in both Nr 10 and the White House.

I always thought that the fragment about presidency being there to distract people from real power was ridiculously spot on.

Douglas Adams had a great example at home with the Royal Family.

It really hit him when I went to America and was exposed to the media. Television there is in this perpetual state of total war, it's as if the news programs have to compete with the adverts for time and attention. On a slow news day you'd wake up there would be some loud fat man screaming about how the President had cornflakes for breakfast instead of Sugar Puffs. Thankfully they'd break after 30 seconds for another 20 minutes of loud and colourful commercials for various opiates with funky names (but the same active ingredient).

I agree. Do we know the actual rulers? I'm thinking a few Russians who gave Trump loans and owners of American steel companies, but I'm not sure who the specific billionaires are.

I do hope the true ruler of things turns out to be an old bloke in a hut with no interest in anything beyond a vague affection for his (possibly imaginary) cat.

Otherwise we’re really in trouble.

> an old bloke in a hut

Wasn't he OUTSIDE the hut?

Perhaps you're thinking of Wonko the Sane, who lived Outside of the Asylum.

Yes indeed. Thanks.

Jose Mujica almost fits the decription. BTW I don't think he was very good overall.

At least Zaphod was charming at times.

"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president, should on no account be allowed to do the job."

I think the book was written to teach us the importance/uses of towels and bags.

We just take it for granted.

This.

I was going to reply to the anti-christian attitudes but decided I like your surmise better.

As anecdote, my girlfriend teaches philosophy and has used fragments of this book more than once. I personally find it to be a modern Alice in Wonderland, don't you think?

> Douglas Adams’s masterwork is blithely comic in tone but deeply serious in purpose.

I thought it was just a funny book. What is its "deeply serious purpose"?

Perhaps to call the Christian worldview into question using sarcasm and sardonic humor.

Certainly that was part of it, anyway. Adams was a self-described "radical atheist" before that was a popular stance, and he and Richard Dawkins were mutual fans of each others' works and became personal friends.

What particular bits?

Any of the very clealy labelled bits about religion.

The contemporary resurgence of populism in politics feels a lot like the description of democracy in the "Wrong lizard won"-passage. You can read it here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162557-it-comes-from-a-very...

I have questions about populism.

Hearing about Roman populism makes me think it's better than Nobel rule. At least occasionally the masses get a policy that benefits them. For instance the Trump tax cuts and Obamacare took money from the 10% and gave it to the masses. (I'm a bitter 10%er that thinks it's time for the 10% to unite)

So what's wrong with populism? The class warfare?

Is the actual issue demagogry like Trump and Bernie that have fake policy that wins the emotional and uneducated Masses?

Populist politicians claim that they represent "The People." The problem, as Umberto Eco pointed out, is that The People is a fiction. We have only The Public, which is a collection of individuals with diverse interests and beliefs. We aggregate The Public's will though democracy as it is impossible for a single individual or political group to speak for everyone. But populists claim that democratic institutions do not represent The People, because they are corrupt and controlled by The Elite. Only the populists truly speak for The People and anyone opposed to them is therefore automatically also an enemy of The People. Enemies are very useful to the populist. (Sanders has spent his career railing against the 1% on behalf of the 99% and Trump, of course, has literally called the press "the enemy of the people.") In short, it's a corrosive ideology that works by undermining faith in democracy and dividing the public into friend and foe.

What if democratic institutions really have been captured by an elite? Regulatory capture comes to mind as a problem that objectively exists.

The kind of populism that promises easy answers by oversimplifying the issues is a problem.

At the same time, I often feel that there is a deep flaw in modern "moderate/centrist" thinking in not trying hard enough to do the things that would actually be popular, instead coming up with overly technocratic and ultimately flawed arguments for maintaining a status quo that provides bad results for a large fraction of the population.

As a politician, how would you call for getting out of that without being branded as the bad kind of populist?

I wanted to verify this description by reading the definition in Wikipedia, but then I realised that the editor elites control Wikipedia and hide the truth from the people. So I'm none the wiser.

Actually, thank you for that description. It's the best summary I've ever read and cleared up a lot of my confusion about the term.

For me, off the top of my head:

- Explorations of meaning

- Delving into the incredibly strange nature of reality

- Musings on the nature of politics and religion and it's relationship to human nature and evolution

Some of the shouting I quite like.

He also used the book to explore his hatred of poetry

My first exposure to "Hitchhiker's" was probably the t.v. series. I loved the almost monochrome green graphics and text of the sections covering the Guide's topics, such as [1], which compared Encyclopedia Galactica's entries to the guide's. The narration of Kurzgesagt science videos reminds me fondly of the hg2g [3].

I also loved the bits about people who'll be "the first against the wall when the revolution comes".[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvtPglw5ftk [2] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Sirius_Cybernetics_Corpo... [3] https://www.youtube.com/user/Kurzgesagt/

"The sound of several thousand people saying "whoop" at once":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzivgKuhNl4

Incredible how many people and things were inspired by H2G2, including Radiohead: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ev4ga7/thom-yorke-confirm...

Naming a song Paranoid Android (my personal all-time favourite) was pretty obvious, though it is not about Marvin. I do dispute his opening statement - Ok Computer was their best album and one of very few albums that you can just leave on repeat without skipping tracks.

https://archive.md/m1Pnl

TV Series available on Amazon Prime at https://smile.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07CGTY13F

Radio series CD box set available in my car's changer, currently on disc three of the Tertiary Phase.

man if only he knew what digital watches turned into

"The Book" surely?

I would love to know what Douglas would think of the modern smartphone.

I’ve also always wanted to laser engrave “DON’T PANIC” in large friendly letters on the back of my phone

The BBC are re-releasing the episodes as from tonight:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000g55m/episodes/guide

Back in 2004 I had the H2G2 website (h2g2.com) bookmarked on my Nokia 3100 and would read it whenever I was waiting for the bus (this was before Google Reader). A cheeky, entertaining precursor to Wikipedia.

Both the first book and the start of the second series are among the very funniest things I have ever encountered. They have a density of invention that is truly joyous to follow.

Well, that is going to explain so much about 2020. It’s like the planets aligning. I fully expect Vulcans to make contact with humanity this year. Or Klingons.

As long as it isn't Vogons

Obligatory mention for every fan of Douglas Adams: "Parrots, the Universe, and everything". [0]

Watch the whole thing. You will thank me later.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc

Galaxy S42

I love these books, but why post a pece that is paywalled?

It isn't for me, in Continental Europe. Where are you?

UK reader here. “Continue reading this article

Same here in Norway.

Paywalled in US too. The Economist have a new paywall.

Opens fine from Italy with Javascript disabled, maybe they failed at making it foolproof:

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

https://beta.trimread.com/articles/7070

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