by Douglas Adams
216 pages
Ballantine Books
Recommended for ages 10 and up
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this...is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
"This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
"And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches."
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Arthur Dent was having a bad day. A very bad day. One of those terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days that only comes along once in a million years, when the town counsel decides to demolish your house and a pesky Vogon Constructor Fleet appears out of nowhere to destroy your planet. Thankfully, Arthur was friends with Ford Prefect, a roving reporter for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, even though he'd been stuck on Earth for fifteen years, still knew how to hitch a ride into space when he needed one.
Less than five minutes before the Earth was demolished to make room for an interstellar bypass, Ford and Arthur were smuggled onto a Vogon Constructor ship, only to be ignominiously hurled into space a short while later when their presence was discovered by the Vogon ship's captain. Floating in space, each could expect to survive for thirty-seconds on a lungful of air. Twenty-nine seconds after leaving the airlock, they were picked up by the Infinite Improbability Drive of the starship Heart of Gold.
Once onboard, they met Trillian, the only other surviving earthling in the universe, and two-headed galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox. Together, Zaphod, Trillian, Ford, and Arthur travel to a vanished planet, learn the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, and meet a variety of interesting characters -- from the chronically-depressed robot Marvin to the infamous Buggblatter Beast of Traal ("a mind-bogglingly stupid animal that assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you") -- all before tea-time. At the same time, Arthur receives an introduction to that invaluable space-traveler's encyclopedia, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a small, black electronic book with the words "Don't Panic" emblazoned on its cover.
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