SF and the 20th Century, Part 1: Favorite Stories
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Novel; 1979; Douglas Adams) |
If there ever was a cult classic, this hilarious five-book trilogy is it. This story about the destruction of Earth and the happy-go-lucky days that follow focuses on a poor English chap named Arthur Dent and his out-of-work actor friend Ford Prefect, who has simply been posing as an out-of-work actor to hide the fact that he is really at alien from the planet Betelgeuse. As wacky as he wants to be, Adams unleashes his irreverent sense of humor on everything from war to religion to love in this satirical romp through the universe in which we live. With its sequels: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe, and Everything; So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish; and Mostly Harmless; The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a study in the absurd that explains why the answer to the question, What is the meaning of life? is, in fact, 42, and reveals God's final message to his creation: "We apologize for the inconvenience."
| Fahrenheit 451 (Novel; 1953; Ray Bradbury) |
A recurring fear throughout history has been that knowledge could undermine the authority of a government that wishes to protect its stranglehold on society. It was from such fear that sprung one of the darkest moments in mankind's quest for knowledge—the burning of Alexandria's library by the emperor Theodosius in 391 A.D. While such a tragedy might seem impossible in the modern world, Ray Bradbury's masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 (the temperature at which books burn) proffers that it is not and carries us to a world where the job of firefighters isn't to put out blazes but rather to start them—destroying books to prevent the spread of knowledge and protect a totalitarian regime. But when Guy Montag realizes that books are more than just paper—that they contain real flesh and blood ideas—the power of the story's warning shrills through. Without
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