Will I love The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

I first encountered Douglas Adams when I caught The Hitchhiker’s Guide on late-night radio, and I was hooked. The novel is slightly different, with Adams giving a bit more consideration to plot and logic, but it has the same wonderful, rapid-fire dialogue style, which has seldom been replicated.

I absolutely love Arthur Dent’s ludicrous accidental odyssey, meeting characters like Zaphod Beeblebrox and the wonderfully named Slartibartfast. The Guide sits in the background, popping up to provide superbly funny explanations of the history of the universe, humanity’s obsession with money, and a lot more.

For me, the thing that sets this… show more.

I love this book because it combines two of my favorite literary subjects: science fiction and humor. Not only is it funny, but it's absurd at times, and absurdity is one of my favorite types of humor. But never fear; the silliness doesn't take over; there's an important story told in this book, and the comedy is just the icing on this sci-fi cake.

When mild-mannered Arthur Dent is rescued from Earth as it's about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, both he and his rescuer, Ford Prefect, a traveling researcher for the titular Guide, embark… show more.

I had read Hitchikers Guide over 30 years ago and revisited it after watching the TV version. It was as good as I remembered, but it was a little verbose in its viewpoint. There were tangents that wavered on a bit, but overall, it was still as wonderous as I thought it was in the past.

Let us move toward the light, shall we, into the realm of satire and farce—and set aside for a moment the profoundly significant intentions of the author. At least long enough to say the book was fun to read. Witty, sophomoric, frivolous, irreverent, ridiculous. Meanwhile, taking a jab at pride, greed, sloth, ignorance, carelessness, and all the other deadly sins, as demonstrated by the cruel, blind, destructive arrogance of bureaucracy.

A political/philosophical manifesto, if you will, penned by a Literature MFA who wrote gags for the Monty Python troupe and scripts for the BBC television show Doctor Who. (Cover… show more.

No book has had a bigger influence on me as a person or a writer than this one. I suppose a lot of hoopy froods could say the same. It’s an adventure on a galactic scale, and yet, at its core, it’s just about a guy who wants to go home and have a cup of tea.

It’s a brilliantly funny satire and full of jokes and moments I’ll never forget. All four books in the series are amazing, and I’ve re-read them countless times. The fifth and final book is a downer worth skipping. 

This one-of-a-kind comedy turned the sci-fi genre on its head. With outrageous ideas pitched in a fast-paced and verbose style, Douglas stole the hearts of many young readers.

I especially loved the long-winded explanations of ridiculous but compelling things, often written in Thurberesque run-on sentences that lead the reader on a wild goose chase of logic before coming together in tight little conclusions.

This is easily one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, but this novel (and the series as a whole, although I have mixed feelings about the later books) contains some of the most imaginative places, species, inventions, and characters I’ve ever seen.

Even some of the one-off side characters that are little more than a passing joke are obnoxiously original and could star in their own stories as easily as Arthur Dent does in this one. I’m hard-pressed to think of a more creative, absurd, and wide-reaching book than Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Oh, what’s not to love? Space travel, poetry writing aliens, a criminal galactic president, the end of the world, a depressed robot … this book has it all, and I reread it (and the other 4 volumes in the trilogy, yes, trilogy) every year or so.

This is a fun escape, I discovered this volume as a kid, fell in love with it, and it’s my favorite book still to this day all these centuries later.

No list of funny sci-fi books would be complete without this book, the grandfather of humorous SF. I like underdogs, and as I mentioned above, Arthur Dent is the quintessential underdog. In fact, he’s almost too browbeaten to love, but he manages to come through in the end.

But the best parts of Adams’s famous book (and series) are the insanely ridiculous planets and circumstances Dent encounters. When I’m looking for something really silly, I reread this book.

Technically, this book is science fiction instead of fantasy–aliens, spaceships, planet-hopping, check. But Adams isn’t particularly interested in the science or the predictive aspects as he is in finding a backdrop for his hilarious satire. His phrasing is so deft, his jokes so devastating that people are quoting him decades later. They’re still some of the funniest books ever written.

But there’s a bitter wounded heart under it all that comes out in a wistful strain of melancholy, which makes it all ring true. It’s funny because it has something deep and urgent to say about humans and our nature.… show more.