The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG, for short) is a classic science fiction series, by Douglas Adams. The plot goes something like this:
Precis
The world is destroyed by Vogons to make way for a bypass
- The earth is demolished by the Vogons, in order to make room for a new hyperspace bypass.
The Vogons represent mindless, repressive, unstoppable bureaucracy: …billions of years ago when the Vogons had first crawled out of the sluggish primeval seas of Vogsphere, and had lain panting and heaving on the planet’s virgin shores… it was as if the forces of evolution ad simply given up on them there and then… They never evolved again; they should never have survived. The fact that they did is some kind of tribute to the thick-willed slug-brained stubbornness of these creatures…Thus the planet Vogsphere whiled away the unhappy millennia until the Vogons suddenly discovered the principles of interstellar travel. Within a few short Vog years every last Vogon had migrated to the Megabrantis cluster, the political hub of the Galaxy and now formed the immensely powerful backbone of the Galactic Civil Service. The Vogons are uniquely suited to work in the civil service, due to their lack of personality and mindless orneriness.
- Arthur Dent escapes by hitchhiking on a Vogon ship together with Ford Prefect, a friend of his who turns out to be an alien.
- In the course of his travels, Arthur discovers that in addition to the innocuous reason for the earth’s destruction (it happened to be in the way), there is also a sinister reason for this apparent accident:
The Question, the mice and the psychiatrists
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- Many millions of years ago, the mice (who are really hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings) built the greatest computer in the universe to find the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.
- After seven-and-a-half million years, the computer calculated that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, was 42.
- The mice realise that they asked for the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, but they do not know the question. That means, they do not know what single question summarises the quandary of Life, the Universe and Everything.
- Subsequently the mice now have the answer (42), but not the question.
- In order to find The Question, the mice commission the creation of the earth. The world and its inhabitants comprise a massive organic supercomputer. World history is a computer program designed to find The Question:
| Your planet and people have formed the matrix of an organic computer running a ten-million-year research programme… |
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- However, if the quandary of Life, the Universe and Everything is finally solved, this will put all psychiatrists out of business. Therefore a consortium of wealthy psychiatrists bribe the Vogons to destroy the earth:
| …it was in fact Halfrunt (a psychiatrist) who was employing the Vogon. He was paying him an awful lot of money to do some very dirty work. As one of the Galaxy’s most prominent and successful psychiatrists, he and a consortium of his colleagues were quite prepared to spend an awful lot of money when it seemed that the entire future of psychiatry might be at stake. |
It seems that two things may foil the Vogon’s plans to demolish the world and to eliminate The Question; Arthur Dent and the dolphins…