Hitchhiker's Guide Turns 30

XaN-ASMoDi writes "Yesterday saw the 30th anniversary of the very first broadcast of Douglas Adam's seminal work, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", to mark this, Mark Vernon has written an article for the BBC News Magazine on the answer to The Question. 'It's 30 years since Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy made its debut on BBC radio, but its most famous mystery is still waiting to be resolved...'"

Comments

Re:The proper way to celibrate

[hey!]

But it's more than just geek humor.

Adams didn't just poke fun at his characters, he wrote with a real sympathy for them. Well, just look at the man, he was a person who cared about things like the extinction of bizarre species that the vast majority of humanity has never heard of, much less seen for themselves. Empathy. That's the secret of reaching the apex of funniness. When the reader in his imagination steps into a character's shoes, he takes the metaphorical pies in the face personally.

Adams wrote as if the way the universe is mattered.

He also wrote as if the way the universe is happens to be funny.

The fact that the way things are both matters and is funny isn't exactly funny itself. Or rather it's very funny, and it's very something else, which there isn't a perfect word for. To capture that something else, you'd have to write a bunch of books.

Which is just what Douglas Adams did.

My theory...

[itsdapead]

...is that Adams was referring to the pivotal clause #42 of the official rules for the game Mornington Crescent (using the pre-Livingstone concordance, obviously, since Adams was writing in 1978) - which also explains the significance of Fenchurch Street Station in the later books. Regular listeners to BBC Radio 4 (on which the original radio versions of HHGTTG were broadcast) will immediately grasp how following this philosophy allows the follower to confidently navigate the complexities and contradictions of life - but slashdotters from the USA and elsewhere may need to look it up.

Of course, it could be that Adams was merely satirising humanity's strange obsession with seeking simplistic answers without actually understanding the question - but that seems unlikely considering the masses of evidence for a deeper numerological significance.