{"product_id":"the-ultimate-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-isbn-9780345453747","title":"The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn one complete volume, here are the five classic novels from   Douglas Adams’s beloved Hitchhiker series.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNow celebrating the pivotal 42nd anniversary of \u003ci\u003eThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, \u003c\/i\u003esoon to be a Hulu original series!\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy \u003c\/i\u003e(\u003cb\u003eNominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s \u003ci\u003eThe Great American Read\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eSeconds   before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford   Prefect, a researcher for the revised \u003ci\u003eGuide\u003c\/i\u003e. Together they stick out their thumbs   to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Restaurant at   the End of the Universe\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eThe moment before annihilation at the hands of warmongers is a curious   time to crave tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and   his comrades as they hurtle across the galaxy in a desperate search for a place to   eat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLife, the Universe and Everything\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eThe unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit   are sick of looking at the night sky– so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that   is. Now only five individuals can avert Armageddon: mild-mannered Arthur Dent and   his stalwart crew.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eSo Long, and Thanks for All the Fish\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eBack on Earth, Arthur Dent   is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out   imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription thrusts him back to reality. So to speak.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eMostly Harmless\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eJust when Arthur Dent makes   the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life, all hell breaks loose. Can he save   the Earth from total obliteration? Can he save the \u003ci\u003eGuide\u003c\/i\u003e from a hostile alien takeover?   Can he save his daughter from herself?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eIncludes the bonus story “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe”\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e“With droll wit, a keen eye for detail and heavy doses of insight . . . Adams makes us laugh until we cry.”—\u003ci\u003eSan Diego Union-Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e“Lively, sharply satirical, brilliantly written . . . ranks with the best set pieces in Mark Twain.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Lively, sharply satirical, brilliantly written . . . ranks with the best set pieces in Mark Twain.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“With droll whit, a keen eye for detail and heavy doses of insight . . . Adams makes us laugh until we cry.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSan Diego Union\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eDouglas Adams\u003c\/b\u003e was born in 1952 and created all the various and contradictory manifestations of \u003ci\u003eThe Hitchhiker’s\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eGuide to the Galaxy\u003c\/i\u003e: radio, novels, TV, computer games, stage adaptations, comic book, and bath towel. He was born in Cambridge and lived with his wife and daughter in Islington, London, before moving to Santa Barbara, California, where he died suddenly in 2001.\u003cb\u003eIntroduction: A Guide to the Guide\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome unhelpful remarks from the author\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe history of \u003ci\u003eThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy\u003c\/i\u003e is now so complicated that every time I tell it I contradict myself, and whenever I do get it right I’m misquoted. So the publication of this omnibus edition seemed like a good opportunity to set the record straight—or at least firmly crooked. Anything that is put down wrong here is, as far as I’m concerned, wrong for good.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe idea for the title first cropped up while I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1971. Not particularly drunk, just the sort of drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff Gössers after not having eaten for two days straight, on account of being a penniless hitchhiker. We are talking of a mild inability to stand up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was traveling with a copy of the \u003ci\u003eHitch Hiker’s Guide to Europe\u003c\/i\u003e by Ken Walsh, a very battered copy that I had borrowed from someone. In fact, since this was 1971 and I still have the book, it must count as stolen by now. I didn’t have a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day (as it then was) because I wasn’t in that financial league. Night was beginning to fall on my field as it spun lazily underneath me. I was wondering where I could go that was cheaper than Innsbruck, revolved less and didn’t do the sort of things to me that Innsbruck had done to me that afternoon. What had happened was this. I had been walking through the town trying to find a particular address, and being thoroughly lost I stopped to ask for directions from a man in the street. I knew this mightn’t be easy because I don’t speak German, but I was still surprised to discover just how much difficulty I was having communicating with this particular man. Gradually the truth dawned on me as we struggled in vain to understand each other that of all the people in Innsbruck I could have stopped to ask, the one I had picked did not speak English, did not speak French and was also deaf and dumb. With a series of sincerely apologetic hand movements, I disentangled myself, and a few minutes later, on another street, I stopped and asked another man who also turned out to be deaf and dumb, which was when I bought the beers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI ventured back onto the street. I tried again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen the third man I spoke to turned out to be deaf and dumb and also blind I began to feel a terrible weight settling on my shoulders; wherever I looked the trees and buildings took on dark and menacing aspects. I pulled my coat tightly around me and hurried lurching down the street, whipped by a sudden gusting wind. I bumped into someone and stammered an apology, but he was deaf and dumb and unable to understand me. The sky loured. The pavement seemed to tip and spin. If I hadn’t happened then to duck down a side street and pass a hotel where a convention for the deaf was being held, there is every chance that my mind would have cracked completely and I would have spent the rest of my life writing the sort of books for which Kafka became famous and dribbling.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs it is I went to lie in a field, along with my \u003ci\u003eHitch Hiker’s Guide to Europe\u003c\/i\u003e, and when the stars came out it occurred to me that if only someone would write a \u003ci\u003eHitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy\u003c\/i\u003e as well, then I for one would be off like a shot. Having had this thought I promptly fell asleep and forgot about it for six years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI went to Cambridge University. I took a number of baths—and a degree in English. I worried a lot about girls and what had happened to my bike. Later I became a writer and worked on a lot of things that were almost incredibly successful but in fact just failed to see the light of day. Other writers will know what I mean.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy pet project was to write something that would combine comedy and science fiction, and it was this “obsession that drove me into deep debt and despair. No one was interested, except finally one man: a BBC radio producer named Simon Brett who had had the same idea, comedy and science fiction. Although Simon only produced the first episode before leaving the BBC to concentrate on his own writing (he is best known in the United States for his excellent Charles Paris detective novels), I owe him an immense debt of gratitude for simply getting the thing to happen in the first place. He was succeeded by the legendary Geoffrey Perkins.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In its original form the show was going to be rather different. I was feeling a little disgruntled with the world at the time and had put together about six different plots, each of which ended with the destruction of the world in a different way, and for a different reason. It was to be called “The Ends of the Earth.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile I was filling in the details of the first plot—in which the Earth was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace express route—I realized that I needed to have someone from another planet around to tell the reader what was going on, to give the story the context it needed. So I had to work out who he was and what he was doing on the Earth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI decided to call him Ford Prefect. (This was a joke that missed American audiences entirely, of course, since they had never heard of the rather oddly named little car, and many thought it was a typing error for Perfect.) I explained in the text that “the minimal research my alien character had done before arriving on this planet had led him to think that this name would be “nicely inconspicuous.” He had simply mistaken the dominant life form.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo how would such a mistake arise? I remembered when I used to hitchhike through Europe and would often find that the information or advice that came my way was out of date or misleading in some way. Most of it, of course, just came from stories of other people’s travel experiences.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt that point the title \u003ci\u003eThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy\u003c\/i\u003e suddenly popped back into my mind from wherever it had been hiding all this time. Ford, I decided, would be a researcher who collected data for the Guide. As soon as I started to develop this particular notion, it moved inexorably to the center of the story, and the rest, as the creator of the original Ford Prefect would say, is bunk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The story grew in the most convoluted way, as many people will be surprised to learn. Writing episodically meant that when I finished one episode I had no idea about what the next one would contain. When, in the twists and turns of the plot, some event suddenly seemed to illuminate things that had gone before, I was as surprised as anyone else.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI think that the BBC’s attitude toward the show while it was in production was very similar to that which Macbeth had toward murdering people—initial doubts, followed by cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm at the sheer scale of the undertaking and still no end in sight. Reports that Geoffrey and I and the sound engineers were buried in a subterranean studio for weeks on end, taking as long to produce a single sound effect as other people took to produce an entire series (and stealing everybody else’s studio time in which to do so), were all vigorously denied but absolutely true. The budget of the series escalated to the point that it could have practically paid for a few seconds of \u003ci\u003eDallas\u003c\/i\u003e. If the show hadn’t worked . . . \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first episode went out on BBC Radio 4 at 10:30 P.M. on Wednesday, March 8, 1978, in a huge blaze of no publicity at all. Bats heard it. The odd dog barked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter a couple of weeks a letter or two trickled in. So—someone out there had listened. People I talked to seemed to like Marvin the Paranoid Android, whom I had written in as a one-scene joke and had only developed further at Geoffrey’s insistence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen some publishers became interested, and I was commissioned by Pan Books in England to write up the series in book form. After a lot of procrastination and hiding and inventing excuses and having baths, I managed to get about two-thirds of it done. At this point they said, very pleasantly and politely, that I had already passed ten deadlines, so would I please just finish the page I was on and let them have the damn thing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMeanwhile, I was busy trying to write another series and was also writing and script editing the TV series “Dr. Who,” because while it was all very pleasant to have your own radio series, especially one that somebody had written in to say they had heard, it didn’t exactly buy you lunch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo that was more or less the situation when the book \u003ci\u003eThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy \u003c\/i\u003ewas published in England in September 1979 and appeared on the Sunday Times mass market best-seller list at number one and just stayed there. Clearly, somebody had been listening.New York Times bestselling author","brand":"Del Rey","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303805636837,"sku":"NP9780345453747","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345453747.jpg?v=1767741967","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-ultimate-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-isbn-9780345453747","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}