hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy – Cubilone's Dimension

Review: Rocannon’s World

Even from this early sample of Le Guin’s writing you can tell she’s not just another science fiction writer, authors of what I suppose my father had in mind when he always kept telling me to avoid reading this kind of literature: the jobs of her characters (Rocannon is an ethnologist, similar to the protagonist of The Word for World is Forest whose field is anthropology), their dispositions towards their world, what is uttered and what is done in her stories are just one-of-a-kind.

Precisely because this is one of her earlier works, and she hadn’t yet refined this type of sci-fi storytelling many would come to love, the plot of Rocannon’s World wasn’t anything spectacular. However, if I said that I didn’t enjoy travelling through this world, complete with different day-night cycles, different cultures and different forms of life, a journey to a world I wouldn’t have made otherwise and one that made me richer, even by a little bit, I would be lying. Even what would seem like a small part of what makes this book and other books by Le Guin so engrossing, like observing the discovery of a new continent on an otherwise insignificant planet, can feel mystical to me. It makes me want to go out and become myself a surveyor and ethnographer of planets whose description is only a paragraph long in the respective Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The ending I found particularly impressive and it stuck with me, even right now when I can’t look it up from the book itself. It managed to convey so much of the ambitions of Rocannon and the tragedy, paradox and incompatibility of the big picture vs. everyday life in a single line, that I was wearing a satisfied smile for at least the rest of the bus trip from the port to Nea Smyrni.

Yet again, thanks Daphne for giving me this book!

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Review: Mostly Harmless

Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Imagine you’re Douglas Adams in 1992. You’ve relatively recently done Last Chance to See and have added “interest in wildlife and evolution” to your already unusually large toolbox of inspiration and influences. This new way of looking at the world has alarmed you about the state of things and has filled you with a reserved pessimism; not that your previous work can be said to have been optimistic — unless aloof nihilism can double for optimism, which is of course, by itself, a matter of some discussion. Perfectly not primed, you return to that same greatest achievement that made you famous 8 years after last leaving readers at an already sad cliffhanger (that’s all I can say for the end of “Thanks For All the Fish” — no, it doesn’t get better than that). What do you do then? Being a jerk at this point is an understandable, if not very bold, move. That is exactly what you go on to do.

Douglas Adams has said that the period in which he wrote Mostly Harmless was a bleak one for his personal life; one can certainly tell. Oh yes. In the world of H2G2 everything somehow worked out for our heroes, improbability always on their side no matter how fantastic, dangerous or humorously absurd (usually all three) the scenario. Let’s just say that, this time around, not even improbability itself is spared from all this bleakness.

Even if in subsequent itterations of the series the ending of H2G2 has been altered to be more cheerful or even expanded in the form of a sixth book by Eoin Colfer, the fact is that this was Douglas Adams last word on the matter before his death in 2001. I think it is shocking, of course I do. But it somehow still fits with Adams’ vision of his Universe. Aloof nihilism is still the ultimate universal force this part of the Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash; only this time, this same universal force works against everything the reader has come to expect or wish. Oh well. Same shit, different space-time continuum. At the same time, this bleakness serves to colour the humour black — and there’s no shortage of humour in this one either: in typical Adams fashion, the humour is funny because it rings true. To me, that’s what H2G2 is all about. Therefore I don’t think it’s any worse than book 4; to tell the truth I would place them together just a notch below the first three.

To put it all together in a nice little summary that may be able to say, in its brevity, more than all of the above: Mostly Harmless is just the opposite side of the coin that is H2G2, the first four books being the first side; still absurd, still funny, still clever, still making social critique, still eloquent. Only this time, it doesn’t give a Belgium.

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Journey of the Sorcerer — Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Series

I’ve read the first four books of H2G2 and I can safely say that they have been some of the best fiction I ever came across. It’s the kind of fiction that underlines its property of being fiction by so successfully parodying our own, not so fictional (?) reality while being irresistibly witty at the same time. In the words of the brilliant George Bernard Shaw:

“When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.”

These days, probably because of my long hours of sitting around at home, I decided to start walking more. The thought came quickly, perhaps making me want to walk more in the first place: what’s better than walking with the company of some good auditory stimulation? In Denmark that is what got me into Spanish; what would I get into this time?

So I’ve been listening to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Shows, which incidentally preluded and later inspired the books, having first been aired in 1978 on the BBC. I can tell you, it’s great fun. Each season – book consists of six half-hour episodes, so if you don’t feel like reading the books but still want a dose of Douglas Adams running in your veins, making your reality this much more realistically insane, you can’t miss them. Well, you can, obviously, but why would you want to?

Incidentally, the following track is used as the theme to the show and has become emblematic for the series/franchise itself. Douglas Adams wanted something that sounded sci-fi but also gave off an impression of travelling and hitch-hiking. What do you think? I think I can’t stop listening to it.

Review: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Four

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Four by Douglas Adams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was thinking of starting my review with a quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It would neatly go to display exactly why the probability of this book’s humour and insight into the ways of the universe actually existing are two to the power of two hundred and twenty-six thousand seven hundred and nine to one against. You see, after coming in contact with the universe that sprung out from the genius that was Douglas Adams, your life gets torn into the period before having read H2G2 and after. It shapes your mind, it makes you think about the world in ways you never thought possible — or it makes you realise that this is exactly the way you used to look at the absurdness of the Universe, only life on this mostly harmless planet has made you think in mostly harmless ways yourself.

It’s such a yummy, well-mixed recipe of dead-pan, random, black, so-funny-because-it’s-so-true humours, all served with hearty amounts of insight you can’t help stuffing your face with the whole pot. There’s also a secret ingredient which talks to your philosophy loving side… It leaves you lighter as you laugh with lines so clever, a writer so talented and situations so bizarre you can hardly believe your eyes. It’s the hash brownie of scifi…

The only breaker for me was the characters as well as the plot. Both of them serve as little more than means to present the jokes. I get the meaning of the story is to be bizarre but at some points it went so overboard I had little idea of what was happening. The characters were also inconsistent and to some point interchangeable. Maybe that was Douglas Adams’s intention? I don’t know. But still, four books later, I have no clear view of the plot or of the characters, they’re blurs more than anything else. Which is a shame, for they were means for some pretty unique situations.

I thought that the first and second book were the best, with the third one having the strongest messages but the most confusing situations and plot. “So Long And Thanks For All The Fish” had its moments, especially between Arthur and Fenchurch but it was generally disappointing. I read however that Adams was forced to push through a deadline for the fourth book and was generally disappointed by the end result himself.

The Trilogy of Four is aptly named for my rating standards: I’m giving it a four overall because it didn’t maintain the stellar quality of the first two books throughout the series. I know I’m not finished. This is only my introduction to this extraordinary and hilarious world of not only The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy but Douglas Adams in general. Now I must play the game, read the rest of the books, see or hear the shows…

And to think I may had not read the books in the end because I hated the film…

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