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Friday, April 09, 2010
The Universe's Guide to Hitchhikers
Title: The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Author: Douglas Adams
Bookmark: built-in ribbon
I have no idea how many times I've read this series. My best guess is that this is my third run through, but the number could easily be higher. Each time, though, my impressions are the same:
- Douglas Adams is a genius.
- Absolutely anything can be satirized in a sci-fi framework.
- Mr. Adams got tired of these books after number three (there are five books in the Hitchhiker Trilogy)
- I don't care--they're still fun.
The first time I read these I had to poke around in the uncharted territory of the Adult Fiction section of my hometown library. That was before they moved to the new building, and there was a stark contrast between the kids/teen section (comfy chairs, carpeting, bright colors, lots of light) and the Adult Fiction section (concrete floors, high narrow canyons of bare steel bookshelves, sunlight creeping greenly through ivy-choked smoked glass windows). It felt like a library both secret and arcane, the type of place you see in a creepy movie where the books might be filled with strange symbols printed in blood, or where mysterious figures may direct you to a goal, and are later discovered to be twenty years dead. Then I started reading Douglas Adams, and realized that's exactly the kind of space I had discovered. He may well have been my entry into Adult Fiction. I don't remember for sure.
Now I own two separate copies of the entire trilogy. This one is black, with gold lettering on the cover, gilt-edged pages, and a long, narrow ribbon trailing from the spine to mark your place. It looks like the sort of book found in the libraries seen in those movies. Exactly the sort of thing to keep on a bedside table or shelf to add a touch of class to your collection until someone notices the picture of a small sphere (planetoid?) sticking its thumbs where its ears might be and waggling its tongue at you. Kind of what Adams' books did to... well, everything.
For those unfamiliar with the books (if you are among their number, you should read them soon, or we may not be able to be friends anymore), they start with Arthur Dent, mild-mannered Englishman, protesting the pending demolition of his house to make room for a bypass. Then his friend Ford convinces him to leave the planet with/ abducts him because the Vogons are coming, and they want to destroy the planet to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Don't try to figure out why it makes sense. You'll never get there.
Arthur and Ford (who had been stuck on our planet for fifteen years, but is actually a Betelgeusian who writes for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) proceed to have a series of wildly improbable and bizarre misadventures traipsing about the galaxy and through time, learn the secret origins of our planet and the questionable origins of our species, witness the end of the Universe, quest for Ultimate Truths, learn to fly, defy physics and escape certain death too many times to count. Oh, and they help to save the universe at least once. And that's just the first three books.
My guess is that Adams felt he was done at this point, but a clamoring public demanded more. Again, this is only a guess. I've done no actual research on that topic. The fourth book is a complete departure. When I first read it, I was annoyed that Adams had suddenly decided to write an entire novel that seemed to be nothing more than a dopey love story, and Ford (my favorite character in the series, possibly in all of literature) spends most of it setting up an elaborate telephone prank to bankrupt a technology company and possibly drive one of its sales representatives completely mad. Now, I can at least appreciate that he may have wanted to try something different, and I have to admit it contains the hottest and most physically improbable love scene ever written. Plus, he tells us God's Last Message to His Creation, which has been thoroughly commercialized, as you might expect.
The last book, though, makes it obvious that Adams was done with HHGTTG books, because SPOILER ALERT he destroys the Earth in every possible universe simultaneously, taking with it three of the major characters.
SPOILER ALERT OVER
There's also a short story, Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, which I've only ever seen in my two collected editions, and takes place long before the trilogy starts, but gets stuck in the book somewhere between the third and fifth volumes (I don't remember whether it's before or after the fourth).
The important thing to remember is that he's not really trying to write a sci-fi epic. He's just using sci-fi to look at everything in our messed-up world and give it a twisted, satirical bent. Hell, he even uses it to make fun of sci-fi. It's rude, unapologetic, completely hysterical, and absolutely brilliant. To those who read this, remember to pack your towel.
Thanks, Mr. Adams. So long, and thanks for all the fish.Labels: androids, Brit lit, finding oneself, good books, humor, philosophy, satire, sci-fi, talking animals
posted by reyn at
1:21 PM
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Saturday, October 11, 2008
Assholistic
Title: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Author: Douglas Adams
Bookmark: Paper telling me where I can donate blood.
Long ago, I read all five books of the Hitchhiker Trilogy. It's a geek prerequisite for graduating high school. Soon after, I discovered that Adams had written other books, and I managed to find The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul in my local library. There was mention in this book of a preceding volume, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and ever since I've been trying to find it. Ironically, although my current library has DGHDA, it does NOT have TLDTTotS, and only books one and four of the H2G2.
Honestly, I was disappointed.
It has all of the charm and sly wit and twisted humor of the other books, and there's more than a little Ford Prefect in Dirk Gently, but it just didn't seem as polished as the others. Maybe it's an effect of memory.
The first weird thing I noticed is that we don't even meet the title character until almost halfway into the book.
We do meet an Electric Monk, a programmer whose couch is impossibly wedged in the stairwell, a professor who might not really be a professor, a technology mogul who is promptly killed off and replaced by the technology mogul's ghost, and the mogul's sister/programmer's somewhat-neglected girlfriend.
Dirk bills himself as a Holsitic Detective, who "believes in the interconnectedness of all things," and although he repeats this many times, he does a much more entertaining (and consistent) job of it in TLDTTotS. Here, he's more con artist than sleuth, and his sleuthing would make Fox Mulder cry "bullshit."
Still, he throws himself in to proving the programmer's innocence in the mogul's murder, even if it's only because he wants to figure out how the ersatz professor performed some sleight-of-hand (interconnectedness of all things, remember), and by the end of the book they manage to not only save all of human existence, but provide Bach with all the music he ever wrote, reveal how the couch got stuck in the stairway, and help scribe Coleridge's most famous work.
Sadly, the ending doesn't quite explain everything you're left wondering, and although I'm sure Adams might have thought he had tied up all those loose ends, most are still pretty frayed.Labels: androids, crazy fiction, ghosts, humor
posted by reyn at
2:48 PM
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Thursday, February 28, 2008
The bastard son of Sarah Connor and Jack Bauer
Title: Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)
Author: Philip K. Dick
Bookmark: someone else's gas receipt, which I accidentally picked up during my last 2,000 mile drive
Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter. His job is to find androids who have escaped to earth posing as humans, and "retire" them with, as the parlance goes, "extreme prejudice."
"He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand
uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into
greater entropic ruin."
We get to see this world through the eyes of both men, allowing us to figure out an awful lot that neither of them know, until the final chapters when they actually meet for the first time for the briefest of exchanges.
Deckard is on the trail of eight escaped androids who made it back from Mars, where they are issued to emigrants as fieldhands and houseworkers. Two had been retired by the senior bounty hunter in the district before the third got him with a laser. He spends the entire book in a hosptial bed, and we never actually see him. Deckard's boss is pushing him to wipe out the other six in 24 hours, to keep them from getting time to escape or form a new plan. The entire book spans a little more than 24 hours, with no food or sleep for Deckard, and five separate attempts on his life (there was a sixth, but it was too half-hearted to really count)
There's also an extensive subplot revolving around the widespread religion(?) of Mercerism, which promotes empathy and concern for the well-being of all living things (are androids alive? they have blood and cells, but it's all driven by circuitry. Deckard ponders this throughout the book), mainly because there are so very few of them left. When the dust fell, it killed all the owls and toads, and wiped out most of the other animals as well. Nobody seems to know what the dust is or where it came from, but owning an animal is a huge responsibility and a huge honor. Such a big deal, in fact, that there's a wide market in false animals, just to keep up appearances. Isidore works for an animal hospital that only services the fakes. Deckard owns an electric sheep. His real sheep died after getting tetanus from the wire on a bale of hay.
Before reading this book (I've never seen the movie, though I've been meaning to see/read the story for ages), I had always assumed the subtitle was a joke based on the idea of counting sheep to go to sleep. We count real sheep, androids must count electric sheep. Makes sense. After finding out about the big deal of owning an animal and caring about other living things and androids' incapacity for empathy (it's part of the test Deckard uses to determine whether an android's an android), I realized that it was more than that: People in that world dream of owning an animal, any animal. Isidore is thrilled to find a spider in the hallway. Deckard spends the entire book whipping out his Sidney's Catalog to check the prices on the real version of any animal he sees. Androids know they can't experience empathy, even going so far as trying to discredit Mercerism to prove that it doesn't exist (this is a very weird scene, because as two andys are yammering on about how it's all a fraud, two more are torturing Isidore's spider, and by extension, Isidore). Would owning an electric sheep and caring for it as a human would a real sheep prove their empathic ability and make them human?
Only two things bother me. First, we never find out why Deckard has to go out and kill the androids (except, maybe, their casual disregard for life). It might be connected to World War Terminus, but we never find out anything about that, either, despite the undeniable formative effect it had on the culture and environment (all the men wear lead codpieces to protect their genetic materials). I want to think it does, if only because every other sci-fi story involving such a large force of mechanical "life" ultimately results in an uprising by the droid army (see: The Phantom Menace; I, Robot; Terminator trilogy and series; Battlestar Galactica), but if that's the case, why do all the colonists still have them?
Second: a really big discontinuity. He determines early on that a human employee of a large corporation is actually an android (gynoid, if you want to be technical), but she's not on his list, and she doesn't know that she's artificial. Much later, she talks about interactions with other bounty hunters as though she's always known she's an android. A small flaw, but it bugged me.Labels: androids, codpieces, sci-fi
posted by reyn at
10:52 AM
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