What makes "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" for you?

cHaTbOx

Ok I know nothing about "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"

I would like to have some suggestions of why it would be great to get into

mike65

Its the only work to feature a planet with an economy based entirely on shoes.

Mike.

trout

And the only body of work whose vast scope includes an ecology so delicate that you must get a receipt when you poop.

orestes

Marvin the Paranoid Android

Legend :cool:

trout

Vogon poetry is awesome.

Goodshape

"...several huge, yellow slab-like somethings. Huge as office blocks, silent as birds. They hung in the air exactly the same way that bricks don't."

The Werewolf

Pan-galactic gargle-blaster.

The effects of which is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon, wrapped round a large gold brick.

Also described as 'the alcoholic equivalent of a mugging' that is, 'Expensive and bad for the head'.

orestes

trout wrote: »

Vogon poetry is awesome.

Post reported :P

The Werewolf

Orestes.

Don't you mean;

Post Reported, signed in triplicate, sent in, queried, sent back, subjected to public inquiry, lost, found, lost again and finally buried in soft peat for six months and recycled as firelighters?:D

Malice

If you're a fan of Terry Pratchett or Tom Sharpe you should enjoy the books.

Personally I loved the the whole plot around the Ultimate Question, it's answer and the role of mice in the whole affair .

Zaph

A sperm whale and a bowl of petunias

Queen-Mise

A cow comes over to your table, and tries to sell parts of its body for you to eat, for example its flank was particularly tasty.

The Rain God

Douglas Adam also tells us how to fly: the trick is to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Zaph

I love the rain god

Queen-Mise

it held such a resonance being from ireland, 40 types of rain. so so true

orestes

Zaph wrote: »

A sperm whale and a bowl of petunias

I love that bit

I wonder if it will be my friend?

KnifeWRENCH

"O freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't."

takola

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the machanics of safety pins, or doing a spectographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

You'll enjoy that I'm sure Chatbox!

DMC

The radio series, as a whole.

As the original medium, and the most intimate, its just sheer brilliance.

Vikinghar

random chatbox wrote: »

Ok I know nothing about "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"

I would like to have some suggestions of why it would be great to get into

I read the "Guide" when I was 19 and fell in love with it from the first line. It's complete escapism took me away from reality and yet showed the absurdity of normal life. It also made me feel hopeful at that age. Because in the real world people starve and die horribly, the characters showed an infinate sense of everything would turn out just fine ('cept Marvin, of course).

My favourite character was Wowbagger, the infintely prolonged. the quote "Wowbagger became immortal due to an accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a pair of rubber bands and a liquid lunch, so therefore does not know how to handle being immortal. This is in contrast to the rest of the immortal beings in the universe, who are, in his opinion, "a load of serene bastards." He eventually comes up with a plan to keep himself busy: he will insult every living being in the universe - in alphabetical order."