by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan
This year marks the 42nd anniversary of the American release of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams’ “five-book trilogy,” of which Hitchhiker’s was the first installment, led readers through a melancholy universe in which bureaucracy is the ultimate source of evil and shallow, self-serving incompetents are the galaxy’s greatest villains. The best-selling series helped shape the worldview of Generation X, capturing the nihilistic cynicism of the Thatcher/Reagan 1980s.
Adams’ seminal work isn’t run-of-the-mill genre fiction in which heroes engage in a good-versus-evil battle, triumphing through bravery and cunning. (That’s the stuff you find in the Harry Potter series, the Millennial Generation’s literary equivalent.) In Hitchhiker’s, our hapless main character, Arthur Dent, is stuck in a world in which his good intentions fail miserably, wasted on an impenetrable system too big to succeed. His traveling companion Marvin, a robot with a brain the size of a planet, sees the truth, and the truth causes incurable depression.
To document the broader cultural impact of Hitchhiker’s, we’ve asked a number of public figures in science, the arts, the humanities, and government to reflect on how the book changed their own understanding of life, the universe, and everything.
“The Hitchhiker series taught me to laugh at the absurd, to mock self-proclaimed genius, to put off searching for the meaning of life in favor of play, and to oppose time travel on the ground that proper tense usage would become too difficult. It also prepared me to understand that some Albany politicians are like Vogons, insofar as neither are above corruption in the same way that the ocean is not above the sky. And it made 42 my favorite number.” –Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and host of Stay Tuned and Doing Justice
“I first heard about The Hitchhiker’s Guide at summer camp, from friends of mine quoting it in ways that I initially experienced as a bunch of nonsensical inside jokes. It seemed like everyone else had read it and had this shared bond because of it. So I read it, and then I was on the inside also. The nonsense made sense! Which I think is an apt metaphor for life that has served me since then: making sense of the nonsense. Or at least striving to enjoy the nonsense. Or accept the nonsense. Or I don’t know. It’s a funny book that helped me connect with my friends, so I’m grateful for it. Congrats, book! You’re doing it!” —Myq Kaplan, comedian
“‘We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!’ Once, that was just another passage in Hitchhiker’s that made me giggle. Today, it’s a reality. Thankfully, we have the wit, wisdom, and practicality of Douglas Adams’ masterpiece to help us navigate the absurdity. Have towel, will travel.”—Candace Gingrich, Unapologetically Queer Hitchhiking Activist
“I read the Hitchhiker’s books the summer I was 11, just a short time after the fourth had been released. They were the most playful books I’d ever read, and along with a healthy appreciation for how nice fjords are that’s what has stuck with me all these years. Yes, the jokes were funny and the characters were good and the central joke—the earth gets destroyed, and then a lot of other stuff happens—remains potent. But the way that Adams happily followed metanarrative will o’ the wisps, followed his ideas down dark alleys, and wrote himself off cliffs—as a reader you could almost see him there, hovering like Wile E. Coyote—helped me understand that whatever rules people said there were about writing, they were all breakable. (Granted, you had to be the most insanely inventive writer in the Galaxy, but you could do it.) Heck, for all its apparent messiness, the plot of Life, the Universe, and Everything clicks together as perfectly as an Agatha Christie novel. A few years later, reading the radio scripts, I was astonished to see how much of Adams’ story was completely worked out on the fly, often just an hour before the tape was due to the BBC. That seems downright miraculous now. I’m really grateful the books came into my life.” —Dan Kois, writer at Slate and author of Vintage Contemporaries
“The book is special because it’s a nerdish rite of passage—it’s almost a Shibboleth among geeky misfits, like me. You can be talking to a Trekkie or a Star Wars fanatic, or someone who loves Lord of the Rings, but all you have to do is say, ‘42 is the answer,’ or ‘You should have brought a towel,’ in the right context and most of them will laugh knowingly. It’s a book that you know other people like you have read, and that those are the people you want to meet.” –Elaine Hesser Giuliano, features editor for The Carmel Pine Cone and former Jeopardy! Contestant
“Probably the most direct influence to which I can point is the playfulness of Adams’s writing style. Even in my teaching and research articles, I aim towards lightness and humor. This is at least partially an imitation of the style The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.” –Jonathan Kujawa, mathematician, University of Oklahoma
“What I carry with me from the book is the quest to examine life, the universe, and everything. Specifically, I think about what the questions are that we should be asking. What answers do I even want? Of course, the infamous answer – 42 – was never the point. That’s what I loved. Adams put me on this circle asking ‘What do I even want to know about life, the universe, and everything?’ And this I always connect to the Jewish Passover Seder and the four questions. In this part of the Seder we discuss four types of children, including the child that does not even know how to ask a question. This is what HG2G ultimately always leaves me asking: Do I even know how to ask the right question about the meaning/existence/reason behind life? And while I know I don’t have the right question, I’ve also learned to just not take any of it too seriously. You risk missing life – or the chance to live on earth – if you’re too caught up in getting to an answer.” —Rachel Barenbaum, author of Atomic Anna and A Bend in the Stars
“The book’s in-jokes were a good way to signal to and bond with other quirky nerds.” —Kate Lovelady, Leader Emeritus, Ethical Society of Saint Louis
“Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy showed me that science fiction did not have to be serious. Most science fiction I read, and I read a lot, had humor on the fringes, but HGG had humor and silliness at the core. That is not to say it did not have social commentary too. In fact the use of comedy made for a more effective critique of 20th century society.” –Gregory Morgan, author of Cancer Virus Hunters and philosopher of science at Stevens Institute of Technology
“I always carry a small towel when I travel. I’m actually not kidding. I had a 45 minute train ride to and from SiriusXM every day for 20 years, and I always found it to be incredibly useful (pillow, blanket, coffee spill, drying off after a rainstorm). Every time I used the towel, I would marvel at how this ‘gag’ actually turned out to be remarkably practical… and of course that makes it even funnier.” –Kenny Curtis, host of the Sirius/XM Kids’ Place program The Animal Farm
“Gen X is all about laughing while the world burns – not in some privileged or nihilistic way, but because we’re survivors. If the world ended today, we’d adjust. The world is terrible, so we may as well laugh. The Hitchhiker’s Guide speaks directly to that sensibility.” – Andy Brownstein, Washington-area journalist and actor
As we celebrate the effect Hitchhiker’s has had over the last 42 years, let’s all raise our Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters in a toast.