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h2g2

h2g2's Front Page on 21 July 2009
URL	bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/
Slogan	The Guide to Life, The Universe and Everything.
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Internet encyclopedia project
Registration	Available
Available language(s)	English
Content license	Authors retain copyright but grant BBC a non-exclusive licence to distribute
Owner	BBC
Created by	Douglas Adams
Launched	April 28, 1999 (1999-04-28) (10 years ago)
Current status	Perpetual work-in-progress

h2g2 is a UK-based collaborative online encyclopedia project engaged in the construction of, in its own words, "an unconventional guide to life, the universe, and everything", in the spirit of the fictional publication The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from the science fiction comedy series of the same name by Douglas Adams.^[1] It was founded by Adams in 1999 and has been run by the BBC since 2001.^[2][3][4] It is often compared to Wikipedia but there are differences between the sites.

The intent was to create an Earth-focused guide that would allow members to share information about their geographic area and the local sites, activities and businesses, to help people decide where they want to go and what they may find when they get there. It has grown to contain subjects from restaurants and recipes, to quantum theory and history. Explicit advertising of businesses is forbidden by the site owners, the BBC, but customer reviews are permitted.^[5]

The content of the project is written by registered "Researchers" on its website.^[6] Articles written by Researchers form the "Guide" as a whole, with an "Edited Guide" being steadily created out of factual articles that have been peer reviewed via the aptly-named "Peer Review".^[7] The Edited Guide includes both traditional encyclopaedic subjects and more idiosyncratic offerings, and while articles in the Edited Guide sometimes aim for a slightly humorous style,^[8] most are correct and well-written treatment of their subject matter by virtue of the Peer Review process. Every article has an associated discussion area which allows for multiple threads, called "Conversations".^[9]

Contents 1 History 2 Edited Guide 2.1 Peer Review 2.2 Sub-editing 2.3 Update Forum 2.4 Editorial Feedback 2.5 Edited Guide Writing Workshop 2.6 Flea Market 3 Other content 3.1 UnderGuide 4 Volunteers 5 Community 5.1 Italics 5.2 Clubs and societies 5.3 Talk forums 5.4 The Post 6 Skins 7 Site redesign 8 Terms and conditions 9 DNA 10 See also 11 References 12 Further reading

History

h2g2 was founded on 28 April 1999 as the Earth edition of the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by the author of the series, Douglas Adams, and his friends and colleagues at The Digital Village.^[10] "h2g2" serves as a handy abbreviation for that rather lengthy title, with the advantage that most people are able to spell it.^[11] The site was a runner-up for Best Community Site in the Yell.com awards in 2000.^[12]

Like other dot-com companies, Adams' company TDV ran into financial difficulties towards the end of 2000 and eventually ceased operations.^[4] In January 2001, the management of the site was taken over by the BBC, and moved to bbc.co.uk (then known as BBCi).^[3] During this takeover there was a lengthy intermission during which the site was unavailable, which the community refers to as "Rupert" — a reference to the serendipitous naming of the fictional tenth planet in Adams' novel Mostly Harmless. Members created an alternative site, "n2g2", standing for "Nowhere To Go To", to maintain their community while the site was down, and to complain about changes implemented by the BBC.

21 April 2005 marked the launch of h2g2 Mobile, an edition of the guide produced specifically for PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) and some mobile phones that could access the internet, so that people could read h2g2 entries while on the move.^[7][13] This was done because people wanted h2g2 to be much like the Hitchhiker's Guide described in the books — a mobile, electronic device that anyone could read from anywhere.^[10] An earlier attempt at a WAP phone based version of h2g2 started in December 2000 only to end when the BBC took over the site in January 2001.^[14]

Edited Guide

Any h2g2 Researcher may write an article (known as an 'Entry') and then submit it to Peer Review for inclusion in the Edited Guide. Other users will review the Entry and suggest improvements, with the author making changes to their work as necessary. Following at least seven days' reviewing, Entries in Peer Review may be recommended by a volunteer Scout (see below) and accepted by the in-house team. When this happens, a copy of the Entry is passed to a volunteer Sub-editor (see below) for fact checking and general tidying, followed by a brief check by the in-house team. Entries appear on the site's home page on the day that they enter the Edited Guide.^[15]

As of July 21, 2009, there were 9,773 Entries in h2g2's Edited Guide.^[16] For comparison, Wikipedia had 2,565 Featured Articles and 7,050 Good Articles on that day.

Peer Review

On h2g2, entries are peer reviewed by members of the community who feel like spending the time to read and comment. Reviewers may be specialists on the topic, but most are not and it soon becomes obvious whether the average Researcher can understand an Entry. While this has the advantage that Entries are generally written in terms that the layman can understand, it also means that mistakes can occasionally slip into the Edited Guide.

Once an Entry has been picked by a volunteer Scout (see below) and leaves Peer Review, a copy is made and editing rights are handed to a Sub-editor. After the Entry has its day on the Front Page of h2g2 and becomes part of the Edited Guide it can be modified or updated by its author either by requesting minor changes through the Editorial Feedback section of h2g2, or by following the Update Forum process if larger changes or a rewrite are needed. However, the author can still update the original, unedited version, which remains in the wider unedited guide. Alternatively, they may choose to delete the unedited version, so that it does not show up in search results.

Sub-editing

Sub-editors, likewise, are not generally experts on the material they are editing. While it involves a degree of fact checking, sub-editing mainly involves ensuring that articles are readable and conform to the h2g2 house style.

Sub-editors may discuss changes with the Researcher who wrote the Entry to make sure that they are correct in their information and written in the right manner, but this is generally at the individual sub-editor's discretion. h2g2 lacks an effective change control system, and this occasionally leads to errors creeping in at this stage.

Update Forum

To keep Edited Entries up-to-date, h2g2 has a formal update system. This consists of the Update Forum process, which allows for a new version of an existing Entry to be submitted to Peer Review. Once the update has been reviewed to a sufficient extent, the updater removes the update from Peer Review and uses the Editorial Feedback system (see below) to notify the Editors. Newly-updated Edited Entries commonly gain a further appearance on the Front Page and appear in a list of recently-updated Entries.

Editorial Feedback

Smaller changes to Edited Entries can be made by posting to the Editorial Feedback page, where the Editors and the Curators (a volunteer group) will attend to them. This can include typos, minor errors, and other small changes. It can also include the addition of extra information:

If the information is more than a few paragraphs, but less than a full reworking, the information can be submitted via Editorial Feedback. For us to accept the update, however, it must be presented with explicit directions as to why the update is required, as well as directions as to what goes where/replaces what and it should be in full GuideML, including links.^[17]

Edited Guide Writing Workshop

If an article is not yet ready for submission to Peer Review, there exists an Edited Guide Writing Workshop (EGWW), where other researchers can post suggestions and corrections, so that the author can improve their work and bring it up to the standard required of the Edited Guide. Researchers may also use the EGWW to arrange collaboration on an Entry.

Flea Market

Another review forum, the Flea Market, exists as a home for abandoned Entries. This allows other researchers to adopt orphaned Entries and submit them to Peer Review, with the original author taking partial credit. Typically, an Entry is moved from Peer Review after its author leaves h2g2 (known as 'Elvising', after Elvis Presley).

Other content

The Edited Guide forms only a small part of h2g2 as a whole. Most of the site's 'cultural life' takes place in the far larger Unedited Guide, which contains, amongst other things, various clubs and societies, discussion areas, Researchers' h2g2 user pages (known as 'Personal Spaces'), and writing workshops. The Unedited Guide can also contain fiction, which as mentioned below may be submitted to the Alternative Writing Workshop.

If an article does not make it through the Peer Review process, the original (unedited) Entry can still be viewed, as before, in the Unedited Guide. It can, of course, also be rewritten and submitted again at a later date.

UnderGuide

There is also an Alternative Writing Workshop, where entries that do not adhere to the Writing Guidelines can be worked on. Entries from this workshop are candidates for the UnderGuide, and may also be accepted for publication in the h2g2 Post (see below).

The UnderGuide is h2g2's most ambitious attempt to bring the attention of the community to the best entries that fall outside of the Edited Guide's Writing Guidelines. The UnderGuide volunteers have a similar structure to the Edited Guide's volunteers - Miners have an equivalent role to Scouts, and Gem Polishers perform a similar task to Sub-editors (see below). Miners inhabit the Alternative Writing Workshop to comment on entries and pick them for the UnderGuide.

Volunteers

There are twelve different kinds of volunteer on the site, with varying responsibilities. Any researcher can apply to become a volunteer; if accepted, they gain a badge for their Personal Space, advertising their status as a member of that particular group. They are traditionally described in alphabetical order:^[18]

• Aces are responsible for welcoming new users and assisting them in becoming active and experienced members of h2g2 (ACE is an acronym for Assistant Community Editor). No statistics are publicly available, but this approach ensures that a large proportion of initially active Researchers continue to contribute. Aces are also expected to take a responsible role within the community, encouraging discussion and debate.^[19]
• Aviators create audiovisual (AV) content for h2g2. Video clips have been produced to accompany Edited Guide entries, and both video and audio content have been produced to accompany articles in The Post. The Aviators host their material on an external site, h2g2aviators.com.^[20]
• Community Artists contribute the art that illustrates entries. The volunteer group provides graphics frequently to meet the requirement for a photo or illustration for one new Edited Entry each weekday. Artists are always credited on the pages they have illustrated.^[21]
• Curators are responsible Researchers who have demonstrated a long-term commitment to the Edited Guide. They have been granted the power to edit Entries in the Edited Guide. They work with the Italics to keep the Edited Guide tidy and up-to-date. Their duties include correcting typos which have slipped through the editing process, cross-linking newer Entries to older ones and removing broken links, and taking care of requests for minor changes which have been posted to the Editorial Feedback forum.^[22]
• Gurus help Researchers with technical issues, such as with GuideML, a custom markup language designed to allow additional features (such as formatting for headings and subheadings, and graphical emoticons), whilst removing unwanted HTML tags (such as JavaScript and embedded images and sounds).^[23]
• Photographers work to provide photographs for older Edited Entries, which must be entirely their own work.^[24]
• Post Reporters are those Researchers who have contributed regularly to h2g2's The Post (see below).^[25]
• Scavengers are those Researchers who have 'rescued' at least five entries from the Flea Market (see above) and used them to produce Edited Entries.^[26]
• Scouts are responsible for the running of Peer Review, and make sure that quality work does not languish there for too long. They keep an eye open for entries that have received a favourable response from other Researchers, and recommend two or three entries each month for inclusion in the Edited Guide. The picks are reviewed by the in-house team and then forwarded to a Sub-editor.^[27]
• Sub-editors check and edit Entries to be added to the Edited Guide. Once they have finished working on an entry, they submit it for a final check by the in-house team, following which the Edited Entry is posted to the front page for a day. The Sub-editors were h2g2's first volunteers, were originally hand picked, and used to do the jobs of scouts as well as sub-editing prior to the creation of Peer Review.^[28]
• University Field Researchers are Researcher who write groups of entries based around a common theme, aiming to provide a comprehensive guide to a specific subject. These projects often become quite involved and may take months to complete. Once finished, they are usually featured on the h2g2 home page for a whole weekend.^[29]
• UnderGuide volunteers are responsible for the running of the UnderGuide, and include Miners and Gem Polishers. Miners are analogous to Scouts in that they recommend material from the Alternative Writing Workshop (see above); Gem Polishers are analogous to Sub-editors and are responsible for sub-editing material for inclusion in the UnderGuide.^[30]

Community

The bulk of site activity takes place in the United Kingdom (GMT/BST) daytime, which is when the in-house London based team (known as 'The Italics', see below), is there. But at other times, the US, Canadian and Australian researchers are also very active.

Italics

The Italics (technically 'the Editors'), the in-house editors of h2g2, are the only people who are paid (by the BBC) to work on the site. They monitor the content of the Edited Guide and oversee the general development of community life. They are named for the way their names appear in conversation threads, in bold italics, to keep people from impersonating them. There are other informal nicknames for the editors such as 'The Powers That Be', 'The Towers', 'The Powers in the Towers' and 'Pisa People' (again, after the slanting nature of their on-screen nicknames).^[31]

The core personnel have changed considerably since h2g2 started in 1999. Of the original TDV team, only Technical Lead Jim Lynn remains working on the site.^[32], although much of his time is spent developing the DNA software base for other uses within the BBC; the first full-time editor, Mark Moxon, left in 2002.^[33]

Clubs and societies

h2g2 is large enough to have numerous unofficial clubs and societies, set up and maintained by Researchers.^[34] Examples include:

• The Musicians' Guild - a place for musicians to gather and discuss musical topics.
• The Zaphodistas - Loosely based on Mexico's Zapatista rebels, but named after Zaphod Beeblebrox, the Zaphodistas campaigned for researcher rights, for example, to include external images on h2g2 pages.
• The Freedom from Faith Foundation - An organization of free-thinkers, the FFFF is a forum for non-dogmatic discussion of philosophical and religious issues.
• The Society for the Addition of a Towel Smiley - This is a group that campaigned successfully to have a graphic representing a towel added to the extensive list of h2g2 smileys.
• The Thingites - a group that began as a campaign for Thursday, a day that they find particularly woeful, to be renamed 'Thing'. They have since broadened their scope and now aim to have the days of the week renamed in their entirety. One of the group's threads, 'No no no!!', reached 96,500 posts during December 2009.
• United Friends of h2g2space - One of the largest clubs at the site, United Friends is simply a celebration of the friendliness of h2g2.

Talk forums

Among the most popular Talk Forums on the site are:

• Ask the h2g2 Community - usually abbreviated to Ask. This is a general forum where Researchers can ask members of the community questions on various subjects. It also contains long-running conversations such as "My penis and I - what do women think of penises?", "What Films have you seen recently?" and "(The Return of) What book are you reading at this time?".

• The Forum - The Forum contains similar conversations to Ask, but they tend to be of a more serious nature.

• SEx - Science Explained Forum - an area for Researchers to discuss scientific matters. Researchers are often experts in particular fields and are able to provide explanations on a broad range of subjects.

• The Quite Interesting Society - an area where Researchers can ask questions after the style of the TV quiz show, QI.

• Miscellaneous Chat - an area devoted to conversations about anything and everything, including the odd 'last post wins' thread.

• Lil's Atelier - often home to h2g2's busiest conversation, the Atelier features both polite discussion and a degree of role-play.

The Post

The Post is h2g2's own virtual broadsheet newspaper, published fortnightly by a team of community members. It includes cartoons, regular columns, fiction, poetry and feature stories written and submitted by the h2g2 Researchers. It is edited by dedicated h2g2 Researchers, not paid in-house editors. The Post provides an outlet for comment and for sharing experiences, and often features content that is not intended to form a part of the Edited Guide.

Skins

h2g2's Classic Goo skin	h2g2's Alabaster skin
h2g2's Brunel skin	h2g2's Plain skin

h2g2 has different skins that may be used to view the site. Users can set a preference to view the site in one or other of the skins when they are logged in.^[35]

• Classic Goo was the first skin. It has large white text on a blue background.^[36]
• Alabaster was the second skin. It features small black text on a white background with chunks of orange and green.^[37]
• Brunel is the newest official skin, and consequently it is the default format for visitors who are not logged in.^[38] It has black text on white backgrounds.^[39] The border colours vary depending on what type of Entry is being viewed, and can be determined by creators of Entries by using special GuideML tags;^[40] the h2g2 Front Page in Brunel changes its colour scheme with its content.
• Plain was designed for Digibox, Palm and Pocket PC users who cannot load the graphic-laden alabaster, brunel or classic skins. It consists of a white background with minimal graphics.^[41]
• pda is intended for mobile phones and pdas on the mobile internet. This skin contains the Edited Guide, the Search function and a page noting that the BBC does not charge for use of the mobile site, but phone companies may do. The skin is graphic-light and articles are cut into sections at headers so that only the desired content may be downloaded. The pda skin does not allow registration with the site, and does not contain unedited entries or conversation fora.^[42]

Site redesign

The site is currently looking forward to a major redesign to bring it in line with the general appearance of BBC sites, while maintaining a degree of the site's old character.^[43] The current skins (see above), the newest of which was created in 2002, will be retired.

Terms and conditions

To contribute to the site it is necessary to register and to agree to the h2g2 "House Rules" and the general BBC Terms and Conditions. Registered users are called Researchers. Researchers retain the copyright to their articles, but grant the BBC a non-exclusive license to reproduce their work in all formats.

The House Rules prohibit various things, including racism, "hard-core" swearing, spamming, flooding, "otherwise objectionable" material, and spitting.^[44] Codes and languages other than English may only be used sparingly and with an accompanying translation. The Terms and Conditions are more legalistic, and prohibit breach of copyright and defamatory material.^[45]

When the site became part of BBCi, the BBC insisted on moderating contributions to the site soon after they were made. However, they were eventually persuaded that the h2g2 Community could be trusted to a system of "reactive moderation", in which posts are not checked by moderators unless a complaint is made. Individual user accounts are sometimes put on "pre-moderation", meaning that posts they make are not displayed until they have been reviewed by a moderator.^[46]

Particularly contentious major issues may lead to discussion being moderated differently. For example:

• Political Discussions during Elections in the United Kingdom are restricted to specific forums. These forums have posts read by moderators to ensure that the BBC cannot be seen to break the tight rules that govern the UK media during such elections.^[47]
• During the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, extra rules were put in place.^[48]
• On 17 March 2003, h2g2 issued guidelines for discussions during the 2003 Iraq war, including a statement that "All new postings and articles relating to the conflict in Iraq posted to h2g2 will now be failed". This policy was lifted on 24 April 2003.^[49]

Occasionally, more contentious Entries submitted for review are hidden pending moderation, with two articles about the Nestlé boycott having been pulled in the past.^[50][51]

DNA

The software for h2g2 - and of its related 'sister' communities in the BBC, such as "606", "Film Network", "Action Network", "Comedy Soup", "Memoryshare" and "Collective" – is affectionately known as DNA, after the initials of author and site founder Douglas Noel Adams. The DNA technology was introduced a few months after the BBC takeover. Before this technology, there was "Ripley", which was named after the character from the film Aliens, in homage to the quote "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."^[52] Before that there was a technology with no particular name, which subsequently gained the retronym Llama, due to the code holding the site together being written mostly in Perl, the handbook for which had a picture of a llama on the front cover.^[53]

Adams himself was rather involved in the website in its early days.^[54] His account name was DNA, and his user number was 42, a reference to the famous joke in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. When Adams died in May 2001, his personal space was the focus for a huge reaction from the community. Adams' legacy is still felt on h2g2, and naturally the site is peppered with references to the Hitchhiker books; it is, however, not a fan site, and was never intended as such.^[2][7]

See also

• Collective
• List of online encyclopedias

References

Further reading

• BBC h2g2 at BBC Online
• BBC h2g2 Team at BBC Online
• h2g2's Edited Entry on Wikipedia

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy By Douglas Adams Books Main series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy · The Restaurant at the End of the Universe · Life, the Universe and Everything · So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish · Mostly Harmless Related works Young Zaphod Plays it Safe · The Original Radio Scripts · The Salmon of Doubt by Dirk Maggs The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Scripts: The Tertiary, Quandary, and Quintessential Phases by Eoin Colfer And Another Thing... Media Radio series ( Phases 1 & 2, Phases 3, 4 & 5) · TV series · Movie · Computer game · Starship Titanic game · Timeline of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy versions · Cast lists Companion media Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion · Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams · Douglas Adams's Guide to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Characters Arthur Dent · Ford Prefect · Zaphod Beeblebrox · Marvin the Paranoid Android · Trillian · Slartibartfast · The Guide · Minor characters · Races and species · Vogons Miscellanea Phrases · Places · Technology · Somebody Else's Problem · Encyclopedia Galactica In culture h2g2 · International Phenomenon · Towel Day · "Journey of the Sorcerer" · 18610 Arthurdent · 25924 Douglasadams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Portal

(Redirected to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy article)

From Wikiquote

For the 2005 film of the same name, see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (film)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (11 March 1952 - 11 May 2001) Started as a comedy radio play on the BBC and expanded into a TV series, a series of novels, and a feature film. The story follows the adventures of Arthur Dent, the last human who hitched a ride off Earth moments before it was destroyed to make way for an interstellar bypass.

Contents 1 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (novel) 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Chapter 1 1.3 Chapter 2 1.4 Chapter 3 1.5 Chapter 5 1.6 Chapter 7 1.7 Chapter 8 1.8 Chapter 9 1.9 Chapter 11 1.10 Chapter 12 1.11 Chapter 13 1.12 Chapter 16 1.13 Chapter 17 1.14 Chapter 18 1.15 Chapter 20 1.16 Chapter 23 1.17 Chapter 24 1.18 Chapter 27 1.19 Chapter 30 1.20 Chapter 34 1.21 Chapter 35 2 The Restaurant at the End of the Universe 2.1 Preface 2.2 Chapter 1 2.3 Chapter 2 2.4 Chapter 3 2.5 Chapter 6 2.6 Chapter 17 2.7 Chapter 18 2.8 Chapter 19 2.9 Chapter 20 2.10 Chapter 22 2.11 Chapter 23 2.12 Chapter 28 2.13 Chapter 29 2.14 Chapter 32 3 Life, the Universe and Everything 3.1 Chapter 1 3.2 Chapter 2 3.3 Chapter 6 3.4 Chapter 7 3.5 Chapter 9 3.6 Chapter 11 3.7 Chapter 18 3.8 Chapter 24 3.9 Chapter 31 3.10 Chapter 33 3.11 Chapter 34 4 So Long And Thanks for All the Fish 4.1 Prologue 4.2 Chapter 7 4.3 Chapter 11 4.4 Chapter 21 4.5 Chapter 23 4.6 Chapter 25 4.7 Chapter 26 4.8 Chapter 31 4.9 Chapter 35 4.10 Chapter 40 4.11 Epilogue 5 Mostly Harmless 5.1 Preface 5.2 Chapter 1 5.3 Chapter 2 5.4 Chapter 12 5.5 Chapter 14 5.6 Chapter 18 5.7 Chapter 25 6 Radio series 7 TV series 8 Young Zaphod Plays it Safe 9 See also 10 External links

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (novel)

Introduction

• This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

• Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

• In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
  First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

Chapter 1

• "Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?"
  "How much?" said Arthur.
  "None at all," said Mr Prosser.

• "The mere thought," growled Mr. Prosser, "hadn't even begun to speculate," he continued, settling himself back, "about the merest possibility of crossing my mind."

Chapter 2

• [The Guide] says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

• "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
  "Very deep," said Arthur, "you should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you."

• "This must be Thursday," said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer, "I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

Chapter 3

• The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

• As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.

• I don't know, apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at all.

Chapter 5

• One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical.

Chapter 7

• "You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
  "Why, what did she tell you?"
  "I don't know, I didn't listen."

Chapter 8

• "Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space, LISTEN!" and so on...

Chapter 9

• Arthur looked up. "Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out."
• "Ford," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
• "But that's not the point!" raged Ford "The point is that I am now a perfectly safe penguin, and my colleague here is rapidly running out of limbs!"

Chapter 11

• "Five to one against and falling..." she said, "four to one against and falling...three to one...two...one...probability factor of one to one...we have normality, I repeat we have normality." She turned her microphone off – then turned it back on, with a slight smile and continued: "Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem."

• "I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed," Marvin said.

• He reached out and pressed an invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words Please do not press this button again.

• "All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done."

• "Come on," he droned, "I've been ordered to take you down to the bridge. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."

• "Sorry, did I say something wrong?" said Marvin, dragging himself on regardless. "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God I'm so depressed. Here's another one of those self-satisfied doors. Life! Don't talk to me about life."

Chapter 12

• If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Chapter 13

• Marvin trudged on down the corridor, still moaning.
  "...and then of course I've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left hand side..."
  "No?" said Arthur grimly as he walked along beside him. "Really?"
  "Oh yes," said Marvin, "I mean I've asked for them to be replaced but no one ever listens."
  "I can imagine."

Chapter 16

• Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Chapter 17

• He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Chapter 18

• Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.

Chapter 20

• "Life," said Marvin dolefully, "loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."

Chapter 23

• For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.

• The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the 'Star Spangled Banner', but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.

Chapter 24

• Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity - distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.

Chapter 27

• "Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
  • "The Answer to the Great Question, of Life, the Universe and Everything"

Chapter 30

• "The chances of finding out what's really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied. Look at me, I design fjords. I'd far rather be happy than right any day."
  "And are you?"
  "No, that's where it all falls apart I'm afraid."
  "Pity, it sounded like quite a nice lifestyle otherwise."

Chapter 34

• "What's up?"
  "I don't know," said Marvin, "I've never been there."

Chapter 35

• It said: "The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.
  "For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?"

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Preface

• There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
  There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Chapter 1

• The story so far:
  In the beginning the Universe was created.
  This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Chapter 2

• "Share and Enjoy" is the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent profit in recent years.
• The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read "Go stick your head in a pig", and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration.

Chapter 3

• Quite how Zaphod Beeblebrox arrived at the idea of holding a seance at this point is something he was never quite clear on.
  Obviously the subject of death was in the air, but more as something to be avoided than harped upon.
  Possibly the horror that Zaphod experienced at the prospect of being reunited with his deceased relatives led on to the thought that they might just feel the same way about him and, what's more, be able to do something about helping to postpone this reunion.
• "Concentrate," hissed Zaphod, "on his name."
  "What is it?" asked Arthur.
  "Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth."
  "What?"
  "Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth. Concentrate!"
  "The Fourth?"
  "Yeah. Listen, I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox, my father was Zaphod Beeblebrox the Second, my grandfather Zaphod Beeblebrox the Third..."
  "What?"
  "There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. Now concentrate!"

Chapter 6

• The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
• "Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal."

Chapter 17

• I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?
• Shee, you guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off.

Chapter 18

• "The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline."
• "Er..." he said, "hello. Er, look, I'm sorry I'm a bit late. I've had the most ghastly time, all sorts of things cropping up at the last moment."
  He seemed nervous of the expectant awed hush. He cleared his throat.
  "Er, how are we for time?" he said, "have I just got a min—"
  And so the Universe ended.

Chapter 19

• It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

Chapter 20

• The ship was rocking and swaying sickeningly as Ford and Zaphod tried to wrest control from the autopilot. The engines howled and whined like tired children in a supermarket.

Chapter 22

• The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother. On Earth – when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass – the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another – particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.

Chapter 23

• The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. "Make it evil," he'd been told. "Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with."

Chapter 28

• The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
  To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

Chapter 29

• "How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?"

Chapter 32

• "Well, you’re obviously being totally naive of course", said the girl, "When you’ve been in marketing as long as I have, you'll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them."
  The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford.
  "Stick it up your nose," he said.
  "Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know," insisted the girl, "Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?"

• "And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
  "Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there."
  "Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
  The marketing girl soured him with a look.
  "Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."

Life, the Universe and Everything

Chapter 1

• The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
• The alien ship was already thundering toward the upper reaches of the atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void that separates the very few things there are in the Universe from one another.
• In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you’ve taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

Chapter 2

• "Africa was very interesting," said Ford, "I behaved very oddly there." [...] "I took up being cruel to animals," he said airily. "But only," he added, "as a hobby."
  "Oh yes," said Arthur, warily.
  "Yes," Ford assured him. "I won't disturb you with the details because they would—"
  "What?"
  "Disturb you. But you may be interested to know that I am singlehandedly responsible for the evolved shape of the animal you came to know in later centuries as a giraffe."
• He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like the wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off.
• "I have detected," he said, "disturbances in the wash." [...]
  "The wash?" said Arthur.
  "The space-time wash," said Ford. [...]
  Arthur nodded, and then cleared his throat. "Are we talking about," he asked cautiously, "some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?"
  "Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum."
  "Ah," nodded Arthur, "is he? Is he?" He pushed his hands into the pocket of his dressing gown and looked knowledgeably into the distance.
  "What?" said Ford.
  "Er, who," said Arthur, "is Eddy, then, exactly, then?"
• "There!" said Ford, shooting out his arm. "There, behind that sofa!"
  Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisley-covered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind.
  "Why," he said, "is there a sofa in that field?"
  "I told you!" shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. "Eddies in the space-time continuum!"
  "And this is his sofa, is it?" asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.

Chapter 6

• "My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre," Ford muttered to himself, "and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes."

Chapter 7

• Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.
• There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.
  The moment passed as it regularly did on Squornshellous Zeta, without incident.
• Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine, and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere.
• "My capacity for happiness," he added, "you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first." —Marvin
• "You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."
  "Er, five," said the mattress.
  "Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"
  The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind.
• "I would like to say that it is a very great pleasure, honour and privilege for me to open this bridge, but I can't because my lying circuits are all out of commission." —Marvin

Chapter 9

• Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful.

Chapter 11

• [...] the renewed shock had nearly made him spill his drink. He drained it quickly before anything serious happened to it. He then had another quick one to follow the first one down and check that it was all right.
  "Freedom," he said aloud.
  Trillian came on to the bridge at that point and said several enthusiastic things on the subject of freedom.
  "I can't cope with it," Zaphod said darkly, and sent a third drink down to see why the second hadn't yet reported on the condition of the first. He looked uncertainly at both of her and preferred the one on the right.
  He poured a drink down his other throat with the plan that it would head the previous one off at the pass, join forces with it, and together they would get the second to pull itself together. Then all three would go off in search of the first, give it a good talking to and maybe a bit of a sing as well.
  He felt uncertain as to whether the fourth drink had understood all that, so he sent down a fifth to explain the plan more fully and a sixth for moral support.
• There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. [...] Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.
• He sat up sharply and started to pull clothes on. He decided that there must be someone in the Universe feeling more wretched, miserable and forsaken than himself, and he determined to set out and find him.
  Halfway to the bridge it occurred to him that it might be Marvin, and he returned to bed.

Chapter 18

• They obstinately persisted in their absence.

Chapter 24

• It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Chapter 31

• "That young girl," Marvin added unexpectedly, "is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting."

Chapter 33

• He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

Chapter 34

• “I'm afraid,” he said at last, “that the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can ever be known about the same Universe.”
• "I wasn't very impressed with it when I first knew what it was," he said, "but now I think back to how impressed I was by the Prince's reason, and how soon afterward I couldn't recall it at all, I think it might be a lot more helpful. Would you like to know what it is? Would you?" They nodded dumbly. "I bet you would. If you're that interested I suggest you go and look for it. It is written in thirty-foot-high letters of fire on top of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet Preliumtarn, third out from the sun Zarss in Galactic Sector QQ7 ActiveJ Gamma. it is guarded by the Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob." There was a long silence following this announcement, which was finally broken by Arthur. "Sorry, it's where?" he said. "It is written," repeated Prak, "in thirty-foot-high letters of fire on top of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet Preliumtarn, third out from the..." "Sorry," said Arthur again, "which mountains?" "The Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet..." "Which land was that? I didn't quite catch it." "Sevorsbeupstry, on the planet..." "Sevorbe what?" "Oh, for heaven's sake," said Prak, and died testily.

So Long And Thanks for All the Fish

Prologue

• Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
  And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
  Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, and so the idea was lost, seemingly for ever.
  This is her story.

Chapter 7

• They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked out at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no surgery involved, just the continual wrenching of experience.
• Once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.

Chapter 11

• He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe.

Chapter 21

• The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable proportion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.
  The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.
  This is:
  Change.
  Read it through again and you'll get it.

Chapter 23

• Ford: "Life," he said, "is like a grapefruit."
  Creature:"Er, how so?"
  Ford: "Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast."

Chapter 25

• "This Arthur Dent," comes the cry from the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a mysterious deep space probe thought to originate from an alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, "what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?"

Chapter 26

• She was mostly immensely relieved to think that virtually everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong.

Chapter 31

• The sign said:
  Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.
  "It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane."

Chapter 35

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [...] says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all."

Chapter 40

• "So much time," it groaned, "oh so much time. And pain as well, so much of that, and so much time to suffer it in too. One or the other on its own I could probably manage. It's the two together that really get me down."

• "Ha!" snapped Marvin. "Ha!" he repeated. "What do you know of always? You say 'always' to me, who, because of the silly little errands your organic lifeforms keep on sending me through time on, am now thirty-seven times older than the Universe itself? Pick your words with a little more care," he coughed, "and tact."

• "We apologise for the inconvenience." God's Final Message to His Creation, written in letters of fire on the side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains.
  "I think," Marvin murmured at last, from deep within his corroding rattling thorax, "I feel good about it."
  The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time ever.

Epilogue

• There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind.

Mostly Harmless

Preface

• Anything that happens, happens.
  Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
  Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
  It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though.

Chapter 1

• One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

Chapter 2

• The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.

Chapter 12

• The thing they wouldn't be expecting him to do was to be there in the first place. Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was, so he was winning already. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

• The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

Chapter 14

• It wasn't merely that their left hand didn't always know what their right hand was doing, so to speak; quite often their right hand had a pretty hazy notion as well.

Chapter 18

• "You don't understand! There's a whole new Guide!"
  "Oh!" shouted Arthur again. "Oh! Oh! Oh! I'm incoherent with excitement! I can hardly wait for it to come out to find out which are the most exciting spaceports to get bored hanging about in in some globular cluster I've never heard of. Please, can we rush to a store that's got it right this very instant?"
  Ford narrowed his eyes. "This is what you call sarcasm, isn't it?"
  "Do you know," bellowed Arthur, "I think it is? I really think it might just be a crazy little thing called sarcasm seeping in at the edges of my manner of speech! Ford, I have had a fucking bad night! Will you please try and take that into account while you consider what fascinating bits of badger-sputumly inconsequential trivia to assail me with next?"

• "Temporal reverse engineering."
  Arthur put his head in his hands and shook it gently from side to side.
  "Is there any humane way," he moaned, "in which I can prevent you from telling me what temporary reverse bloody-whatsiting is?"

• "I leaped out of a high-rise office window."
  This cheered Arthur up. "Oh!" he said. "Why don't you do it again?"
  "I did."
  "Hmmm," said Arthur, disappointed. "Obviously no good came of it."

• "I think we have different value systems." —Arthur
  "Well mine's better." —Ford

Chapter 25

• A tremendous feeling of peace came over him. He knew that at last, for once and for ever, it was now all, finally, over.

Radio series

• Do you want me to sit in a corner and rust or just fall apart where I'm standing?
  • Fit The Second

• I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle. As soon as I reach some kind of definite policy about what is my kind of music and my kind of restaurant and my kind of overdraft, people start blowing up my kind of planet and throwing me out of their kind of spaceships!
  • Fit the Fourth

• Zaphod: Can it Trillian, I'm trying to die with dignity.
  Marvin: I'm just trying to die.
  • Fit The Sixth

• The other Shaltanac's joopleberry shrub is always a more mauvy shade of pinky-russet.
  • Fit the Seventh
  • The Shaltanac equivalent of "the other man's grass is always greener"

•  :Zaphod: The building's being bombed! Who in their right minds would want to bomb a publishing company?

Marvin: Another publishing company.

• What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move with no hope of rescue:
  Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far.
  Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far (which, given your current circumstances, seems more likely):
  Consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.
  • Fit the Eighth

• Life, as many people have spotted, is, of course, terribly unfair. For instance, the first time the Heart of Gold ever crossed the galaxy the massive improbability field it generated caused two-hundred-and-thirty-nine thousand lightly-fried eggs to materialise in a large, wobbly heap on the famine-struck land of Poghril in the Pansel system. The whole Poghril tribe had just died out from famine, except for one man who died of cholesterol-poisoning some weeks later.
  • Fit the Ninth

• The Book: It is said that his birth was marked by earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes, firestorms, the explosion of three neighbouring stars, and, shortly afterwards, by the issuing of over six and three quarter million writs for damages from all of the major landowners in his Galactic sector. However, the only person by whom this is said is Beeblebrox himself, and there are several possible theories to explain this.
  • Fit The Ninth

• Will everything tie up neatly or will it be just like life: quite interesting in parts, but no substitute for the real thing?
  • Fit the Eleventh

• I ache, therefore I am.
  • Fit the Eleventh

• Was I amongst friends when the Haggunenon admiral evolved into a life pod and everybody aboard his flagship escaped leaving me aboard as it steered itself into the nearest star?
  Was I amongst friends when I was left to walk in circles on a swamp planet?
  Left to park cars outside a restaurant for millenia?
  Left for the Krikkit robots to use for batting practice?
  Friend? I don't think I ever came across one of those, sorry, can't help you there.
  • Fit The Twenty-Second

TV series

• Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.
  • Episode 1

Young Zaphod Plays it Safe

• What do you think I am, completely without any moral whatsits, what are they called, those moral things?

See also

• Douglas Adams
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (film)

External links

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quotes at the Internet Movie Database