Maybe similar a fate as that Star Wars has for movies, many aspects of the Hitchhiker's Guide became so familiar in pop culture that it's now almost impossible to read this properly for the first time. What still impressed me very much, though, was how witty it really is.

This first novel feels like the pilot to a series, which I suppose it is in fact. One of the heroes of the book is Earthman Arthur Dent, who in the beginning of the story loses his house because local politics decided that it is to make way for a bypass, right before going through all this again with his home in a wider sense, Earth in general. Lucky for him, he is good friends with Ford Prefect, who actually turns out to be from outer space and who is able to hitch them an intergalactic ride right before the destruction of Earth. Their new situation is only moderately better than the one they just escaped from, but by a stroke of luck of cosmic improbability they soon find themselves on The Heart of Gold, a spaceship powered by an Infinite Improbability Drive and captained by Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is not only the President of the Galaxy, but who coincidentally also turns out to be Ford's cousin. They become part of his crew, which so far included Trillian (a woman that Arthur coincidentally had met at a party some years earlier) and the famous Paranoid Android Marvin, and soon find themselves on the journey to some legendary planet of planet-builders.

The novel hits the perfect balance of racket and wit and there are too many memorable moments and gags to mention. The way that Ford tricks Arthur to come with him and have a couple of pints, the tragically short existence of a very contemplative whale, science-fiction's answer to Eeyore, the proper distribution of intelligence among Earth's species, or "42", to reiterate only the most famous examples. While most of these jests will be familiar to most people, familiar with the book or not, I was surprised by some of their depths.

Take the latter, for instance, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Of course, the answer itself is totally bonkers. But there is some undeniable wit to how the gag actually plays out. It's not only because of the possibilities they consider, even though "How many roads must a man walk down?" is beautifully poetic. Great philosophers have given answers to questions that generations of later thinkers were struggling to actually define in the first place. For instance, what question do solutions to the Problem of Free Will actually answer? Moreover, the way the story goes on also hints at a fascinating theme of hard science-fiction. The supercomputer promises to build an even more intelligent computer who is supposed to calculate an exact formulation of the question. This implies an explosion of intelligence, now frequently called the "singularity".

In fact, the entire novel is often, and quite rightly, regarded as an honest-to-God contribution to the science-fiction genre. There are elaborately worked out alien races, space travel, foreign technology (if you look at the hardware common in the late 1970s, touchscreens really are a cutting-edge idea), highbrow concepts (such as the consequences of probability), and thorough rethinking of familiar things and ideas. Unlike many other works of humorous fiction, It creates a world I felt honestly interested in.

While the humor had me constantly chuckle throughout the entire thing, the entire thing was over in what felt like the blink of an eye. I was just beginning to feel for its characters and started to wonder where they would end up next, when it was suddenly already over. Maybe this is another proof for successful world-building. Luckily, there are more than enough follow-ups to have me sorted for the months to come.

Rating: 4.5/5