Mostly Harmless

- Douglas Adams

Kalgoorlie, WA

May 20, 2021

Goodreads Book Blurb:

It’s easy to get disheartened when your planet has been blown up, the woman you love has vanished due to a misunderstanding about space/time, the spaceship you are on crashes on a remote and Bob-fearing planet, and all you have to fall back on are a few simple sandwich-making skills. However, instead of being disheartened, Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life a bit–and immediately all hell breaks loose.

Hell takes a number of forms: there’s the standard Ford Prefect version, in the shape of an all-new edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and a totally unexpected manifestation in the form of a teenage girl who startles Arthur Dent by being his daughter when he didn’t even know he had one.

Can Arthur save the Earth from total multidimensional obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter, Random, from herself? Of course not. He never works out exactly what is going on. Will you?

Series / Genres:

My Review:

meh, nothing special:

☆☆☆☆☆ 2.5/5

He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.

If this book had started at the point when we catch up with Arthur in Lamuella making sandwiches, I think I would have enjoyed it much more. Everything before that just seemed so pointless. And not in a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ‘everything is crazy and nothing makes sense’ way, but more in a ‘are we ever going to figure out what the point of this story is’ way.

Once we get to Lamuella, over 50% of the way through the book, I was on board. From this point on there was a plot and a sense of direction. This was the perfect ending to the series, coming full circle to make the entire series pointless, just like the narrative.

…except there’s still one more book to go. I know Eoin Colfer was given permission from the family to continue the story but it seems a shame considering how good the ending here was. And while I loved Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series as a kid, I’m not sure the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series needed another book.