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Book 1 |
PD: OS |
Subject: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (englisch) |
Douglas Adams |
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy |
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Douglas Adams The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy |
Douglas Adams The Restaurant at the End of the Universe |
Douglas Adams Life, the Universe, and Everything |
Douglas Adams So long, and thanks for all the fish |
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The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy |
for |
Jonny Brock and Clare Gorst |
and all other Arlingtonians |
for tea, sympathy, and a sofa |
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Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of |
the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded |
yellow sun. |
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles |
is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape- |
descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still |
think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. |
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most |
of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. |
Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these |
were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces |
of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small |
green pieces of paper that were unhappy. |
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and |
most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. |
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, one girl sitting on her own in a |
small cafe 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, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea |
was lost forever. |
This is not her story. |
But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some |
of its consequences. |
It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker's |
Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on |
Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or |
heard of by any Earthman. |
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book. |
in fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out |
of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor - of which no |
Earthman had ever heard either. |
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly |
successful one - more popular than the Celestial Home Care |
Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero |
Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of |
philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of |
God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? |
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 Encyclopedia 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 |