The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Five Novels in One Outrageous Volume
By: Douglas Adams
Publisher: Del Rey
Publication Date (Reissue): April 30, 2002
Genre: Humor, Space Opera, Science Fiction
🛸 Know Where Your Towel Is: A Hitchhiker’s Primer for the Mildly Panicked Blog Reader
If you’re reading this and you know where your towel is, congratulations—you’re already more prepared for intergalactic travel than most Earthlings. According to the delightfully deranged logic of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, that humble towel is the ultimate survival tool. It’s not just for drying off. It’s for signaling competence, confusing aliens, and wrapping around your head when the universe gets too weird to face directly.
In Adams’ five-book “trilogy” (yes, five), Earth is unceremoniously demolished one Thursday afternoon to make way for a hyperspace bypass. If you’re lucky, you’ll be whisked away moments before impact by a friend who turns out to be from Betelgeuse—not Guildford—and who’s secretly a researcher for the galaxy’s most irreverent reference guide: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a bestseller, beating out the Encyclopedia Galactica and even the scandalous memoirs of Eccentrica Gallumbits (from Eroticon Six, naturally).
Once you’re off-planet, things get strange fast. You’ll meet:
- Zaphod Beeblebrox, two-headed galactic rogue and occasional President of the Galaxy.
- Trillian, the brilliant woman Arthur Dent once failed to chat up at a party, who now travels the stars with Zaphod.
- Slartibartfast, planetary designer and proud architect of Norway’s fjords.
- Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, a bureaucrat so committed to red tape he’d let his own grandmother be eaten by the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal rather than skip a form.
Adams’ universe began as a BBC radio series and evolved into novels, a TV miniseries, audio adaptations, and even software. The omnibus edition includes all five novels—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, and Mostly Harmless—plus a bonus short story, Young Zaphod Plays It Safe.
So if you’re a blog reader with a taste for satire, sci-fi, and the occasional existential crisis, this series is your passport to cosmic absurdity. Just remember:
- 🐬 If the dolphins vanish, worry.
- 📕 If you see a book with “Don’t Panic” on the cover, grab it.
- 🧼 And above all, always—always—know where your towel is.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
Comments
13 responses to “Book Review: ‘The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’”
Best series EVER!
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Douglas Adams left us much too soon, I think.
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I absolutely loved reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, all the books were really good but the first one remains one of my favourite books of all time.
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I first heard the BBC radio series…or part of it, anyway, when I was a junior at South Miami High, back in the 1981-82 school year. A few months later, I bought the first novel. So, yeah…I love the first book as well.
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One of my favorites! The movie was actually really enjoyable as well.
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I bought the movie a few years ago. It’s a hoot!
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I loved these books as well. They were fun and quirky. I read the first four, 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, but not Mostly Harmless, and not the omnibus edition The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide.
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Mostly Harmless is worth reading, although it’s a bit darker in tone than the previous four books.
The 2005 movie is also worth watching.
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I saw the 2005 movie but I will read “Mostly Harmless” too. Thank you Alex.
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Oh, these books were so much fun. I haven’t thought about them in years.
I read the Dirk Gently books as well. Not bad, but didn’t match the fun of Hitchhiker’s
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I first read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 1981; I must have been (like Jim Garraty) either a sophomore or junior (depending on the when in 1981 factor), and I’d heard bits of the BBC series on WLRN-FM, Miami’s NPR station. So I was “primed” for the wackiness of Douglas Adams’ humor and wildly inventiveness.
I tried reading the first Dirk Gently novel, but couldn’t quite get into it.
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Dirk Gently is a different sort of thing.
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I noticed!
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