The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was initially a radio comedy series written by Douglas Adams. It has been adapted as a series of novels, as a television series and as a computer game, and as of 2002 there are still plans for a film version.

The title The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is often abbreviated as "HHG", "HHGG", or "H2G2". As well as the several incarnations of the story, of which the books are the most popular, this can also refer to:

the fictional book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a fictional guidebook and sort of eccentric encyclopedia which features in the series
a website hosted by the BBC which is "almost but not quite completely unlike" Wikipedia. See H2G2.

The books are described as "a trilogy in five parts" (sic). They have a wide following around the world, thanks to their hilarious situations and characters (Babel fish, Vogon poetry, Slartibartfast, The answer to life, the universe and everything), their anarchic, ironic humour and subtle social commentary.

The first radio series was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1978. The radio series was split into episodes, known as "Fits" (from Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark); the original series comprised Fits 1-6, and Fit 7 was broadcast separately at Christmas. The success of the series encouraged Adams to write a novel of the series, which was based on the first four Fits and released in 1979. Also released that year was an LP re-recording of the first four Fits, slightly contracted. A second radio series, comprising Fits 8-12, was produced and broadcast in 1980, and the original novel produced a sequel based on Fits 5-12 (but not entirely in that order). Thereafter the radio series ended and the books developed independently.

The radio series (and the subsequent television spin-off) greatly benefited from the voice-over commentary by noted radio comedy actor Peter Jones, playing The Book; his lugubrious tones undoubtedly gave the series a tremendous boost in establishing the tenor of the piece.

The popularity of the first two books gave rise to a 6-episode television series, which aired in 1981. It used most of the actors from the radio series, and was based on the novel versions of Fits 1-6. It was followed in 1984 by a piece of best-selling interactive fiction - effectively a text adventure game - distributed by Infocom and designed by Adams and Infocom regular Steve Meretzky.

More recently, the series spawned an online entity not unlike Wikipedia, known as H2G2; see that article for more information.

The fifth book was written to bring the "increasingly inaccurately named trilogy" to a supposedly conclusive ending. However, it was known that Adams was working on another book (tentatively entitled The Salmon of Doubt) when he died. This book was originally to be the third novel of the Dirk Gently series, but Adams had expressed the desire to recast it as a Hitchhiker book. An existing draft was published posthumously in 2002 in a collection of Adams' miscellanous writings titled The Salmon of Doubt, with Dirk as the main character.

The books in the trilogy are named:

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
Life, the Universe and Everything (1982)
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish (1984)
Mostly Harmless (1992)

A short story was also written, Young Zaphod Plays it Safe. It appears in some of the HHG omnibus editions. It is almost entirely unrelated to the rest of the trilogy.

Neil Gaiman has written Don't Panic: The Official Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion (1984).

Characters:

Places:

Golgafrincham

Two collaborative Internet projects were inspired by the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The original is Project Galactic Guide, which has no official affliation. There is also H2G2, a project started by Douglas Adams' company The Digital Village and currently hosted by the BBC.

See also