DOUGLAS ADAMS

THE ULTIMATE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE

Introduction:
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
Young Zaphod Plays It Safe
Mostly Harmless
Footnotes

Introduction:
A GUIDE TO THE GUIDE
Some unhelpful remarks from the author
The history of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is now so complicated that every time I tell it I contradict
myself, and whenever I do get it right I'm misquoted. So the publication of this omnibus edition seemed like a good
opportunity to set the rec ord straight-or at least firmly crooked. Anything that is put down wrong here is, as far as
I'm concerned, wrong for good. The idea for the title first cropped up while I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck,
Austria, in 1971. Not particularly drunk, just the sort of drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff Gssers after
not having eaten for two days straight, on acco unt of being a penniless hitchhiker. We are talking of a mild inability
to stand up. I was traveling with a copy of the Hitch Hiker s Guide to Europe by Ken Walsh, a very battered copy
that I had borrowed from someone. In fact, since this was 1971 and I still have the book, it must count as stolen by
now. I didn't have a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day (as it then was) because I wasn't in that financial league.
Night was beginning to fall on my field as it spun lazily underneath me. I was wondering where I could go that was
cheaper than Innsbruck, revolved less and didn't do the sort of things to me that Innsbruck had done to me that
afternoon. What had happened was this. I had been walking through the town trying to find a particular address, and
being thoroughly lost I stopped to ask for directions from a man in the street. I knew this mightn't be easy because I
don't speak German, but I was still surprised to discover just how much difficulty I was having communicating with
this particular man. Gradually the truth dawned on me as we struggled in vain to understand each other that of all the
people in Innsbruck I could have stopped to ask, the one I had picked did not speak English, did not speak French
and was also deaf and dumb. With a series of sincerely apologetic hand movements, I disentangled myself, and a
few minutes later, on another street, I stopped and asked another man who also turned out to be deaf and dumb,
which was when I bought the beers.
I ventured back onto the street. I tried again.
When the third man I spoke to turned out to be deaf and dumb and also blind I began to feel a terrible weight settling
on my shoulders; wherever I looked the trees and buildings took on dark and menacing aspects. I pulled my coat
tightly around me and hur ried lurching down the street, whipped by a sudden gusting wind. I bumped into someone
and stammered an apology, but he was deaf and dumb and unable to understand me. The sky loured. The pavement
seemed to tip and spin. If I hadn't happened then to duck d own a side street and pass a hotel where a convention for
the deaf was being held, there is every chance that my mind would have cracked completely and I would have spent
the rest of my life writing the sort of books for which Kafka became famous and drib bling.
As it is I went to lie in a field, along with my Hitch Hiker's Guide to Europe, and when the stars came out it occurred
to me that if only someone would write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well, then I for one would be off like a
shot. Having had this thought I promptly fell asleep and forgot about it for six years.
I went to Cambridge University. I took a number of baths-and a degree in English. I worried a lot about girls and
what had happened to my bike. Later I became a writer and worked on a lot of things that were almost incredibly
successful but in fact just f ailed to see the light of day. Other writers will know what I mean.

My pet project was to write something that would combine comedy and science fiction, and it was this obsession
that drove me into deep debt and despair. No one was interested, except finally one man a BBC radio producer
named Simon Brett who had had the s ame idea, comedy and science fiction. Although Simon only produced the
first episode before leaving the BBC to concentrate on his own writing (he is best known in the United Stares for his
excellent Charles Paris detective novels), I owe him an immense de bt of gratitude for simply getting the thing to
happen in the first place. He was succeeded by the legendary Geoffrey Perkins. In its original form the show was
going to be rather different. I was feeling a little disgruntled with the world at the time and had put together about
six different plots, each of which ended with the destruction of the world in a different way, and for a different
reason. It was to be called "The Ends of the Earth ".
While I was filling in the details of the first plot-in which the Earth was demolished to make way for a new
hyperspace express route-I realized that I needed to have someone from another planet around to tell the reader what
was going on, to give the sto ry the context it needed. So I had to work out who he was and what he was doing on
the Earth. I decided to call him Ford Prefect. (This was a joke that missed American audiences entirely, of course,
since they had never heard of the rather oddly named little car, and many thought it was a typing error for Perfect.) I
explained in the text that the minimal research my alien character had done before arriving on this planet had led
him to think that this name would be "nicely inconspicuous." He had simply mistaken the dominant life form. So
how would such a mistake arise? I remembered when I used to hitchhike through Europe and would often find that
the information or advice that came my way was out of date or misleading in some way. Most of it, of course, just
came from stories of other people's travel experiences.
At that point the title The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy suddenly popped back into my mind from wherever it
had been hiding all this time. Ford, I decided, would be a researcher who collected data for the Guide. As soon as I
started to develop this pa rticular notion, it moved inexorably to the center of the story, and the rest, as the creator of
the original Ford Prefect would say, is bunk. The story grew in the most convoluted way, as many people will be
surprised to learn. Writing episodically meant that when I finished one episode I had no idea about what the next one
would contain. When, in the twists and turns of the plot, some event su ddenly seemed to illuminate things that had
gone before, I was as surprised as anyone else. I think that the BBC's attitude toward the show while it was in
production was very similar to that which Macbeth had toward murdering people-initial doubts, followed by
cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm at the sheer scale of the unde rtaking and still no end in sight.
Reports that Geoffrey and I and the sound engineers were buried in a subterranean studio for weeks on end, taking
as long to produce a single sound effect as other people took to produce an entire series (and stealing ev erybody
else's studio time in which to do so), were all vigorously denied but absolutely true. The budget of the series
escalated to the point that it could have practically paid for a few seconds of Dallas. If the show hadn't worked... The
first episode went out on BBC Radio 4 at 10 30 P.M. on Wednesday, March 8, 1978, in a huge blaze of no publicity
at all. Bats heard it. The odd dog barked. After a couple of weeks a letter or two trickled in. So-someone out there
had listened. People I Balked to seemed to like Marvin the Paranoid Android, whom I had written in as a one-scene
joke and had only developed further at Geoffrey's insistence. Then some publishers became interested, and I was
commissioned by Pan Books in England to write up the series in book form. After a lot of procrastination and hiding
and inventing excuses and having baths, I managed to get about two-thirds of it done. At this point they said, very
pleasantly and politely, that I had already passed ten deadlines, so would I please just finish the page I was on and let
them have the damn thing. Meanwhile, I was busy trying to write another series and was also writing and script
editing the TV series "Dr. Who," because while it was all very pleasant to have your own radio series, especially one
that somebody had written in to say they had heard, it didn't exactly buy you lunch.
So that was more or less the situation when the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was published in
England in September 1979 and appeared on the Sunday Times mass market best-seller list at number one and just
stayed there. Clearly, somebody had b een listening.
This is where things start getting complicated, and this is what I was asked, in writing this Introduction, to explain.
The Guide has appeared in so many forms-books, radio, a television series, records and soon to be a major motion
picture-each time with a different story line that even its most acute followers have become baffled at times. Here
then is a breakdown of the different versions-not including the various stage versions, which haven't been seen in the
States and only complicate the matter further. The radio series began in England in March 1978. The first series
consisted of six programs, or "fits" as they were called. Fits 1 thru 6. Easy. Later that year, one more episode was
recorded and broadcast, commonly known as the Christmas episode. It cont ained no reference of any kind to
Christmas. It was called the Christmas episode because it was first broadcast on December 24, which is not
Christmas Day. After this, things began to get increasingly complicated. In the fall of 1979, the first Hitchhiker book
was published in England, called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was a substantially expanded version of
the first four episodes of the radio series, in which some of the characters behaved in entire ly different ways and
others behaved in exactly the same ways but for entirely different reasons, which amounts to the same thing but
saves rewriting the dialogue. At roughly the same time a double record album was released, which was, by contrast,
a slightly contracted version of the first four episodes of the radio series. These were not the recordings that were
originally broadcast but wholly new recordings of su bstantially the same scripts. This was done because we had
used music off gramophone records as incidental music for the series, which is fine on radio, but makes commercial
release impossible. In January 1980, five new episodes of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" were broadcast on

BBC Radio, all in one week, bringing the total number to twelve episodes. In the fall of 1980, the second Hitchhiker
book was published in England, around the same time that Harmony Books published the first book in the United
States. It was a very substantially reworked, reedited and contracted version of episodes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, S and 6
(in that order) of the radio series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." In case that seemed too straightforward,
the book was called The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, because it included the material from radio episodes
of "T he Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," which was set in a restaurant called Milliways, otherwise known as the
Restaurant at the End of the Universe. At roughly the same time, a second record album was made featuring a
heavily rewritten and expanded version of episodes 5 and 6 of the radio series. This record album was also called
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Meanwhile, a series of six television episodes of "The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy" was made by the BBC and broadcast in January 1981. This was based, more or less, on the first six
episodes of the radio series. In other words, it incorporated most o f the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
and the second half of the book The Restaurant at be End of the Universe. Therefore, though it followed the basic
structure of the radio series, it incorporated revisions from the books, which didn't. In January 1982 Harmony Books
published The Restaurant at the End of the Universe in the United States. In the summer of 1982, a third Hitchhiker
book was published simultaneously in England and the United States, called Life, the Universe and Everything. This
was not based on anything that had already been heard or seen on radio or television. In fact it f latly contradicted
episodes 7, 8, 9, 10, I 1 and 12 of the radio series. These episodes of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," you
will remember, had already been incorporated in revised form in the book called The Restaurant at the End of the
Univers e. At this point I went to America to write a film screenplay which was completely inconsistent with most of
what has gone on so far, and since that film was then delayed in the making (a rumor currently has it that filming
will start shortly before the Last Trump), I wrote a fourth and last book in the trilogy, So Long, and Thanks for All
the Fish. This was published in Britain and the USA in the fall of 1984 and it effectively contradicted everything to
date, up to and including itself. As if this all were not enough I wrote a computer game for Infocom called The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which bore only fleeting resemblances to anything that had previously gone under
that title, and in collaboration with Geoffrey Perkins assembl ed The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original
Radio Scripts (published in England and the USA in 1985). Now this was an interesting venture. The book is, as the
title suggests, a collection of all the radio scripts, as broadcast, and it is therefo re the only example of one
Hitchhiker publication accurately and consistently reflecting another. I feel a little uncomfortable with this-which is
why the introduction to that book was written after the final and definitive one you are now reading and, of course,
flatly contradicts it.
People often ask me how they can leave the planet, so I have prepared some brief notes.
How to Leave the Planet
1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it's very important that you get away as
soon as possible.
2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House-(202) 456-1414-to have a
word on your behalf with the guys at NASA.
3. If you don't have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107095-295-9051). They don't have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to
have a little influence, so you may as wel l try.
4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his
switchboard is infallible.
5. If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that de's vitally important you get
away before your phone bill arrives.
Douglas Adams
Los Angeles 1983 and
London 1985/1986