Resumo de The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
(published in 1979), the characters visit the legendary planet Magrathea, home
to the now-collapsed planet building industry, and meet Slartibartfast,
a planetary coastline designer who was responsible for the fjords of
Norway. Through archival recordings, he relates the story of a race of
hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who built a computer
named Deep Thought
to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and
Everything. When the answer was revealed as 42,
they were forced to build a more powerful computer to work out what the
Ultimate Question actually was, but their plans never come to fruition. (Later
on, referencing this, Adams would create a puzzle
which could be approached in multiple ways, all yielding the answer 42.)

The computer, often mistaken for a planet
(because of its size and use of biological components), was the Earth, and was
destroyed by Vogons
five minutes before the conclusion of its 10-million-year program. Two of the
race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, who turn out to be Trillian's
mice,
want to dissect Arthur's brain to help reconstruct the question, since he is
the last remaining survivor from Earth at the moment when it was destroyed.
Trillian is also human but had left Earth six months previously with Zaphod
Beeblebrox. Our protagonists escape, setting course for "The Restaurant at
the End of the Universe." The mice, in Arthur's absence, create a phony
question since it is too troublesome for them to wait 10 million years again
just to cash in on a lucrative deal. Their new question was "How many roads must a man walk down?"

The book was adapted from the first four radio
episodes. It was first published in 1979, initially in paperback, by Pan Books, after BBC Publishing had turned down the offer of
publishing a novelisation, an action they would later regret [10]. The book reached number one on the book charts in
only its second week, and sold over 250,000 copies within three months of its
release. A hardback edition was published by Harmony Books, a division of Random House
in the United States in October 1980, and the 1981 US
paperback edition was promoted by the give-away of 3,000 free copies in the
magazine Rolling Stone to build word of mouth.
To this day, it has sold over 14 million copie

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