Resumo de The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide is one of those books that can be labeled as beyond words. It's an incredibly witty and well-written
treatise on the inescapable futility to understand the
universe and its inhabitants.

The title of the book stems from
Adams? belief that such a guide is in dire need of invention, because
life in the universe surely could do with some explaining.

The book opens with Arthur Dent, a slightly dull and awkward
resident of England?s West Country, discovering that his house has been
marked for demolition by the city in order to make way for a new
bypass. The man in charge of the bulldozing claims that Arthur could
have complained at any time, as the plans for the bypass have been on
display for months now at the local planning office. Arthur snaps back
that the plans were on display in the basement of the planning
office, where both the lights and stairs had been removed, in an old
filing cabinet locked in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door
saying ?Beware of the Leopard".Adams hates bureaucracy in all
its forms and regularly makes jabs at its ridiculous tendencies to
become bogged down with itself. Adams wants us to
laugh at the systems running our lives but he also wants to make us
aware that things like this do actually occur, which is one of the
greatest reasons why we will never understand the world around us.
Those running the world simply defy comprehension.Only a few
chapters in, it is announced to the planet Earth that it is going to have to be destroyed in order to make way for a new hyperspatial express route that needed constructing.
The Vogons are the ones helming the demolition, an entire race of
horribly ugly and foul-tempered bureaucrats so entrenched in their
worthless system.

The main theme of this book is that the universe is completely and astoundingly mad.
There are no impossible things simply because if something was
impossible, the universe would produce it anyway just so it could laugh
at everyone?s surprised expressions. An example of this is the Babel
fish, a tiny creature that enters the head of an intelligent organism
through the ear and feeds off of incoming brainwaves, and its waste is,
in short, a telepathic translation of any language around that
intelligent organism. Adams reports that many people choose to view the
Babel fish as the proof of the nonexistence of God. These people claim
that the fish could not possibly have evolved like that by pure chance
and so proves the existence of an intelligent designer, but because God
denies proof to his believers, because proof nullifies faith, God
therefore does not exist, because the faith by which he exists suddenly
ceases to be.Adams always held an intense fascination with
technology but never once passed up the opportunity to poke fun at our
growing dependence on it, along with those companies that produce our
supposedly ?must-have? inventions. A good example of this is the
artificial denizens of the Heart of Gold, a cutting edge spaceship that
Zaphod Beeblebrox, another of the book?s characters, has stolen as the
story begins. One such entity is Marvin, an android with a wickedly
sophisticated intelligence who is assigned terribly menial jobs around
the ship. Marvin was built by the Sirius Cyberneticsorporation as a
prototype of their GPP (Genuine People Personalities) line. He is
considered by all of the main characters as a resounding failure or
success as he is continuously depressed and hates everything about
life, especially the fact that he is forced to serve the book?s
characters.

Adams creates a vision of life that is at the same time hilarious
and poignant, and so full of intricacies that the book simply must be
read to appreciate them all.

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