Resumo de The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction comedy
written by Douglas Adams. It originated in 1978 as a radio comedy
broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Since then it has become a series of five
books, published between 1979 and 1992, (the first of which was
entitled The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), a 1981 TV series, and a
1984 computer game. A Hollywood film version was released in April
2005, and adaptations of the last three books to radio were broadcast
from 2004 to 2005.

The title The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is often abbreviated as
"HHG", "HHGG", "HHGTTG", "HG2G", or "H2G2". This title can refer to the
several incarnations of the story, of which the books, having been
translated into over 30 languages by 2005 are the most widely
distributed. The title can also refer to the fictional guidebook The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an eccentric electronic encyclopedia
which features in the series. Last but not least, h2g2, launched as the
"Earth Edition" of the Guide, is a website hosted by the BBC featuring
a range of user-submitted articles.

Adams claimed that the title came from a 1971 incident while he was
hitch-hiking around Europe as a young man with a copy of the
Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe book, and while lying drunk in a field in
Innsbruck with a copy of the book and looking up at the stars, thought
it would be a good idea for someone to write a hitchhiker's guide to
the galaxy as well. However, he later claimed that he had told this
story so many times that he had forgotten the incident itself, and only
remembered himself telling the story. His friends are quoted as saying
that Adams mentioned the idea of "hitch-hiking around the galaxy" to
them while on holiday in Greece, in 1973.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (published in 1979), the
characters visit the legendary planet Magrathea, home of the
now-collapsed planet building industry, and meet Slartibartfast, a
planetary architect who was responsible for the fjords of Norway. 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, disguised as a planet, was the Earth, and was destroyed
five minutes before the conclusion of its 10-million-year program. The
hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, who turn out to be mice, want
to dissect Arthur's brain to help reconstruct the question, but our
protagonists escape, setting course for "The Restaurant at the End of
the Universe."

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. 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.

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