["The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"] is the book that answers "The Great Question, The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." The answer, as it happens, is "forty-two." Since the largest computer ever built (known as Deep Thought) takes seven-and-a-half million years to come up with the answer, the disappointment of the original questioners is perhaps understandable. They are even more disappointed when they learn that the only way to understand the answer is to phrase the question a little more specifically. For this, an even bigger computer and another ten million years are required. It turns out that this computer….

But that is telling the story in chronological order, a narrative trick that Douglas Adams (who once wrote discontinuity for "Monty Python's Flying Circus") is never guilty of. He prefers to tell his stories backward, sideway and even inside out if that will help anyone, which it probably won't. (p. 24)

Humorous science fiction novels have notoriously limited audiences; they tend to be full of "in" jokes understandable only to those who read everything from Jules Verne to Harlan Ellison. The "Hitchhiker's Guide" is a delightful exception, being written for anyone who can understand the thrill that might come to a crew of interstellar explorers who discover a mysterious planet, dead for five million years, and then hear on their "sub etha" radio a ghostly voice, hollow, reedy, insubstantial: "Greetings to you…. This is a recorded announcement, as I'm afraid we're all out at the moment…." (p. 25)