Well, this was a hot mess.  I had never gotten around to reading this last one back in the day.  A more bleak and depressing story you couldn’t imagine.  I’ve read where Adams was in a bad head space that year and took it out on the story.  He said he regretted the story and might have indicated a desire to write a better ending; he didn’t. My advice:  stop with the 4^th book and just give up any hope for everyone to have a happy ending.  Actually, the 4^th book wasn’t too bad.  At least Arthur had Fenchurch and Marvin had….something.

In this book, Adams just threw everyone under the bus; or a herd of busses.

There is some nonsense about multiverses and how the Earth is sort of right in the middle of possibilities.  Meaning that sometimes it got blown up and sometimes it didn’t.  And sometimes Tricia aka Trillian left Earth in the company of a two-headed alien; and sometimes she didn’t, leaving her in an existential funk of what-could-have-been.

There was a lovely plotline about how the Vogons had surreptitiously taken over the corporate offices of The Hitchhikers Guide publishers and Ford figured it out.  He spent the rest of the book trying to thwart them.  It didn’t end well.  I had high hopes.

Arthur had lost Fenchurch – a throwaway line in the book that she disappeared ‘off-screen.’  He then spent all his time trying to find a version of Earth that, at least, resembled his lost home.  He finally gave up and resigned himself to a backwater little planet and made sandwiches.  Then two things happened:  Trillian appeared only to drop off his teenaged daughter; apparently Trillian had availed herself of the only human DNA in a local sperm bank.  And then she left to cover a war as a journalist.  Again, I had high hopes for this story. The second thing was that Ford showed up just in time for Arthur’s daughter to steal his ship and hie off for Earth. Ford and Arthur found a dimensional hole and escaped the backwater planet; and then bought a spaceship from Elvis and followed her.

They did end up back on a very recognizable Earth and even found the answer “42” although I’m not sure the question was relevant.

BIG SPOILER JUST TO MAKE SURE YOU DON’T READ THIS BOOK:  The Vogons’ ulterior motive to taking over the publisher was really to find a way to finally and completely finish the demolition job that just didn’t seem to want to stay finished.  They succeeded.  Everybody in the story died.  Zaphod and Marvin weren’t in this story.

Arthur’s daughter was the biggest McGuffin I’ve ever read; I’m betting that Adams put himself in her character just so he could have a huge existential crisis on paper.

The charming cynicism and tongue-in-cheek references that peppered the earlier books was nowhere to be found.  I’ve read that the author Eoin Colfer resurrected the story and wrote a sixth book that allowed the characters to live; with Zaphod appearing to rescue them in the nick of time.  I also read readers’ reviews that said Colfer blew it; he simply couldn’t channel Adams sufficiently. I won’t be reading that.  ~ Catherine Book

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