The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Published at the end of the 1970s, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is representative of many of the preoccupations of the time. After surviving the depredations of the Second World War and the subsequent need to rebuild bombed-out buildings and ration household necessities, England experienced a renaissance of art and culture, characterized by the so-called “Swinging 60s” in London. There was also an awakening public political consciousness during this time, activated by the Cold War between the West, represented by the democracies of Western Europe and America, primarily, and the East, represented by communist-led Russia and its many satellite countries in Eastern Europe. The war in Vietnam was a particularly galvanizing event for anti-war protestors in America and Europe. However, the optimism and activism that characterized the 1960s gave way to a growing cynicism throughout the 1970s, sparked by economic uncertainty and the tense political climate. At the same time, there was also rapidly-developing technology, particularly in mass communications.

Adams’s novel satirizes consumer capitalism and government bureaucracy. In the introductory section of the book, the narrator notes that people’s happiness appears to be tied to “the movements of small green pieces of paper” (5)—money—which is his first direct critique of capitalism. Later, in his exploration of the history of the fictional planet, Magrathea, Adams again points out the irony of unchecked consumption and the resulting imbalance of wealth: Because Magrathea’s designer planets are so wildly successful and so wildly expensive, it becomes the wealthiest civilization in the Galaxy, thus bankrupting everyone else. The only signs of life throughout the impoverished Galaxy are “the pen scratchings of scholars” writing “little treatises on the value of a planned political economy” (78), which reflects wider concerns about how to control inflation and how to ensure equality of resources during Adams’s era. Adams also questions the authority of people or institutions in positions of power throughout the book, in keeping with the cultural attitudes of those who came of age in the post-war period.

His work is also influenced by the explosion of popular culture at the time, particularly film and television, such as the satirical humor of Monty Python and the launch of Star Wars in 1977. The absurdist humor of Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuted on the BBC in 1969, and their later movies would also display an irreverence toward authority that is the hallmark of Adams’s work as a whole. In their first film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), the troupe critiques capitalism in general, “imperialist dogma,” authoritarian rule, and the entire class system on which England’s social hierarchy is based. Adams himself would appear in two episodes of Flying Circus, and he worked with Graham Chapman, one of the troupe members, on other, non-Python projects.

Star Wars wielded another kind of influence, specifically the use of certain science-fiction tropes. The drinking game that Ford Prefect recalls in order to cajole Arthur into going to the pub with him, rather than protect his home from the bulldozers, is akin to a Jedi mind trick: Arthur’s “will begin[s] to weaken” under the force of Ford’s thoughts (13). Later, when Zaphod describes his youthful exploits with Yooden Vranx, it echoes Han Solo’s bragging about the speed of the Millennium Falcon: “We get in his trijet [. . . ] crossed three parsecs in a matter of weeks, [and] bust our way into a megafreighter I still don’t know how” (125). There is even a passing reference to A Clockwork Orange: When Arthur and Ford are subjected to the painful recitation of Vogon poetry, they are strapped to chairs and forced to listen (45), just as Alex is forced to watch the ultra-violent images that will condition him against violence in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film.

There were also scientific discoveries and technological developments gaining cultural traction at the time, which clearly influenced Adams’s work. From the emerging understanding of quantum physics to the fledgling field of chaos theory, Adams employs humorous explanations and conundrums that reflect these scientific breakthroughs. For example, in creating the Infinite Improbability Drive, Adams satirizes the randomness of astrophysics and quantum physics. The “Brownian Motion producer” that powers finite machines is actually “a nice hot cup of tea” and can be utilized as a party trick: “such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in a hostess’s undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy” (60). Adams’s preoccupation with improbability and coincidence engages with concepts derived from chaos theory, that all actions have reverberations across space and time. Arthur’s careless words falling through a wormhole and initiating a thousand-year-war in a faraway galaxy are just one example (129).

Adams also seems to anticipate the development of technologies: Computers and androids with human personalities and independent intellectual capacities anticipate Artificial Intelligence; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as represented within the text, is “a sort of electronic book” (37), an e-book ahead of its time; and the notion that people’s lives “are governed by telephone numbers” (70) presages the singular significance of the cell phone. Finally, Adams’s suggestion that the Earth is really a kind of “organic computer” (110)—a computer designed to calculate the question to the answer of life, the universe, and everything—sounds remarkably similar to recent ideas proposed by the Simulation Hypothesis. This Hypothesis suggests that the world in which humanity thinks it exists is, in fact, a computer simulation. It seems certain that Adams would be delighted by such a possibility.