The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The first words I read in a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book were: “Zaphod’s faces fell.”

I had never heard of the series. It turned out to be the key to a lock that I didn’t know I had.

I was in college. I had a weekly routine surveying the new and used bookshops downtown. It wasn’t a big town so an evening or part of an afternoon was plenty of time to check them all.

Having such a routine is…well it’s not a behavior shared among a majority of people.

I had then (as I do now) a few sections I hit every time before I explored other sections with no particular aim in mind. Fashion? Why not. Floral design? Not my thing but let’s see what’s there. Romance? Ok, not that section.

Sometimes I’m looking for a book on my list but I’m usually looking for serendipity.

Which is how I found The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. In the “SciFi/Fantasy” section of a bookstore, I was pulling books out by the spine without reading the title. I was skeptical of the green faced blob (“Cosmic Cutie”) cover art with, it turns out, good reason, but opened to a random page (a non-deterministic Page 99 test) and read those words:

“Zaphod’s faces fell.”

I looked back at the cover for clues. Zaphod? Faces? Plural?

The cover said it was the sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I found that book on the shelf and opened it.

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 98 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

I bought the book.

I had no inkling that Hitchhiker’s Guide would find fertile soil, well-tilled by Monty Python and Fawlty Towers which had significantly shaped our family’s humor. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is probably the fiction book that has had the most profound and farthest reaching impact on me.