Well, I finally went and did it. I read the four books comprising the Hitchhiker's Guide (ahem) trilogy. So now I finally get a lot of references I never quite got before. For example, many years ago, a friend used the nickname 'Zaphod Beeblebrox' on the net, and I've seen many others use it since. Zaphod was the two headed alien who was famous for saying something along the lines of "I get stranger things than you with my breakfast cereal" to a bureaucratic alien. I also know who Arthur Dent is and Wowbagger and Ford Prefect and Marvin. And I now understand the babelfish reference at altavista!
The books are: 1) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 2) The Restautant at the end of the Universe, 3) Life, the Universe and Everything, and 4) So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish. The first book was by far the best and funniest. The Earth gets wiped out, but Arthur escapes with Ford Prefect and eventually finds Zaphod and his girlfriend (Trillian, another earth person). They discover eventually that mice are actually in charge and that the Earth is (was) a giant computer designed to find out the question to the ultimate answer. The Restaurant at the end of the Universe actually refers to the End of Time, not the edge of the physical universe.
It's a fun romp at first, but I found the series to be a little tiresome towards the end. And the ending is on par with those sorts of book endings where some intricate plot or dire consequence comes to its denouement by the main character waking from a nightmare. In short, it was not an ending that was very fulfilling to a reader ... not this reader in any case. It's a four book trilogy, each book being about 200 pages in length. All of it could have been printed in a single book, though, so I'm inclined to think the books subsequent to the first were capitalizing on a proven moneymaker. Sorta like that crappy sequel to Disney's original Aladdin movie.
