What is The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy(HHGTTG for short) is a science fiction series created by Douglas Adams and produced by the BBC. It originally started out as a radio show in the 70s, and was serialized as a novel sometime later. The two ran in parallel, with both the radio show and novelizations continuing to follow the same plot through the end of the decade. In 1981, BBC decided to make a show out of the first two books.

What's it about? (SPOILERS!)

OK I’m going to do my best to be as vague as possible, but there are still spoilers, so be warned!

HHGTTG follows Arthur Dent, a placid, milquetoast British guy, and his manic pixie dream boy best friend Ford Prefect. Arthur is a human, while Ford is an alien working as an editor/field researcher for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a sort of galactic wikipedia, who has been stranded on Earth for around 15 years. Arthur is not aware of this, despite them having been friends for a while. Within the first chapter, Earth is destroyed by aliens, leaving Arthur and Ford to hitchhike their way through space.

By chance, they get picked up by Zaphod Beeblebrox, two-headed president of the galaxy, Trillian Astra, an astrophysicist that Arthur fumbled at a party a few years ago, and Marvin, their depressed pet robot. The rest of the first book follows them as they travel to Magrathea, an ancient luxury planet building factory, and learn the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.

In the second book, the group goes to a restaurant at the end of the universe. The book is entitled The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Go figure. Oh also in that one Arthur and Ford get teleported to prehistoric Britain.

I read the third book. I don’t really consider it, or any of the following books canon, since Douglas Adams didn’t want to write them. Sorry Fenchurch nation.

• 1978 - The primary phase of the radio show begins.
• 1979 - HHGTTG is first adapted into a novel.
• 1980 - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is published.
• 1981 - The TV show begins airing

Anything new beyond this I don't consider canon.

• 1982 - Life, the Universe and Everything is published
• 1984 - So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is published
• 1985 - The radio scripts are published as a book
• 1992 - Mostly Harmless is published

My Headcanons and Interpretations

I love my blorbs, and want to share some of my interpretations/headcanons for the books. Names are color coded to the pictures above.

• Ford is autistic. A lot of his mannerisms line up with my experience as an autistic person, and it's really special to me that I've found a character I can relate to in that regard.
• Trillian actually really likes Marvin. Not in a romantic way, I just think she enjoys his company and would like to see him happy.
• Zaphod is the malewife to Trillian's girlboss. He could not enact even half of his schemes without her. Piloting the Heart of Gold? All Trillian. Zaphod just sits there and looks pretty.
• Marvin sound like the vocalist in the lost media version of FEX's Subways of Your Mind. Every time I listen to it I picture Marvin.
• Arthur likes to insist he is straight despite the fact that no one really cares about that in space. (This one is not an intepretation and is purely a headcanon that I find funny.)