Questions tagged [the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy]
For questions about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a series of BBC radio plays and books by Douglas Adams. It is a science fiction comedy, beginning with the destruction of Earth to make a hyperspace bypass and a quest for the question to the ultimate answer (which is 42).
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Is the age of the Earth in the novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" 10 million years?
At the time of the destruction, the Earth was 10 million years old. However, in the series, the guide indicates a scientifically recognized age of 4.5 billion years. Is there a logical explanation for ...
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What colour is Zem the mattress in "Life, the Universe, and Everything?"
In Life, the Universe and Everything, a population of mattresses, all called Zem, happily lives on the planet Sqornshellous Zeta. Do we have details, or reasonable intuition, about their color?
The ...
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Was Douglas Adams's Deep Thought inspired by Robert Sheckley's Answerer?
Robert Sheckley's short story "Ask a Foolish Question" (1953) is about a sophisticated machine called Answerer which can answer any question but only those that are "valid", ...
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Was Douglas Adams specifically joking about British small talk?
There's this paragraph in the book:
“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as ...
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Was Douglas Adams trying to express something in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books?
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of my favorite science fiction stories. I used to consider it as only an interesting story book, but now I think the author wants to express a lot of things ...
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What should be understood from the message from god to its creation in H2G2?
In the fourth book of the H2G2 trilogy, Fenchurch and Arthur go check the message from god to its creation.
PS: Some translations may not be accurate, as I did not read it in english.
The message is ...
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How did the Dine-O-Charge come about to being an accepted payment method in the Galaxy?
If I remember correctly, in one of the earlier books Ford Prefect attempts at paying a bartender with his Amex card while he's fully aware that only Earth had this primitive form of plastic currency. ...
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Did Douglas Adams say "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe."?
I like the quote:
I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe.
It seems to sum up some of the weird things and coincidences I encounter in life. The quote is allegedly from ...
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Is 'Semprini' an HHGG expletive?
I seem to remember 'Semprini' being an obscenity used by Zaphod. Did I imagine it? I have discovered it was used as such by Monty Python, as was 'Belgium'.
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How does the Babel fish translate the Vogonic phonetic for Barnard’s star?
I saw this question asked recently.
Presuming that Vogonic cosmography and Human cosmography are unlike, the brain waves for the Human interpretation of Barnard’s star would not correlate with the ...
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How was Zaphod Beeblebrox five hundred thousand light years away from the Sun and still in the Milky way?
In chapter 4 of the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, the first part of the six book series it reads,
Far away on the opposite spiral arm of the Galaxy, five hundred
thousand light-years from ...
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Is there a reason "Hoopy" is rarely used in The Hitchhiker's Guide? [closed]
“Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly ...
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What is this green alien supposed to be on the American covers of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"?
I have the 2017 Del Rey Books mass market edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Here is the front cover:
It features a circular green alien with two arms sticking its tongue out. Looking ...
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What does "Sund, explns." mean in one of the Hitchhiker's guide books?
In the second book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, contractors were told not to install a teleporter into a ship that's going to be sent into the sun. They did it anyway and put it in ...
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Did Douglas Adams get the idea of communication/alien dolphins from "Stationary Orbit" by Peter Macey?
Inspired by this question/answer.
Given that the novel by Macey was written four years prior to the first broadcast of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and subsequent novelization, is there any ...
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