Gaiman Neil - The ultimate hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

THE ULTIMATE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE DOUGLAS ADAMS
Complete & Unabridged
Contents:
Introduction:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Chapter
1
Chapter
2
Chapter
3
Chapter
4
Chapter
5
Chapter
6
Chapter
7
Chapter
8
Chapter
9
Chapter
10
Chapter
11
Chapter
12
Chapter
13
Chapter
14
Chapter
15
Chapter
16
Chapter
17
Chapter
18
Chapter
19
Chapter
20
Chapter
21
Chapter
22
Chapter
23
Chapter
24
Chapter
25
Chapter
26
Chapter
28
Chapter
29
Chapter
30
Chapter
31
Chapter
32
Chapter
33
Chapter
34
Chapter
35
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe Chapter
1
Chapter
2
Chapter
3
Chapter
4
Chapter
5
Chapter
6
Chapter
7
Chapter
8
Chapter
9
Chapter
10
Chapter
11
Chapter
12
Chapter
13
Chapter
14
Chapter
15
Chapter
16
Chapter
17
Chapter
18
Chapter
19
Chapter
20
Chapter
21
Chapter
23
Chapter
24
Chapter
25
Chapter
26
Chapter
27
Chapter
28
Chapter
29
Chapter
30
Chapter
31
Chapter
32
Chapter
33
Chapter
34
Life, the Universe and Everything Chapter
1
Chapter
2
Chapter
3
Chapter
4
Chapter
5
Chapter
6
Chapter
7
Chapter
8
Chapter
9
Chapter
10
Chapter
11
Chapter
12
Chapter
13
Chapter
14
Chapter
15
Chapter
16
Chapter
18
Chapter
19
Chapter
20
Chapter
21
Chapter
22
Chapter
23
Chapter
24
Chapter
25
Chapter
26
Chapter
27
Chapter
28
Chapter
29
Chapter
30
Chapter
31
Chapter
32
Chapter
33
Chapter
34
So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish Chapter
1
Chapter
2
Chapter
3
Chapter
4
Chapter
5
Chapter
6
Chapter
7
Chapter
8
Chapter
9
Chapter
10
Chapter
11
Chapter
12
Chapter
14
Chapter
15
Chapter
16
Chapter
17
Chapter
18
Chapter
19
Chapter
20
Chapter
21
Chapter
22
Chapter
23
Chapter
24
Chapter
25
Chapter
26
Chapter
27
Chapter
28
Chapter
29
Chapter
30
Chapter
31
Chapter
32
Chapter
33
Chapter
34
Chapter
35
Chapter
36
Chapter
37
Chapter
38
Chapter
39
Chapter
40
Epilogue:
Mostly Harmless

Chapter 2
Chapter
3
Chapter
4
Chapter
5
Chapter
6
Chapter
7
Chapter
8
Chapter
9
Chapter
10
Chapter
11
Chapter
12
Chapter
13
Chapter
14
Chapter
15
Chapter
16
Chapter
17
Chapter
18
Chapter
19
Chapter
20
Chapter
21
Chapter
22
Chapter
23
Chapter
24
Chapter
25
Introduction:
A GUIDE TO THE GUIDE
Some unhelpful remarks from the author
The history of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is now so complicated that every time I tell it I contradict myself, and whenever I do get it right I'm misquoted. So the publication of this omnibus edition seemed like a good opportunity to set the record straight-or at least firmly crooked. Anything that is put down wrong here is, as far as I'm concerned, wrong for good. The idea for the title first cropped up while I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1971. Not particularly drunk, just the sort of drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff Gssers after not having eaten for two days straight, on account of being a penniless hitchhiker. We are talking of a mild inability to stand up.
I was traveling with a copy of the Hitch Hiker s Guide to Europe by Ken Walsh, a very battered copy that I had borrowed from someone. In fact, since this was 1971 and I still have the book, it must count as stolen by now. I didn't have a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day (as it then was) because I wasn't in that financial league.
Night was beginning to fall on my field as it spun lazily underneath me. I was wondering where I could go that was cheaper than Innsbruck, revolved less and didn't do the sort of things to me that Innsbruck had done to me that afternoon. What had happened was this. I had been walking through the town trying to find a particular address, and being thoroughly lost I stopped to ask for directions from a man in the street. I knew this mightn't be easy because I don't speak German, but I was still surprised to discover just how much difficulty I was having communicating with this particular man. Gradually the truth dawned on me as we struggled in vain to understand each other that of all the people in Innsbruck I could have stopped to ask, the one I had picked did not speak English, did not speak French and was also deaf and dumb. With a series of sincerely apologetic hand movements, I disentangled myself, and a few minutes later, on another street, I stopped and asked another man who also turned out to be deaf and dumb, which was when I bought the beers. I ventured back onto the street. I tried again.
When the third man I spoke to turned out to be deaf and dumb and also blind I began to feel a terrible weight settling on my shoulders; wherever I looked the trees and buildings took on dark and menacing aspects. I pulled my coat tightly around me and hurried lurching down the street, whipped by a sudden gusting wind. I bumped into someone and stammered an apology, but he was deaf and dumb and unable to understand me. The sky loured. The pavement seemed to tip and spin. If I hadn't happened then to duck down a side street and pass a hotel where a convention for the deaf was being held, there is every chance that my mind would have cracked completely and I would have spent the rest of my life writing the sort of books for which Kafka became famous and dribbling. As it is I went to lie in a field, along with my Hitch Hiker's Guide to Europe, and when the stars came out it occurred to me that if only someone would write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well, then I for one would be off like a shot. Having had this thought I promptly fell asleep and forgot about it for six years.
I went to Cambridge University. I took a number of baths-and a degree in English. I worried a lot about girls and what had happened to my bike. Later I became a writer and worked on a lot of things that were almost incredibly successful but in fact just failed to see the light of day. Other writers will know what I mean.
My pet project was to write something that would combine comedy and science fiction, and it was this obsession that drove me into deep debt and despair. No one was interested, except finally one man a BBC radio producer named Simon Brett who had had the same idea, comedy and science fiction. Although Simon only produced the first episode before leaving the BBC to concentrate on his own writing (he is best known in the United Stares for his excellent Charles Paris detective novels), I owe him an immense debt of gratitude for simply getting the thing to happen in the first place. He was succeeded by the legendary Geoffrey Perkins.
In its original form the show was going to be rather different. I was feeling a little disgruntled with the world at the time and had put together about six different plots, each of which ended with the destruction of the world in a different way, and for a different reason. It was to be called "The Ends of the Earth "
While I was filling in the details of the first plot-in which the Earth was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace express route-I realized that I needed to have someone from another planet around to tell the reader what was going on, to give the story the context it needed. So I had to work out who he was and what he was doing on the Earth.