Eoin Colfer - And Another Thing...

EOIN COLFER

If you own a copy of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, then one of the last things you would be likely to type into its v-board would be the very same title of that particular Sub-Etha volume. As presumably, since you have a copy, you already know all about the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor. However, presumption has been the runner-up in every major Causes of Intergalactic Conflict poll for the past few millennia. First place invariably going to land-grabbing bastards with big weapons, and third usually being a toss-up between coveting another sentient beings significant other and misinterpretation of simple hand gestures. One mans Wow! This pasta is fantastico is anothers Your momma plays it fast and loose with sailors.

Let us say, for example, that you are on an eight-hour layover in Port Brasta without enough credit on your implant for a Gargle Blaster, and if upon realizing that you know almost nothing about this supposedly wonderful book you hold in your hands, you decide out of sheer brain-fogging boredom to type the words the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy into the search bar on the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, what results will this flippant tappery yield?

Firstly an animated icon appears in a flash of pixels and informs you that there are three results. Which is confusing as there are obviously five listed below him, numbered in the usual order.

Guide Note: That is if your understanding of the usual numerical order is from small to large and not from derivative to inspired, as with Folfangan slugs, who judge a numbers worth based on the artistic integrity of its shape. Folfangan supermarket receipts are beauteous ribbons, but their economy collapses at least once a week.

Each of these five results is a lengthy article, accompanied by many hours of video and audio files and some dramatic reconstructions featuring quite well-known actors.

This is not the story of those articles.

But if you scroll down past article five, ignoring the offers to remortgage your kidneys and lengthen your pormwrangler, you will come to a line in tiny font that reads, If you liked this, then you might also like to read Have your icon rub itself along this link and you will be led to a text only appendix with absolutely no audio and not so much as a frame of video shot by a student director who made the whole thing in his bedroom and paid his drama soc. mates with sandwiches.

This is the story of that appendix.

S o far as we know The Imperial Galactic Government decided, over a bucket of jeweled crabs one day, that a hyperspace expressway was needed in the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy. This decision was rushed through channels ostensibly to preempt traffic congestion in the distant future, but actually to provide employment for a few ministers cousins who were forever mooching around Government Plaza. Unfortunately the Earth was in the path of this planned expressway, so the remorseless Vogons were dispatched in a constructor fleet to remove the offending planet with gentle use of thermonuclear weapons.

Two survivors managed to hitch a ride on a Vogon ship: Arthur Dent, a young English employee of a regional radio station whose plans for the morning did not include having his home planet blasted to dust beneath his slippers. Had the human race held a referendum, its quite likely that Arthur Dent would have been voted least suitable to carry the hopes of mankind into space. Arthurs university yearbook actually referred to him as most likely to end up living in a hole in the Scottish highlands with only the chip on his shoulder for company. Luckily Arthurs Betelgeusean friend, Ford Prefect, a roving reporter for that illustrious interstellar travel almanac The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, was more of an optimist. Ford saw silver linings where Arthur saw only clouds, and so between them they made one prudent space traveler, unless their travels led them to the planet Junipella, where the clouds actually did have silver linings. Arthur would have doubtless steered the ship straight into the nearest cloud of gloom, and Ford would have almost certainly attempted to steal the silver, which would have resulted in the catastrophic combustion of the natural gas inside the lining. The explosion would have been pretty, but as a heroic ending, it would have lacked a certain somethingi.e., a hero in one piece.

The only other Earthling left alive was Tricia McMillan, or Trillian to use her cool spacey name, a fiercely ambitious astrophysicist cum fledgling reporter who had always believed that there was more to life than life on Earth. In spite of this conviction, Trillian had nevertheless been amazed when she was whisked off to the stars by Zaphod Beeblebrox, the maverick two-headed Galactic President.

What can one say of President Beeblebrox that he has not already had printed on T-shirts and circulated throughout the Galaxy free with every uBid purchase?

Zaphod Says Yes to Zaphod was probably the most famous T-shirt slogan, though not even his team of psychiatrists understood what it actually meant. Second favorite was probably Beeblebrox. Just be glad hes out there.

It is a universal maxim that if someone goes to the trouble of printing something on a T-shirt, then it is almost definitely not a hundred percent untrue, which is to say that it is more than likely fairly definitely not altogether false. Consequentially, when Zaphod Beeblebrox arrived on a planet, people invariably said yes to whatever questions he asked and when he left they were glad he was out there.

These less than traditional heroes were improbably drawn to each other and embarked on a series of adventures, which mostly involved gadding around through space and time, sitting on quantum sofas, chatting with gaseous computers, and generally failing to find meaning or fulfillment in any corner of the Universe.

Arthur Dent eventually returned to the hole in space where the Earth used to be and discovered that the hole had been filled by an Earth-sized planet that looked and behaved remarkably like Earth. In fact this planet was an Earth, just not Arthurs. Not this Arthurs at any rate. Because his home planet was at the center of a plural zone, the Arthur we are concerned with had found himself shuffled along the dimensional axis to an Earth that had never been destroyed by Vogons. This rather made our Arthurs day, and his usually pessimistic mood was further improved when he encountered Fenchurch, his soul mate. Luckily this idyllic period was not cut short by Arthur and Fenchurch bumping into any alternate universe Arthurs who may have been wandering around, possibly in Los Angeles working for the BBC.