The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Taschenbuch
224 Seiten; 172.72000 mm
Sprache English
2005 Ballantine
ISBN 978-0-345-39180-3

Besprechung

Lively, sharply satirical, brilliantly written . . . ranks with the best set pieces in Mark Twain. The Atlantic

Irresistible! The Boston Globe

With droll wit, a keen eye for detail and heavy doses of insight . . . Adams makes us laugh until we cry. The San Diego Union-Tribune

One of the greatest achievements in comedy. A work of staggering genius. David Walliams

Really entertaining and fun. Michael Palin

Fizzing with ideas . . . brilliant. Charlie Brooker

Weird and wonderful. Eoin Colfer

It changed my whole life. It s literally out of this world. Tom Baker

Zusatzinfos
Textauszug
Verfasser:in
Schlagworte

Kurztext / Annotation

Es beginnt damit, dass der Engländer Arthur Dent sein Haus räumen muss, denn die Erde soll gesprengt werden, um einer Hyperraum-Umgehungsstraße Platz zu machen. Was folgt ist die unglaublichste Odyssee in der Geschichte des Weltalls.

Langtext

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Extremely funny . . . inspired lunacy . . . [and] over much too soon. The Washington Post Book World

SOON TO BE A HULU SERIES Now celebrating the pivotal 42nd anniversary of The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy!

Nominated as one of America s best-loved novels by PBS s The Great American Read

It s an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent . . . until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur s best friend has just announced that he s an alien.

After that, things get much, much worse.

With just a towel, a small yellow fish, and a book, Arthur has to navigate through a very hostile universe in the company of a gang of unreliable aliens. Luckily the fish is quite good at languages. And the book is The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy . . . which helpfully has the words DON T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover.

Douglas Adams s mega-selling pop-culture classic sends logic into orbit, plays havoc with both time and physics, offers up pithy commentary on such things as ballpoint pens, potted plants, and digital watches . . . and, most important, reveals the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Now, if you could only figure out the question. . . .

Textauszug

Chapter One

The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village. It stood on its own and looked out over a broad spread of West Country farmland. Not a remarkable house by any means it was about thirty years old, squattish, squarish, made of brick, and had four windows set in the front of a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye.

The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in. He had lived in it for about three years, ever since he had moved out of London because it made him nervous and irritable. He was about thirty as well, tall, dark-haired and never quite at ease with himself. The thing that used to worry him most was the fact that people always used to ask him what he was looking so worried about. He worked in local radio which he always used to tell his friends was a lot more interesting than they probably thought. It was, too most of his friends worked in advertising.

On Wednesday night it had rained very heavily, the lane was wet and muddy, but the Thursday morning sun was bright and clear as it shone on Arthur Dent s house for what was to be the last time.

It hadn t properly registered yet with Arthur that the council wanted to knock it down and build a bypass instead.

At eight o clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn t feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.

Toothpaste on the brush so. Scrub.

Shaving mirror pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom window. Properly adjusted, it reflected Arthur Dent s bristles. He shaved them off, washed, dried and stomped off to the kitchen to find something pleasant to put in his mouth.

Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee. Yawn.

The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment in search of something to connect with.

The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one.

He stared at it.

'Yellow,' he thought, and stomped off back to his bedroom to get dressed.

Passing the bathroom he stopped to drink a large glass of water, and another. He began to suspect that he was hung over. Why was he hung over? Had he been drinking the night before? He supposed that he must have been. He caught a glint in the shaving mirror. Yellow, he thought, and stomped on to the bedroom.

He stood and thought. The pub, he thought. Oh dear, the pub. He vaguely remembered being angry, angry about something that seemed important. He d been telling people about it, telling people about it at great length, he rather suspected: his clearest visual recollection was of glazed looks on other people s faces. Something about a new bypass he d just found out about. It had been in the pipeline for months only no one seemed to have known about it. Ridiculous. He took a swig of water. It would sort itself out, he d decided, no one wanted a bypass, the council didn t have a leg to stand on. It would sort itself out.

God, what a terrible hangover it had earned him though. He looked at himself in the wardrobe mirror. He stuck out his tongue. 'Yellow,' he thought. The word yellow wandered through his mind in search of something to connect with.

Fifteen seconds later he was out of the house and lying in front of a big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path.

Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curio

Biografische Anmerkung zu den Verfassern

Douglas Adams was born in 1952 and created all the various and contradictory manifestations of The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy: radio, novels, TV, computer games, stage adaptations, comic book, and bath towel. He was born in Cambridge and lived with his wife and daughter in Islington, London, before moving to Santa Barbara, California, where he died suddenly in 2001.

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