Abak Hussain
It’s a fairly new phenomenon for people to be having heart to heart conversations with their choice of AI, but as every geek knows, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything was already spat out by a godlike machine and published in a cult novel some 47 years ago. In the Douglas Adams classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years of thinking to give the answer. The answer is 42.
Just like so many of the answers we get, whether from human or synthetic wisdom, this one is absurd, frustrating, but really, an answer as good as any. Over time, in the geekdom and general populace, the exact phrasing has often morphed from the book’s words. It is often simply said that “the meaning of life” is 42, and that is a perfectly acceptable corruption. Many have obsessed over the properties of the number, trying to find if there was some significance there. Is there any spiritual significance to the number 42, perhaps by way of signaling an age of maturity? The author Douglas Adams, who passed away in 2001 at the age of 49, has said there is no special meaning to the number. It just is. And there you have it. This life in which we accidentally find ourselves is a series of absurdities, and a long list of questions without answers, and answers without questions, full of sound and fury and panic and towels and tea and insanely powerful computers, signifying nothing.
Photo Source: Matthieu Beaumont
The book came out in 1979, which is before I was born, so I may be excused for not reviewing it at the appropriate time. But it’s never too late to do the right thing, and so here I put down my tribute to this epic, which many younger newcomers to science fiction may still find a bit bewildering and niche. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a comedy, and the humor is very, very, British. The language is understated and sparse, and the humor comes out in dry little fits, sometimes our laughter is left hanging in midair. The sci-fi of it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense a lot of the time, and yet it has tremendous power to absorb your imagination and throw you into a series of questions. What if I got picked up in a spaceship and was suddenly told my home planet is gone? What if my civilization were part of a larger consortium of civilizations, all more powerful than mine? What if there existed poetry so bad it could kill you, and this is no hyperbole but actually cause you pain so excruciating you may die? (Many Vogons may be found in the Ekushey boimela.) What if our own planet and everything in it were nothing but a grand project designed to answer the ultimate question of … you get the idea.
But like I said, the book is sparse. My edition from Macmillan is a mere 184 pages, and can be finished in one sitting with a good cup of tea, provided you do not panic halfway. The overall pop culture universe of the HG2G though, is sprawling and kind of messy. This is because of the many different strains that were rendered for different media with different purposes in mind. It started when Douglas Adams created the original radio comedy in 1978, which ran as a series. In 1979, Adams published the first novel: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which most fans, including myself, consider canon, and really the most important thing to read in this series. If you want to ignore everything else and just read the first thin book, that is perfectly acceptable, and you won’t be missing anything important. But the first book spawned four others in the series, so now HG2G is available in many places as a box set. In 1981, a BBC TV series came out, further cementing fandom. In 2005, the first big-budget movie adaptation came out, directed by Garth Jennings and starring Martin Freeman and Zooey Deschanel. So there’s a lot of material out there, and it is not always unified. But perhaps in this case this disunity is appropriate. If the universe itself is nonsensical, and the meaning of life is 42, why would this franchise play by the rules of coherence?
Photo Source: Drew Taylor
The basic plot very quickly: the average fellow Arthur Dent, with the help of one of his friends (who turns out to be an alien) is able to hitch a ride off planet Earth. Earth is about to be demolished to make way for an intergalactic highway, so now Dent is off in some weird spaceship where none of the rules of life he learnt about apply anymore. His home planet is gone and he is floating through space with no conception of what comes next or what matters. There are many fun and obnoxious characters he meets along the way, including a Trump-like narcissist and a clinically depressed robot (perhaps he is depressed because his powerful AI allows him to understand this cold and indifferent universe more starkly than us self-deluding humans). He learns the most crucial lessons of moving through the universe, which include always carry a towel, and “Don’t Panic.” And earthly comfort can be summed up as a good cup of tea.
Like most British comedy, the vibe of HG2G can be an acquired taste. The first time I saw the film (while in college, over 20 years ago), I remember finding it a bit off-putting. But I think the story is meant to cramp your style, just a little. Take the scene of a whale coming into existence, and falling from the sky. In the few seconds of life that it has, it asks questions about its identity, where it came from and where it is going. The ground seems to come closer and closer until, splat! The whale’s life has ended before it has had a chance to comprehend why it began. Is this not an apt if infuriating metaphor for the human condition? But then, saying anything too seriously or too definitely about HG2G comes across as pedantic, like overexplaining a joke. So you just try to savor the lines, like: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”
In these bleak times of AI and space bahzillionaires, if you are looking for an antidote to your existential malaise, I can suggest you try this book. It goes down easy enough, and at less than 200 pages, two or three concentrated doses may complete the whole course. It may not solve any of your problems, but it could make you laugh, and it is perfectly safe, even without prescription.
Abak Hussain is Contributing Editor at MW Bangladesh.
