So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [0]
“Douglas Adams is a terrific satirist.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“What’s such fun is how amusing the galaxy looks through Adams’s sardonically silly eyes.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Adams is one of those rare treasures: an author who, one senses, has as much fun writing as one has reading.”
—The Arizona Daily Star
“Riotous goings-on … the best entry since the original Hitchhiker’s.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Books by Douglas Adams
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING
SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH
DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY
THE LONG DARK TEA-TIME OF THE SOUL
MOSTLY HARMLESS
THE SALMON OF DOUBT THE ULTIMATE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
THE ORIGINAL HITCHHIKER RADIO SCRIPTS
THE MEANING OF LIFF (with John Lloyd)
LAST CHANCE TO SEE (with Mark Carwardine)
THE DEEPER MEANING OF LIFF (with John Lloyd)
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For Jane
With thanks
to Rick and Heidi for the loan of their stable event
to Mogens and Andy and all at Huntsham Court for a number of unstable events
and especially to Sonny Mehta for being stable through all events.
Prologue
ar out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has—or rather, had—a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.
Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, and so the idea was lost, seemingly for ever.
This is her story.
Chapter 1
hat evening it was dark early, which was normal for the time of year. It was cold and windy, which was normal.
It started to rain, which was particularly normal.
A spacecraft landed, which was not.
There was nobody around to see it except for some spectacularly stupid quadrupeds who hadn’t the faintest idea what to make of it, or whether they were meant to make anything of it, or eat it, or what. So they did what they did to everything, which was to run away from it and try to hide under each other, which never worked.
It slipped down out of the clouds, seeming to be balanced on a single beam of light.
From a distance you would scarcely have noticed it through the lightning and the storm clouds, but seen from close up it was strangely beautiful—a gray craft of elegantly sculpted form; quite small.
Of course, one never has the slightest notion