The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams; Neil Gaiman

The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams; Neil Gaiman

Author:Douglas Adams; Neil Gaiman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0345453743
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 1979-01-01T05:00:00+00:00


Chapter 17

Although it has been said that on Earth alone in our Galaxy is Krikkit (or cricket) treated as a fit subject for a game, and that for this reason the Earth has been shunned, this only applies to our Galaxy, and more specifically to our dimension. In some of the higher dimensions they feel they can more or less please themselves, and have been playing a peculiar game called Brockian Ultra Cricket for whatever their transdimensional equivalent of billions of years is.

“Let’s be blunt, it’s a nasty game” (says The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), “but then anyone who has been to any of the higher dimensions will know that they’re a pretty nasty heathen lot up there who should just be smashed and done in, and would be, too, if anyone could work out a way of firing missiles at right angles to reality.”

This is another example that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will employ anybody who wants to walk straight in off the street and get ripped off, especially if they happen to walk in off the street during the afternoon, when very few of the regular staff members are there.

There is a fundamental point here:

The history of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of idealism, struggle, despair, passion, success, failure and enormously long lunch breaks.

The earliest origins of the Guide are now, along with most of its financial records, lost in the mists of time.

For other, and more curious, theories about where they are lost, see below.

Most of the surviving stories, however, speak of a founding editor called Hurling Frootmig.

Hurling Frootmig, it is said, founded the Guide, established its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism and went bust.

There followed many years of penury and heart-searching during which he consulted friends, sat in darkened rooms in illegal states of mind, thought about this and that, fooled about with weights, and then, after a chance encounter with the Holy Lunching Friars of Voondoon, who claimed that just as lunch was at the center of man’s temporal day, and man’s temporal day could be seen as an analogy for his spiritual life, so lunch should be (a) seen as the center of man’s spiritual life, and (b) held in jolly nice restaurants, he refounded the Guide, laid down its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism and where you could stuff them both, and led the Guide on to its first major commercial success.

He also started to develop and explore the role of the editorial lunch break that was subsequently to play such a crucial part in the Guide’s history, since it meant that most of the actual work got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing.

Shortly after this, the Guide was taken over by Megadodo Publications of Ursa Minor Beta, thus putting the whole thing on a very sound financial footing, and allowing the fourth editor, Lig Lury, Jr., to embark on



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.