Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is dry, daft science fiction for 11 year olds who like jokes that take a second to land.<\/p>\n
It opens with Arthur Dent lying in the mud in front of a bulldozer. A bypass is coming through and his house happens to be standing where it goes. Arthur has only just found out, because the plans were on display, in a locked filing cabinet, in a disused lavatory, behind a door marked Beware of the Leopard.<\/p>\n
Then his friend Ford Prefect turns up and insists they go to the pub. Right now. Arthur is going to need a very stiff drink, apparently.<\/p>\n
Ford is not from Guildford, as he has been telling everyone for fifteen years. He is from a small planet near Betelgeuse, he has been stranded here doing research, and he has just worked out that the Earth is about to be demolished. By a different council. For a different bypass.<\/p>\n
That is the joke the whole book runs on. Enormous things and tiny things treated exactly the same way.<\/p>\n
Reading it feels like being let in on something. Adams keeps stopping the story to tell you about the guidebook itself, which sells well partly because it has the words Don’t Panic in large friendly letters on the cover. Then he goes back to Arthur, who is still muddy and still cross. Your reader will spot that most of the jokes work by taking something ridiculous completely seriously.<\/p>\n
Worth knowing what is actually in it. Ford is a drunk, and Adams says so cheerfully more than once. There is a lot of pub, a lot of whisky and a drinking game with its own song. There is some mild swearing of the bloody and shut up sort. Very early on there is a passing joke about a man nailed to a tree two thousand years ago, which some families will want to talk about and others will not.<\/p>\n
None of it is nasty. It is just written for grown-ups, and it reads that way. If your reader is still working out chapter books, this is not the one. If they are the sort who already enjoys reading a sentence twice because the second time is funnier, they will love it and quote it at you for years.<\/p>\n
Adams went back to this universe in a short story about Ford’s cousin. Young Zaphod Plays It Safe finds him running a salvage ship and cheerfully making a wrecked spacecraft nobody understands a lot less safe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is dry, daft science fiction for 11 year olds who like jokes that take a second to land. It opens with Arthur Dent lying in the mud in front of a bulldozer. A bypass is coming through and his house happens to be standing where it goes. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11237,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":9813,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Young Zaphod Plays It Safe","lr_seo_hook":"A man, his house, a bulldozer, and a friend who is not from Guildford."},"book_tag":[1046],"age_group":[28],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[270],"class_list":["post-9121","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-sci-fi-books","age_group-books-for-11-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-douglas-adams"],"yoast_title":"The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A man, his house, a bulldozer, and a friend who is not from Guildford. For ages 11+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n