The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
TITLE: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy AUTHORS: The field researchers and editors of Megadodo Publications ORIGIN: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series, episode "Fit the First," 1978, created and written by Douglas Adams) EDITION: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (movie, 2005, directed by Garth Jennings)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of the most remarkable, certainly the most successful, books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor—more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Coluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who Is This God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
I. Reference — Encyclopedias — Life, the universe, and everything II. Compendia of all knowledge — Technological — Definitively inaccurate III. Plot navigators — Tomes of exposition — World-building infodumps IV. Books as characters — Narrators — Fourth wall breaking
