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The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online
A Del Rey ® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, copyright © 1979 by Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, copyright © 1980 by Douglas Adams
Life, the Universe and Everything, copyright © 1982 by Douglas Adams
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, copyright © 1985 by Douglas Adams
Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, copyright © 1986 by Douglas Adams
Mostly Harmless, copyright © 1992 by Serious Productions
Foreword copyright © 2002 by Neil Gaiman
Introduction copyright © 1986 by Douglas Adams
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. This edition was previously published by Random House Value Publishing as The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide and also in separate volumes.
Grateful acknowledgment is given for lyric excerpts from “You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright 1945 by Williamson Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights managed by T. B. Harms Company c/o The Welk Music Group. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.delreybooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-49846-5
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword: What Was He Like, Douglas Adams?
Introduction: A Guide to the Guide: Some unhelpful remarks from the author
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Life, the Universe and Everything Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
Young Zaphod Plays It Safe Mostly Harmless
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Foreword:
What Was He Like,
Douglas Adams?
He was tall, very tall. He had an air of cheerful diffidence. He combined a razor-sharp intellect and understanding of what he was doing with the puzzled look of someone who had backed into a profession that surprised him in a world that perplexed him. And he gave the impression that, all in all, he was rather enjoying it.
He was a genius, of course. It’s a word that gets tossed around a lot these days, and it’s used to mean pretty much anything. But Douglas was a genius, because he saw the world differently, and more importantly, he could communicate the world he saw. Also, once you’d seen it his way you could never go back.
Douglas Noel Adams was born in 1952 in Cambridge, England (shortly before the announcement of an even more influential DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid). He was a self-described “strange child” who did not learn to speak until he was four. He wanted to be a nuclear physicist (“I never made it because my arithmetic was so bad”), then went to Cambridge to study English, with ambitions that involved becoming part of the tradition of British writer/performers (of which the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus are the best-known example).
When he was eighteen, drunk in a field in In