Whimsy is currently in short supply, a deficiency that makes Douglas Adams' new book all the more welcome. Life, the Universe and Everything … is like nothing ever published before except, perhaps, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, also written by Douglas Adams. Once again the protagonist is a reluctant wanderer named Arthur Dent; once again his intergalactic guide is an extraterrestrial named Ford Prefect. Vooming around the void accompanied by a two-headed, three-armed creature who once controlled the universe and a sexy space cadet, Dent manages to avert Armageddon and save the world for life as we never knew it. Adams delights in cosmic pratfalls, and if he sometimes loses track of his narrative, he more than makes up for it by confirming what many have suspected all along: "He learned to communicate with birds and discovered that their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries." Adams fails, however, to resolve the discrepancy between the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer. The answer, provided in Adams' first book, is 42. The question, postulated in his second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, is: What is six times nine? The third book says that Q. and A. cancel each other out—and take the universe with them. (pp. 93, 95)
Peter Stoler, "Five Novels Revive a Genre," in Time (copyright 1982 Time Inc.; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission from Time), Vol. 120, No. 20, November 15, 1982, pp. 92-3, 95.∗
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