It is probable that no one will enjoy Life, the Universe and Everything as much as its predecessors. Once you expect the unexpected, it is no longer unexpected, and that which is startling and amusing only as long as it remains surprising cannot endure being spun out into trilogies. The books, in any case, cannot be as funny as the radio show: the dialogue of Marvin the paranoid android, for instance, is pretty dull in print but a real scream when rendered in … [a] magnificently morose (and electronically distorted) voice. Then again, this third volume gives way more than the second (and much more than the first) to the inherent gloominess of Adams' temperament. His irony was always bitter, underlaid—and, indeed, fuelled—by the supposition that things can and must not only go wrong, but go wrong in the most grotesque possible fashion, that being what you'd expect of our kind of universe. The answer to the riddle of life, the universe, and everything is 42, largely because by the time you get to that age (because you're as young as you feel, some people reach it much earlier than others, including Douglas Adams, who is only thirty) you know perfectly well that it doesn't matter a damn whether the riddle has an answer or not, or whether there's a riddle at all. Personally, I appreciate Adams' work, but can't really get all that enthusiastic about it because I've been ninety-two since I was fifteen and there's nothing he can tell me about the awful ways of the infinitely silly universe. (pp. 19-20)
Brian Stableford, in a review of "Life, the Universe and Everything," in Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review (copyright © 1933 by Science Fiction Research Association), No. 12, March, 1983, pp. 19-20.
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