Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy
I finally got around to reading this book today. God, it was so much better than I thought it would be. Funny, irreverent, a girl named trillian.....what more do you want out of a book?
But seriously, it was such fun reading it. I refused to buy it knowing that the prices would be jacked up due to the opening of the movie so I sat in Borders for 2 hours reading it.
Plus I loved that concept of an Improbability drive and also a planet that MADE planets....
But the best part of all? I loved the fact that the people secretly running the earth were mice....Thoroughly puts us humans in our place.
I have to try to read the rest of the books in this series, its so good. But I hope it won't be a let down the way the sequels to Ender's Game were. Some authors start out so well and then just blow it in Book 2.
Below is this great extract from the book, I got it off Xiaxue's blog because this was the one of the scenes which amused me so hugely and I'm too lazy to either search for the rest online or to type out my favourite bits.
"The Babel fish," said the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. (......) The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof for the nonexistance of God.
"The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
" 'But,' says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It would not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
" 'Oh dear,' said God, "I haven't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
---- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
But seriously, it was such fun reading it. I refused to buy it knowing that the prices would be jacked up due to the opening of the movie so I sat in Borders for 2 hours reading it.
Plus I loved that concept of an Improbability drive and also a planet that MADE planets....
But the best part of all? I loved the fact that the people secretly running the earth were mice....Thoroughly puts us humans in our place.
I have to try to read the rest of the books in this series, its so good. But I hope it won't be a let down the way the sequels to Ender's Game were. Some authors start out so well and then just blow it in Book 2.
Below is this great extract from the book, I got it off Xiaxue's blog because this was the one of the scenes which amused me so hugely and I'm too lazy to either search for the rest online or to type out my favourite bits.
"The Babel fish," said the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. (......) The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof for the nonexistance of God.
"The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
" 'But,' says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It would not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
" 'Oh dear,' said God, "I haven't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
---- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
posted by adinahaes at 7:29 AM
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