[Just your average movie goer]

I think that's probably right. Been a while since I read them though. Did anyone read the fifth one? That was when things really went downhill... literally. But still worth a look. I found them all pretty entertaining. But like Deven said, I think the first three are the best.

[Rory]

Well, I think originally it was just supposed to be a silly idea for blowing up the earth, really. I rather liked all the books. I found them all to be entertaining and funny, and I liked how he brought it full circle, sort of.

Wasn't the third one where Arthur has sex with that woman? Or was that the fourth? I think it was the fourth. If so, then the fourth was the weakest of the five, in my opinion. And Douglas Adams expressed some regret in being so disrespectful of his readers in that one part, where he tells them that they can all fuck off if they dont want to hear about Arthur Dent's love life.

The fifth book had some wicked nice bits about sandwiches, and was, in my opinion, rather enjoyable, really.

[Deven]

The fifth book had some wicked nice bits about sandwiches

I only wish there were more books of which this could be said.

This post has been edited by Deven: 13 September 2004 - 07:31 AM

[civilian_number_two]

I understand that they were originally only supposed to be a trilogy.

They weren't even that. The chronology goes like this: Douglas Adams got the opportunity to write and direct and produce a radio series for the BBC, and he nearly literally wrote it one episode at a time. The way he tells it, when Ford and Arthur are thrown out of the Vogon spaceship at the end of episode 1, he had no idea how they'd survive. He had to write an answer and then record it before the next episode was due, a week later; BBC radio plays had relativly low standards in the 70s, maybe they still do: anyway, he'd worked on other shows, so he had some trust, and he ran away with it.

The show was technically more than most people had ever done on radio before, with unique sound effects and musical cues, and of course absurd subject matter on par with the stuff Monty Python was doing. So it became a hit, mostly I think because of Marvin and the the narration from the book (Simon Jones will narrate the film!), and he got offered a tv series by the very same BBC, and he cast all the same people, and he shot it more or less word-for-word, only he didn't go as far with the tv series as he did with the radio series. No second season, that is.

Both are great, if you have the chance. The tv series is on DVD, and available everywhere; the radio series is hard to come by (please, anyone, tell me where I can download it, as my cassette tapes are from the late 80s) but you can read the transcripts, which are wonderful and full of footnotes and commentary. Add to which you can read the second season, where all new stuff happens, stuff that didn't make any of the books!

Someone came along and offered Adams a book deal, which he shrugged off and accepted at the same time; you can see how seriously he took the notion of "deadline" by how abruptly the first book ends. The first two books more or less follow the first season of the radio series, and the entirety of the tv series, except the order of some things changes, like it did in the tv show. But it's more or less the same thing.

The third book, the one about the Krikkit war, is entirely new, has nothing to do with the radio or tv series, and was my favorite one of the books for that reason: my initial exposure had been to the tv series, and then after that to the radio plays that my uncle brought to me from Ireland, so the novels were well after-the-fact. LIFE THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING was entirely novel, so I loved it the most. In retrospect I might not love it as much now, but in those days it was the best book ever.

The other two books are terrible, IMO, but with good bits here and there. At that time Adams was working on the Dirk Gently books, and I think he put more heart into them than into the Hitchhiker sequels, which I'm sure he just did because someone dangled some money in front of his face.

That's my $0.02