Popular Science Review - The Science of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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Review - The Science of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Michael Hanlon

I am very fond of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Many have come to this fantastical science fiction humour through Adams' bestselling books, but it's impossible to rival the heady days when it was first broadcast as a radio series. I can remember frantically pushing a cushion into my mouth to try to suppress the hysterical laughter, because I was recording it from the radio using a tape recorder with a microphone (such was the high tech of the day).

Partly because of this affection, I approached this book with some caution. Much of the science in HHGTTG is pure fantasy, though as Michael Hanlon points out, Adams was a technology fan, and enthused by the hot cosmological topics of the moment like black holes and the Big Bang. I was also concerned because it's difficult to avoid the temptation to write in a pseudo-Douglas Adams style, and without his masterly touch such pastiche becomes irritating very quickly.

A touch of such painful writing does surface occasionally, but like the introduction to the fictional HHGTTG, it settles down pretty quickly and after that it's good stuff. We get to cover aliens (and where they are, exactly), supercomputers, the existence of God (not exactly a science issue, but one Adams repeatedly returns to), the end and beginning of the universe (where Adams sites restaurants), time travel, the Babel fish's automatic translations, teleportation, growing meat that wants to be eaten, Matrix-style artificial universe, parallel worlds, the power of probability and ending up with the ultimate questions that could have had an answer other than 42.

If reading through that list seems a little tedious it was done to highlight what is the biggest problem with this book. It's great the way Hanlon flits from one topic to another, weaving a web of scientific and technological ideas, but often his skim is so quick and shallow that it becomes a summary and that isn't always the most exciting reading. It might have been better to have put less in and covered it in a bit more depth - just occasionally I'd read a bit and think "so?"

Even at the summary level, there were a few points where I wish Hanlon had done a little more. Just pointing out, for instance, that Deep Thought's comment about constructing a machine whose "operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate" is a parody of John the Baptist's remark about Jesus, for example, or noting that there is an exact answer to his question "What effect would a fully functional, programmable mechanical computer have had on Britain's nascent Industrial Revolution" in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's superb novel The Difference Engine. Such omissions aren't spoilers, but filling them would have given more of an edge.

What's delightful is discovering one again just how much there is in HHGTTG - and Hanlon's light style is ideally fitted to exploring the products of Douglas Adams' mind. I found myself turning the pages quickly, wanting more - which can't be a bad thing. This isn't by any means a bad book, but it could have been even better if it had delivered that "more" in depth as well as variety.

Only in paperback (US edition is hardback).

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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