I Read: Mostly Harmless

Mostly Harmless, by Douglas Adams, was first published in 1992.

It’s the fifth book in the five-part trilogy.

I borrowed it from the Seattle Public Library.

It’s 218 pages long.

The book opens with:

“Anything that happens, happens.”

“Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.”

“Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.”

“It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.”

Tricia McMillan is a British TV anchor person. She’s come to New York to further her career by becoming an American TV anchor person. Tricia loves New York.

Ever since she’d missed that opportunity to travel into space with a two-headed alien, Tricia has learned that she should never go back to retrieve her bag.

Tricia fails her interview and returns to Britain. She learns that she should always go back to retrieve her bag.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a lot of information about parallel universes, including the fact that they are neither parallel nor universes.

A neutrino stuck an atom on one of the many Earths and created an Earth where four-leaf clovers are common, and finding a three-leaf clover is lucky, and where Tricia McMillan never boarded a spaceship with Zaphod Beeblebrox. This Earth was never destroyed by a Vogon construction fleet in order to build an intergalactic bypass.

Outside of her home in Essex, Tricia McMillan is approached by a group of extraterrestrial aliens. They’ve lost their memories. All they know is that they’re supposed to bring Tricia to their home planet, Rupert, so that she can help recalibrate their horoscopes. Seeing an opportunity for a news story, Tricia agrees to go to Rupert with them.

Meanwhile, Ford Prefect discovers that his employer, the publisher of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has been bought by InfiniDim Enterprises. InfiniDim has been making a fortune, not by selling billions of copies of The Hitchhiker’s Guide, but by selling the same copy to billions of parallel universes. Furthermore, Ford learns that he has been reassigned from field researcher to restaurant critic.

Meanwhile, Arthur Dent has arrived at the planet of NowWhat. It had been named after the first words the first settlers spoke upon landing there. It’s always cold and wet on NowWhat. It’s a miserable place.

Arthur looks at travel brochure and recognizes the planet’s landmasses. This was Earth. Or, rather, it was not Earth.

“Right planet, wrong universe,” Arthur sadly concludes.

The love of Arthur Dent’s life, Fenchurch, vanished in a hyperspace accident a year earlier. (That’s not a spoiler. It’s in the synopsis.) She vanished so completely that her name was no longer on the passenger list. The seat where she had been sitting before the hyperspace jump wasn’t even warm. Arthur realizes that he’s the only person in the entire galaxy who remembers that Fenchurch ever existed.

Arthur Dent is miserable. He wants to have a life, and wants to find a planet to live his life on. For some unknown reason, his copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy isn’t working properly, and that’s making finding a suitable planet difficult.

This book is darker than the previous four.

Then Arthur is surprised to discover that he has a teenage daughter. Her name is Random Dent. (That’s also in the synopsis. I won’t spoil who Random’s mother is.)

Arthur Dent remembers the Earth being destroyed. Ford Prefect apparently remembers this, too. Random Dent has never been to Earth, but she has heard of it. For Tricia McMillan, the Earth exists, and has always been there. When Arthur finds Trillian, she mentions Zaphod Beeblebrox, so maybe this version of Tricia does remember the Earth being destroyed.

I liked the whole “parallel reality” bit in the previous book better, where it wasn’t clearly explained. In this book, I thought it was explained too much, and it felt heavy-handed.

Towards the end, when Tricia gets mistaken for Trillian, the “parallel reality” bit finally began to grow on me.

There’s a cameo by a famous person who’s never named, but their identity is obvious early on. And yet, the book keeps giving obvious hint after obvious hint. I thought that was especially heavy-handed.

I don’t like the way that Fenchurch was suddenly written out of the story. We don’t even get to experience the shock of her disappearance. We’re merely told that this character who took up most of the previous book, and became a major part of Arthur Dent’s life, is just gone.

This book is lacking a lot of Douglas Adams’ earlier wit and finesse. What happened here?

I was disappointed by this final book in the series.