Illustrated by Jonathan Burton
In the fourth volume of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, Arthur Dent finds a whole new set of mind-boggling mysteries to deal with when planet Earth appears not to have been destroyed after all.
In the fourth installment of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, Arthur Dent finally comes home to Earth – somewhat inexplicably, given that it was destroyed by a Vogon Constructer Fleet. Very little has changed, and Arthur is more than happy to believe that his long, strange trip through time and space was simply a particularly alarming dream, but it seems the universe hasn’t finished with him yet. All the dolphins have vanished from the Earth’s oceans, and Arthur has been left a gift-wrapped fishbowl bearing the cryptic inscription ’So long, and thanks for all the fish.’ Along with Fenchurch, a woman with plenty of her own mysteries to solve, Arthur sets out to discover what it all means. Convinced that the secret lies in God’s Final Message to His Creation, they go in search of it.
‘An astonishing comic writer: he could craft sentences that changed the way a reader viewed the world.’
- Neil Gaiman
Bound in glittered blocked cloth
Set in Sabon
168 pages
Frontispiece and 6 colour illustrations
Metallic slipcase
9˝ x 5¾˝
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
An oddity in a series known for its oddness, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish owes much of its surreal atmosphere to the circumstances in which it was written. Adams had recently returned to England from California, following an unsuccessful attempt to get his first novel made into a film. Arthur, returning home from his wild adventures with Zaphod Beeblebrox and Ford Prefect, has picked up a lot of Adams’s world-weariness. It was also a book produced against the odds. The author, who famously enjoyed the ’whooshing sound’ made by deadlines as they flew by, had to be locked in his hotel room until the book was finished – passing each page to his editor as it was written. The result is a novel full of ingenious strangeness, reading, as Neil Gaiman describes it, as though it has ’not so much been plotted as stumbled upon’. It is an unusually optimistic and joyful instalment in the series, with a love story at its heart, while all of the author’s trademark wit and invention is in full flow.
This edition, produced in series with the other Hitchhiker novels, features seven illustrations by Jonathan Burton. His ingenious, quirky images capture the wildest flights of Adams’s imagination, including Wonko the Sane’s unsettling inside-out house, Ford Prefect menaced by a disembodied arm and a giant silver robot standing in the rubble of Harrods.
Born in Cambridge in 1952, Douglas Adams studied at Brentwood boarding school before going on to earn a BA, and later an MA, from Cambridge. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) was originally written as a weekly radio series and was later developed into a novel. This was followed by The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984) and Mostly Harmless (1992). Adams died in 2001.
Jonathan Burton has worked as an illustrator since 1999, after graduating with an MA from Kingston University, London. He has been awarded two silver medals from the Society of Illustration in New York, two Awards of Excellence from Communication Arts, and has received the Overall Professional Award for 2013 from the Association of Illustrators. For The Folio Society he has also illustrated Cover Her Face by P. D. James, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and the entire Hitchhikers series. He lives in Bordeaux, France.
If aliens were watching us, what would their favourite TV show be? What’s next for that unique publishing phenomenon, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? And how do you make the perfect sandwich? These and other unlikely questions are answered in the final volume of Adams’s universe-spanning odyssey.
Comparing Adams’s work to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Stoppard and even Jonathan Swift, science-fiction writer Adam Roberts describes this novel as ‘that rare thing: a sequel that surpasses its original’.
In the first in his ‘trilogy of five’, Douglas Adams introduces us Earthbound readers to Zaphod Beeblebrox, the Babel fish, Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters and Marvin the Paranoid Android.
More inspired lunacy in the third of Adams’s ‘trilogy of five’, here introduced by his friend, the acclaimed comedy writer Jon Canter.
