So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

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.