So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish-Douglas Adams

How I found this book: I read it immediately after Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Setting: Earth, however since the Earth was destroyed in The Hitchhiker’s Guide, we come to the crux of our story…

Main Characters:

Arthur Dent: One of our main protagonists through all the novels, Arthur has been hitchhiking across the universe, and hears a rumor that the Earth has returned. Heading back to his home planet, he finds everything is eerily the same, and yet everything is very much different.

Fenchurch: A girl referenced in the opening page of The Hitchhiker’s Guide as the girl who finally figured it all out, she has been out of sorts ever since the Earth returned, and is one of the few people in the world whose caught on to the fact that something cataclysmic happened, she just can’t put her finger on it. Arthur finds her very beautiful.

Ford Prefect: A field report for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Ford had at one point written a heavily edited, (read two-word), article on Earth that he expected to be deleted from the latest edition. Instead he discovers that not only is the Earth back, as is his article, and that’s he’s owed a ton of money as back payment.

Marvin, the Paranoid Android: Now 37 times older than the universe itself thanks to all his time travel, Marvin waits patiently and grumpily for a chance to finally end his life.

Plot: After years of jaunting around the universe and learning how to fly with the people of Krikkit, Arthur Dent returns home to Earth…which mysteriously has reappeared. Settling back into his old life, Arthur is troubled by the existence of this new earth, and wonders if perhaps he hasn’t imagined the whole nasty business of hitchhiking across the universe. Perhaps the only other person who understands Arthur’s predicament is the beautiful but strange girl, Fenny, whom Arthur encounters and falls in love with. Meanwhile, Ford Prefect, out having a good Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, discovers while flipping through The Guide, that not only is there a new entry about Earth, (his previous entry, containing the words ‘mostly harmless’ had been edited out in the last edition), but that the new entry on Earth has all the information he had gathered from his fifteen year sojourn on the planet in the events prior to The Hitchhiker’s Guide. He decides to return to Earth to find out what is going on. Between Arthur, Fenny, and Ford, they try to discover just why it is that the Earth is still there, who their mysterious benefactors were, and why all this craziness is happening in the first place.

Themes:

Environmentalism: The environment was very important to Adams, and it is reflected in the re-creation of the Earth by the Dolphin populace of Earth, who managed to escape the destruction of the first Earth. Much as the human efforts to “Save the Dolphins” try to help preserve the endangered species, so in Adams story do the Dolphins do for humans, and it is there last message to Earth, that serves as the stories title, “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

Most of the populace are just placid berks: Arthur, by virtue of having witnessed the first destruction of Earth, and Fenny, (as well as Wonko the Sane), are part of only a small group of people who realize that anything is different in their world, (outside of the lack of dolphins, which everyone has noticed). People continue on with their lives, not even noticing that everything had once ceased to exist, and indeed they had been given a great gift. It says something for human nature that often we take for granted those things we should appreciate.

The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything: While Adams is STILL wondering what all that is about; I think he puts the idea of life sucking very succinctly, with the last message from the Creator to his Creation, “WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.” I think that’s a message many people want to hear when life gets tough.

Every book sucks somewhere: I think that this book suffers a lot less from the episodic nature of the previous ones, and is instead written as a story. So at least it hasn’t that problem. But I did have a problem with the fact that Ford is randomly stuck into the story without a firm explanation of what he is up to, and in that, Ford becomes rather the Zaphod of the story, which is a bit out-of-character for Ford, (of the two Beteulgeusians, Ford is by far the one with more marbles).

What did I like: I did like that this book for once sat still…in other words no jumping around in space and time, save for at the end. This gives you a chance to have a bit more character development of Arthur and of Fenny, and in the end I discovered I quite liked Arthur after all. In previous books he comes off much more like Charlie Brown, a hapless, wishy-washy sort of fellow who has stuff happen to him, rather than causing stuff to happen. I think this new side of Arthur makes him a much more likeable character than in previous incarnations of him.

How would I rate this wormy book: This one earns a MONSTER out of me, I think after the first book it is my next favorite of the series. I know some people wouldn’t say that it is, but I think the slower pace, character development, romance, and the more internal looking aspect of the story makes it must better than it’s previous two predecessors.