Novel: Life, the Universe and Everything

Overview
Douglas Adams’s third Hitchhiker’s novel hurls Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect from prehistoric exile back into a galactic crisis when an ancient feud threatens everything. Life, the Universe and Everything turns a quintessentially English game into a cosmic doomsday device, intertwining slapstick invention, grand satire, and time-bending capers. While the Guide’s entries still nibble at the edges with footnote-like wit, the book narrows its aim on a single peril: a civilization so isolated that, upon discovering the wider cosmos, it decides to wipe it away. The result is a brisk, joke-dense quest with improbable technology, existential puzzles, and a surprisingly humane resolution.

The Krikkit Problem
Rescued from the Stone Age by a time-sliding sofa that deposits them at Lord’s Cricket Ground days before Earth’s destruction, Arthur and Ford witness a spaceship raid that steals the Ashes, the sport’s iconic urn. Slartibartfast swoops in with the revelation: this is one piece of a scattered Key to the Wikkit Gate, a lock holding the planet Krikkit in a Slo-Time envelope. Millennia earlier, Krikkit, hidden in a dust cloud, believed itself alone. When a ship crashed and revealed the universe, the Krikkiters’ provincial certainty curdled into genocidal resolve. A galaxy-spanning war ended with their imprisonment and the Key broken up and disguised as momentous artifacts strewn across space and time. Now Krikkit robots are quietly reassembling it to restart the war and finish the job.

The Chase Through Space and Time
Slartibartfast recruits Arthur and Ford onto the Bistromath, a ship powered by bistromathics, the uncanny arithmetic of restaurant bills, camouflaged by a Somebody Else’s Problem field. Their pursuit careens from the eternal party in Islington that never ended to bleak corners of deep space, folding in Trillian and the ever-depressed Marvin. Arthur blunders into the Cathedral of Hate, where a reincarnated being named Agrajag tries to murder him for repeatedly and inadvertently causing its deaths across lifetimes. In panicked desperation, Arthur learns to fly by missing the ground, a sublime gag that also becomes unexpectedly practical. Meanwhile, the robots keep collecting Key components, their politeness matched only by their efficiency.

Revelations and Climax
The hunt points to Hactar, a planet-sized computer pulverized into a sentient dust cloud after it subtly sabotaged a commissioned ultimate weapon. Unable to die or forget its purpose, Hactar has been nudging events so Krikkit would assemble a different path to universal annihilation. The Wikkit Gate is opened; Krikkit’s leader prepares to resume the war; a final, elegant bomb awaits activation. The turning point is disarmingly small: Trillian, the only one to treat Krikkiters as more than caricatures, punctures their chauvinism with calm logic and weary compassion, halting the political will behind the atrocity. Hactar attempts a last deceitful detonation, but Arthur, armed with nothing grander than a cricket ball and a lifetime of English awkwardness, spoils the mechanism with an improbable throw. The bomb fails; Hactar, exposed, fades into weary contrition. Krikkit is steered toward reconciliation rather than revenge, its people coaxed into seeing a universe too intricate to be tidily erased.

Themes and Tone
Adams skewers parochialism and the comforts of certainty, using Krikkit’s literal insularity as a funhouse mirror for human small-mindedness. Bureaucracy, etiquette, and sports rituals sit beside apocalyptic machinery, their absurd equivalence a running joke. Technology obeys psychology more than physics; drives function on belief, fields conceal by social habit, and problems yield to empathy as often as to force. The comedy is quicksilver and pedantic in the best way, yet the book’s heart rests with a handful of bewildered beings choosing curiosity over fear. For a series famous for cosmic punch lines, this installment’s answer is not a number but a change of mind.