It’s hard to describe a book that has so many unrelated concepts squeezed into it. Of course, this worked very well in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. But here, Adams has taken it up several notches, throwing in everything and then several kitchen sinks too.
This is a non-exhaustive list of some of the concepts which are introduced in the book:
- An alien electric monk, who rides to earth through a trans-dimensional gateway
- An Oxford don who has been there forever, literally. Like from when the college was established
- Sofas that get stuck in stairways, in a mathematically impossible way
- A ghost trying its best to communicate an important message so it can move on to the great beyond
- A time traveling room
- A deeper meaning to Samuel T Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner
- An alien being stuck on Earth for untold millenia, trying to resolve an engine problem
So many concepts, and somehow a single thread is woven through all of them. There are throwbacks, but there is such a high volume of new concepts being introduced, right up until towards the end of the book, that the throwback doesn’t even land.
Not his best work, but still a jolly overwhelming read.