So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. By Douglas Adams

So Long And Thanks For All The Fish

Douglas Adams

Ballantine Books. First published 1980.

This is the fourth book in a 'trilogy' of five books. Arthur Dent returns to an England he thought had been destroyed (in the first book 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy') to build an inter-galactic superway. 'So Long...' is chiefly a collection of reruns of jokes from the earlier books ('Don't Panic', 'Mostly Harmless', '42'...) along with sarcastic potshots at life in contemporary Britain, and other parts of the Western world. For example, the following lines about democracy: '"No", said Ford, "...On its world the people are people, the leaders are lizards". "Odd", said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy....Why don't the people get rid of the lizards?....You mean the people actually vote for the lizards?... Why?". "Because if they didn't", said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."'

There is a loose 'story' that attempts (and mostly fails) to give some direction to the book. After Creation, God has left behind a Final Message in flaming letters on a remote planet in the Galaxy. Arthur and his girlfriend, and the readers, get to read it in the last few pages - it's again a joke, of course, in the same vein the others in the trilogy, but not as quotable as the best ones.

'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' had jokes and ideas which really pointed out social injustices and logical flaws in our thinking. It attempted to deflate many of our pompous assumptions about ourselves. This book is a weak follow up, and appears to be just an attempt to do exactly the kind of thing Adams himself criticizes so frequently - extend the money-milking ability of an earlier success. It is Mostly Boring.