It is probable that no one will enjoy Life, the Universe and Everything as much as its predecessors. Once you expect the unexpected, it is no longer unexpected, and that which is startling and amusing only as long as it remains surprising cannot endure being spun out into trilogies. The books, in any case, cannot be as funny as the radio show: the dialogue of Marvin the paranoid android, for instance, is pretty dull in print but a real scream when rendered in … [a] magnificently morose (and electronically distorted) voice. Then again, this third volume gives way more than the second (and much more than the first) to the inherent gloominess of Adams' temperament. His irony was always bitter, underlaid—and, indeed, fuelled—by the supposition that things can and must not only go wrong, but go wrong in the most grotesque possible fashion, that being what you'd...