[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is] science fiction and it's extremely funny—a rare and precious conjunction in a field Douglas (Noel) Adams 1952– Photograph by Mary Allen from Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams; copyright © 1982 by Douglas Adams; used by permission of Harmony Books, a division of Crown Publishers, Inc.where what usually passes for humor is a bad pun at the end of a dull story.

There's nothing dull about the Guide, which is inspired lunacy that leaves hardly a science fictional cliché alive. It relates, in an almost linear fashion, the adventures of an interstellar hitchhiker who calls himself Ford Prefect (when he's visiting that mostly harmless planet called Earth, at any rate) and his dazed companion Arthur Dent, who is fated to see not only his house but his entire world demolished to make way for a new expressway. On their travels...