Douglas Adams's book, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy—a spin-off from his radio series—shot hilariously away from the gravity that so often weighs down modern science fiction, and proved an appropriately astronomical success. Now, he has launched a follow-up, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

It contains the same central figures: Arthur and Trillian, who escaped just before the Earth was destroyed to make way for a hyperspatial express route; Ford, who 'was in fact from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed'; Zaphod, rogue President of the Galaxy, 'recently voted the Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe'; and Marvin the Paranoid Android, an oppressively depressive robot with 'this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side'.

In The Hitch-Hiker's Guide—a sardonically funny exercise in galactic globe-trotting—they hurtled...