Hot Black Desiato has made so much money out of ear-shattering plutonium rock music that he is having to spend a year dead for tax reasons. Gargravarr is a man whose mind and body have agreed to live apart on the grounds of incompatibility. And here again, bleep bleep hooray, is Marvin the Paranoid Android robot, who manages to look permanently lugubrious, as far as it is possible for something with a totally metal face to show self-pity.

In short, and indeed in prolixity, chums, [The Restaurant at the End of the Universe] is the sequel to The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which has attracted a cult even among those normally impervious to the mechanical charms of science fiction. A summary of the plot would read like case notes of a nervous breakdown. Here be further adventures of Ford Prefect and his companions with odd numbers...