Mostly Harmless (Hitchhiker's Trilogy, No 5)

Rating:
Summary: For the love of Zarquon....
Review: This book was a decent read, but shy's in comparison to the first four of the series. The wacky zany and highly entertaining universe Adams created is somewhat unsettled by this book. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth for the dedicated fan. I am honestly lead to believe, after having read all of Adams' work, that another book was to follow this one. The issues of Fenchurch as well as there being two Trillian's in the end, plus the lack of Zaphod (with the Heart of Gold) just leaves the door open for a loop hole out of the disturbingly final tone to this book. A loophole I don't Adams was overlooking. While I can appreciate the ideas this book presented, I have to agree with some of the other reviewers here that the previous books filled you with a sort of hope that things would work out for poor and miserable Arthur Dent, as well as, finding it hard to believe that Ford Prefect couldn't find himself out of any difficult situation. While I don't know if I personally could ever get enough of the hitchhiker series, I'm indecisive as which book I would rather have as a finale......

Rating:
Summary: Mostly Harmful
Review: When describing The Hitchhiker books to friends, I say that you can pick up any one, open it to a random page, start reading, and get as much from story as you would if you read the entire series start to finish. Now, this is either a sign of Douglas Adams' sheer brilliance, or a sign of his well executed, serial lampoonery. I choose the latter for "Mostly Harmless" and for the rest of the Hitchhiker series in general. After all, brilliant is as brilliant ends.

No doubt, the Hitchhiker books are perhaps the most entertaining sci-fi comedy I've ever read. Moreover, at one happy moment ("So Long and Thanks for the Fish") the story rises above episodic, laugh-out-loud comedy, and becomes a tale that one can take a human interest in. Of course, whatever humanity developed there is squished to smithereens in "Mostly Harmless", and that is no surprise. The careful reader should have noted that if there is a single prominent theme in Adams' writing, it is that the human viewpoint is irrelevant, simply a few blips on the probability axis, mostly harmless and dispensable enough to be eradicated from all possibility by single-minded space slugs and zero-minded alien astrologers. But perhaps the most disappointing parts of "Mostly Harmless" are the shallow and painful exchages between Arthur and Random. Therein was much potential for Adams to let us again dare to care about Arthur, above and beyond him being the biggest loser in the universe. Maybe if Arthur had strapped Random and Trillian to a Perfectly Normal Beast and sent them off without alimony or child support, things would have been a lot more interesting. Oh well.

Mr. Adams was a self proclaimed "radical atheist", so perhaps the lackadaisy nihilism of "Mostly Harmless", and the Hitchhiker series as a whole, was his answer to the ultimate question. Regardless, the irony is that "Mostly Harmless" is mostly harmful to Adams' magnum opus, which, I think most will agree, is an otherwise uniquely entertaining sci-fi experience this side of the Milky Way.