Hitchhiker's Guide Turns 30 193
XaN-ASMoDi writes "Yesterday saw the 30th anniversary of the very first broadcast of Douglas Adam's seminal work, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", to mark this, Mark Vernon has written an article for the BBC News Magazine on the answer to The Question.
'It's 30 years since Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy made its debut on BBC radio, but its most famous mystery is still waiting to be resolved...'"
Maybe my memory's failing me... (Score:4, Informative)
The answer.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:if we knew (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:2, Informative)
They just picked it because it was the funniest number they could think of.
It created its own nerdy significance. :)
Re:Maybe my memory's failing me... (Score:5, Informative)
That was the Question that came out of Arthur's brain, when pulling random letters from the Scrabble tile bag in pre-historic Earth. But as Ford and Arthur pointed out just before they did so, Arthur escaped from the Earth just before his planet was destroyed. So whatever comes out probably won't be the correct Question, but it should be close.
And in fact, 6 x 7 = 42, so 6 x 9 was off by 2. :-)
Re:Rubbish article (Score:5, Informative)
In fact if you read much of his stuff, including interviews (I have everything its possible to get in audio form), you learn that he definitely did not want the movie to be a copy of either the book or the radio series. Actually it never could be a copy of the radio series, because there were all sorts of problems over what Douglas had the right to use.
It's not fashionable to like the H2G2 movie, but I enjoyed it hugely. Had it been an exact rehash of the same old stuff I'd have been annoyed. I wanted to not know what was going on for as much of the film as possible. Casting Mos Def as Ford Prefect was an inspired move, he performed the role really well. I'm not so sure about Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, but we can't have everything.
And Marvin? Well he was amazing. I never did understand why such an advanced robot should look like the one in the tv series. The one in the movie was much closer to my mental image of the robot then I expected.
Re:Maybe my memory's failing me... (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, but that couldn't be the Ultimate Question. As it's defined in HGTTG, it's practically impossible to derive the Answer from the Question, or vice versa. (Yet the Answer is fully responsive to the Question.)
Actually, the Question is presented in the books. There's a conversation between Marvin and a mattress creature on Squornshellous Zeta in which - well, read it for yourself [geocities.com]. It's right there, plain as day.
My geek duties for the day having been satisfied, I shall now go have breakfast... ;)
- David Stein
Re:Maybe my memory's failing me... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maybe my memory's failing me... (Score:4, Informative)
It's base 10, and intended to be wrong, to allow the punchline of "I always knew there was something fundamentally wrong about the universe".
Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I should finish the series (Score:3, Informative)
Radio - third series (Tertiary Phase) also good; missed the 4th one, so can't comment
Books - three is good, four is short (because he was locked in a hotel room with only a Mac Plus to write it on, rather than an of his 5 Mac IIs,because the publisher had let him miss too many deadlines already, and wanted a book. any book). Pass on five, unless you like downer endings
Re:This book will live forever (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:4, Informative)
There was no deep hidden meaning in the selection at all.
RIP, Douglas, we miss you.
Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:5, Informative)
Adams *did* reveal the "secret" behind 42 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's not the ultimate meaning... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, but the Belgium joke actually predates that: it was in the second radio series, from which Life, The Universe And Everything was very loosely adapted. (Zaphod says it when about to fall out of the Nutrimatic cup.)
Peter