Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million
miles is an utterly insigificant little blue green planet
whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive
that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this:
most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much
of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem,
but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of
small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole
it wasn't the small green pieces of paper which were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and
most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital
watches.

Many were increasing of the opinion that they'd all made a big
mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And
some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no
one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one
man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be
to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own
in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was
that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew
how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time
it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get
nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, brfore she could get to a phone to tell anyone
about it, a terrible catastrophe occured, and the idea was
lost for ever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible stupid catasrophe and
some of its consequences.

It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on
Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occured, never seen
or even heard of by any Earthman.

Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.

In fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come
out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - of
which no Earthman had ever heard either.

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly
successful one - more popular than Celestial Home Care Omnibus,
better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero
Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy
of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some more
of God's Greatest Mistakes, and Who is this God Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern
Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already
supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard
repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many
omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least
wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian
work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words
DON'T PANIC in large friendly letters on its cover.

But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of
its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these
consequencesare inextricably intertwined with this remarkable
book begins very simply.

It begins with a house...

Taken from

"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

By Douglas Adams