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Guida Galattica Per Gli Autostoppisti

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

Go figure!

Not that watches matter much at this point, considering the planet Earth is about to be destroyed to make way for a new highway. Okay, digital watches aren't a great invention, and the planet will be destroyed. It couldn't get worse than this.

Don't panic.

You, my dear Arthur, consider yourself worse off. They are demolishing your house. There's no time for protest now, though, if you want to save yourself it's time to stick out your thumb and hope for a galactic hitchhike. Even if it's from the Vogons, creatures with the same sex appeal as "a car accident". 

And then? Then who knows. Hold your breath and take a towel with you. 

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers some advice on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value: you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it around your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough."

 Don't be alarmed if a whale or a pot of petunias drops out of the sky on top of you. Highly improbable things, but not impossible. Don't be surprised either if the whale invites you to ponder existence and the existent with it. If necessary, flip through your Hitchhiker’s Guide.

"The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate."

Yes, but why? Why reality?

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

And then?

Science fiction, pure English humor, almost thirty years old (October 1979!), and a story so absurd that it hardly justifies the writing of this "trilogy in five parts" (of which this is the first book). That's all. It's improbable that a book with such characteristics could be appreciated; someone must have turned on the infinite improbability drive of the 'Heart of Gold'.