And Another Thing...

by Eoin Colfer

  Sub-etha networks

  When Ford Prefect hitches a ride on a passing spaceship, he does so by means of an electronic sub-etha “thumb”. When Trillian visits Arthur on Lamuella, she informs him that she is now working for a major sub-etha broadcasting network. And it is via the sub-etha net that field researchers submit their material to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself.

  Unlike many of Adams’s ideas, the sub-etha network requires no hypothetical quantum physics to evaluate its chances of one day becoming a reality. It is, of course, here already, in the form of the Internet. Though its use in military and academic fields pre-dates Adams’s initial radio script by some years, the World Wide Web as we know it didn’t arrive until at least a decade later, thanks to the invention of HTML, not to mention the growth in home computing. (Adams was a predictably enthusiastic early adopter, first going online in 1983.)

  Just as the sub-etha network became a reality in the guise of the Internet, Adams actually attempted to launch an Earth-based Hitchhiker’s Guide, in the form of online encyclopedia h2g2.com. The collaborative nature of this site, open to contributors all over the world, parallels that of The Guide, whose entries are as likely to come from passing strangers as from established researchers such as Ford Prefect.

  Of course, this editorial stance has become standard practice with the growth of “wiki” sites, of which by far the best known is Wikipedia, launched in 2001. As with Wikipedia, The Guide’s content can be biased towards the interests of its particular demographic, and neither is it always reliable. (One apparently minor typo has led many trusting interplanetary hitchhikers to their death at the hands of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts, which unfortunately make a good meal of, rather than for, visiting tourists.) Also like Wikipedia, however, it has clear advantages over its book-based equivalent. Not only does The Guide have more entries and greater portability than the Encyclopaedia Galactica, but as every Hitchhiker’s fan knows, it is also slightly cheaper and has “Don’t Panic” inscribed on the cover.

  Recent phenomena such as blogging and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are also reminiscent of The Guide’s egalitarian editorial policy. And the concept of open-source software, developed in a transparent, collaborative fashion via peer review rather than behind closed doors by copyright holders, goes one step beyond Adams’s wildest predictions.

  Teleportation

  When Arthur, Ford, Zaphod, Trillian and Marvin find themselves on a stolen spaceship heading into the heart of a sun, they escape via a teleport. Indeed, it’s the same mode of transport that allowed Arthur and Ford to escape from Earth right at the start of the Hitchhiker’s story.

  Though it may sound just as unlikely as travel via the Infinite Improbability Drive, teleportation – or matter transference – is in fact far closer to reality. The basis for this is a seemingly impossible but readily observable phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, which appears to contradict Einstein by seemingly operating faster than the speed of light. (It is not known how its speed compares with the Hingefreel spaceship, powered by the one thing faster than light: bad news.)

  Much like time travel, however, teleportation throws up some tricky questions. Would it really be you that arrived at the other end, or simply a facsimile? Does the original subject simply vanish (and would this constitute an act of murder?), or remain in the original

  Universes

  As if parallel universes weren’t confusing enough already, they also throw up some pretty awkward questions in terms of semantics. For if the Universe by definition encompasses all of existence, how can there can be a parallel version? Some have responded by referring to the counterparts in different terms: rather than parallel universes, some suggest “alternative realities”, “interpenetrating dimensions”, “parallel worlds” or “alternative timelines”. Others, adherents to the so-called “many universes interpretation”, have instead coined new umbrella terms for the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash, including “multiverse”, “meta-universe” and even “omniverse”. This last term found a strong champion outside the scientific community in the form of the late cosmic jazz pioneer Sun Ra, whose Arkestra for a while actually incorporated the term into their ever-changing group moniker. Sadly, scientists have thus far been unable to conclusively prove whether or not the bandleader was, as he claimed, born on Saturn.

  location like a faxed piece of paper? The answers to such conundrums are as yet unknown beyond the cast of Star Trek.

  Time travel

  Though less prominent than in some science-fiction tales – H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) remaining the classic example – time travel still plays an important role in Hitchhiker’s. It is the only means, for instance, of reaching the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (except for Marvin, of course, who gets there by simply being very patient indeed).

  Thankfully for those of us without a robot’s longevity, scientists have suggested it would not be inconceivable to reach Milliways the short way. Certainly some believe that we could achieve a sort of time travel via the very method unwittingly practised by Arthur Dent, who in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish returns from eight years in space only to discover that a mere six months have passed on Earth. In reality, however, this time discrepancy would actually work in reverse: that is, more time would have passed on Earth than in space, the logic being that the faster one moves through space, or the further one is from a massive object such as Earth, the slower one moves through time. Arthur’s cover story that he’s had a “face drop” would not, therefore, be necessary.

  If a brief holiday from Earth feels like a bit of a cheat as a means of time travel – and let’s face it, it’s not going to get you to Milliways – then rest assured that many other methods have also been deemed worthy of scientific consideration. Mathematical logician Kurt Goedel, best known for his Incompleteness Theorem, suggested that twists in the fabric of space time could allow for time travel. There is also talk, for instance, of entering a wormhole in one era and exiting in another.

  Moving any of this from the theoretical realm to the practical has, as usual, proved a little tricky. Yet Adams seemed less concerned by the science of time travel than by associated philosophical questions, such as a situation in which you travel back in time and kill your grandfather (in a strictly hypothetical sense, it must be stressed). This, of course would mean that you yourself were never conceived – so how could you have travelled back in the first place? Adams offers his own take on this “grandfather paradox”, except that in Hitchhiker’s, the danger is not killing but becoming one’s own father or mother; it might be dubbed the “Marty McFly paradox” in honour of cult movie Back to the Future. Adams, however, says that becoming one’s own parent is nothing a broadminded family can’t handle.

  Adams even offers his own time travel paradox, in the story of the great poet Lallafa, who was offered an endorsement deal by manufacturers of correcting fluid who travelled back in time for the purpose. So lucrative was the deal that Lallafa never actually got round to writing the poems in the first place. It was this event, we’re told, that led to the formation of the Campaign for Real Time. Lacking such a real-life pressure group, some quantum physicists get round this sort of paradox by suggesting that if one travelled back in time, every change one made would result in the creation of a parallel universe – see parallel universes.

  Total Perspective Vortex

  No removal of fingernails, no electrodes to the genitals – the Total Perspective Vortex does nothing but reveal to its victim their size in relation to the whole of the Universe. And yet, it is the cruellest torture method in the whole Hitchhiker’s saga, worse even than Vogon poetry in that only Zaphod Beeblebrox has ever survived it (and only then because he was in an electronically synthesized universe).

  Invented by a character named Trin Tragula in an attempt to silence his nagging wife, the Total Perspective Vortex relies on channelling the whole of Creation through one small piece of fairy cake. Ad
ams’s logic here was that every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter, and thus the whole thing can be extrapolated from any individual component.

  Michael Hanlon has confirmed that this idea has at least one foot in passable scientific theory; it does seem to chime, for instance, with the “cosmic web” idea that the whole Universe is bound together by an invisible cobweb of dark matter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, Hanlon points out that extrapolating the entire Universe from a piece of fairy cake might in practice not be so easy. Again, the relevant arguments concern Werner Heisenberg and the multiplicity of possible electron locations (see Infinite Improbability Drive).

  The Ultimate Answer

  It may have been conceived, let us never forget, as a joke, but the number 42 has a tendency to have theories thrust upon it. Some of the more creative interpretations have been dealt with in the previous chapter, but there is also a scientific approach to this most enthusiastically investigated number.

  Certainly, the concept of distilling Infinity into numerical form has become markedly less ridiculous in the years since Adams conceived of the idea. In 1999, Martin Rees, the UK’s Astronomer Royal, declared that the Universe could be boiled down to six numbers, including the strength of gravity and the speed at which the Universe is expanding. Each has a value that, for whatever reason, falls within the terrifyingly narrow conditions required for life.

  Admittedly, none of Rees’s figures was 42. Yet that number did enjoy specific, if short-lived, scientific endorsement, as the exact value of the Hubble Constant, a measure of the rate of expansion of the Universe. This was truly “a delicious moment”, as Adams’s friend and collaborator John Lloyd recalls. The joy was tempered somewhat, however, by the discovery that Hubble’s Constant wasn’t constant at all, and hence promptly changed to a completely different number.

  Of course, Adams conceived the notion of the Ultimate Answer well before either of these events, rendering them of passing interest only (though he was apparently deeply tickled by the Hubble episode). Instead, he was presumably poking fun at the broader desire for a single unifying theory to explain our existence. It’s this same concept, indeed, that he mocked in Mostly Harmless as the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash, which “doesn’t actually exist but is just the sum total of all the different ways there would be of looking at it if it did”.

  Absurd though it may sound, however, the idea of the Ultimate Answer is not too far removed from a genuine drive in contemporary physics – that towards a Grand Unified Theory, or the even more ambitious Theory of Everything. This latter is, in essence, an attempt to reconcile the fundamental forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and weak and strong nuclear forces. Each makes sense on its own terms but the otherwise elegant theories cannot yet

  Time travel grammar

  Far from killing your grandfather or becoming your own mother, Adams writes in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe that the most challenging problem associated with time travel is in fact one of syntax. Apparently, the only solution in such circumstances is to consult the Time Traveller’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations by Dr Dan Streetmentioner. Among the grammatical constructions contained within are “wioll haven be”, in place of “which is”; “willing watchen” for “whilst watching”; and, as the correct substitution for “can meet and dine with”, the spectacularly verbose “mayan meetan con with dinan on-when”. We would go on, but Dr Streetmentioner’s book stops dead at the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional. So rare was it for a reader to get beyond the section, it was deemed unnecessary to actually print the subsequent pages.

  be encompassed within a single theoretical framework. In technical terms, “big stuff” (stars, black holes) doesn’t seem to work like “small stuff” (electrons).

  While some scientists don’t believe in a unifying Theory of Everything, others are pinning their hopes on superstrings, M-branes and mind-meltingly complex ten-dimensional Calabi-Yau shapes. Whether the number 42 plays any particularly significant role within these Calabi-Yau shapes, of course, remains to be seen.

  About the book

  The Ultimate Guide to the Ultimate Question

  This new Rough Guide explores the ever-expanding universe created by Douglas Adams. A must-have companion for both long-term enthusiasts and those discovering the Hitchhiker’s stories for the first time.

  Features include:

  • A lightspeed crib of the stories so far

  • Everything you need to know about the saga’s numerous incarnations: book, TV show, movie, radio series and more

  • Coverage of key Hitchhiker’s concepts and plot devices: tea, cricket, towels and small yellow fish.

  • The stories behind all your favourite characters: Ford, Arthur, Zaphod and, of course, Marvin.

  • The life and times of Douglas Adams: his influence, passions and an overview of his other works.

  • Details of online resources, including the lowdown on the official fanclub, “ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha”.

  You’ve been reading an extract from The Rough Guide to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy by Marcus O’Dair, £7.99.

  To get your hands on a copy of the book at 20% discount click here and quote “Rough” at the checkout. Offer valid until end of 2009.

  About the author

  Marcus O’Dair is a freelance journalist and broadcaster, who has written for The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Financial Times and magazines including Word, The Wire, Plan B, Downbeat and The Idler. Marcus also presents The Independent’s music podcast.

  Find out more about Rough Guides at www.roughguides.com*

  Listen to the first chapter of And Another Thing below

  And Another Thing, the unabridged audiobook read by Simon Jones, is available on CD and as a digital download.

  (The first chapter audiobook sample has been stripped from this distribution as it is too large. Obtain the full audiobook from Audible, Amazon, or your favorite library.)