Why am I passionate about this?
I am a cultural historian, film critic, literary critic, editor, and essayist–and a frustrated fiction writer–fascinated by ‘the fantastic’ in art or in life. Answering that fascination, I wrote Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), and I’ve written two books for the BFI Film Classics series on two great movies of the fantastic, Rosemary’s Baby (2020) and It’s A Wonderful Life (2023). I also edited three anthologies of Victorian and Edwardian fantasy, The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (2010) and Victorian Fairy Tales (2015), and now an anthology, Origins of Science Fiction (2022) for Oxford World’s Classics.
Michael's book list on science fiction books about visiting alien worlds
Why did Michael love this book?
It’s a strange confession to make, but after my formative reading of this book, I can’t help but feel there’s something mystical about the number ‘forty-two.’ As you remember, ‘forty-two’ is the computer Deep Thought’s answer to the question, "What’s it all about, life, the universe, and everything?".
It fits Adams’ skepticism that this baffling ultimate answer sends everyone back to rethinking what the ultimate question might be. It’s questions, not answers, that count here.
Adams simply makes me laugh, or rather complexly makes me laugh. Depressive Marvin, the paranoid android, with his "brain the size of a planet"; the horror that is Vogon poetry; even the fact that the most useful item for a space-traveler to pack would be a towel, it’s so wonderful, and Adams does as good a job as Lewis or Le Guin at catching the wonder of things.
30 authors picked The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
This box set contains all five parts of the' trilogy of five' so you can listen to the complete tales of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Bebblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android! Travel through space, time and parallel universes with the only guide you'll ever need, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read by Stephen Fry, actor, director, author and popular audiobook reader, and Martin Freeman, who played Arthur Dent in film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is well known as Tim in The Office.
The set also includes a bonus DVD Life, the Universe and…