About book So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish (2002)
An unseen spaceship lands on Earth (England), in the rain ( never knew about all that precipitation there ! ), a "man " leaves the craft and waves , thanking the crew for the ride, but first going back , he forgot his bag, towels inside ! Slogs through the mud and muck, in the cold windy darkness, slipping and sliding going up a hill, climbs over a fence and is almost killed, when a speeding automobile (Porsche), nearly crushes the stranger on the road. The heavy rain pours down, lightning flashes in the nearby gloomy hills, illuminating for a brief moment the cheerless surroundings, the miserable, soaked man, tries to hitchhike but nobody will stop in this weather. This is no alien but a nostalgic Mr. Arthur Dent, coming back home after eight lengthy years, crossing the galaxy. Only five months have passed here, his planet has not vanished, the mystery goes unexplained, this is a science- fiction book ! At last the shivering Dent, gets into a car, with an unconscious woman in the back seat and her brother driving. She falls on the professional hitchhiker, who can't see her face and immediately becomes infatuated. The lady is named Fenny ( Fenchurch, don't ask), so says her unsympathetic brother Russell, with mental problems, too many hospital visits, hallucinations, she too saw the world destroyed, silly idea, will become the expatriate's, great love. Meanwhile back on a real alien world, Mr.Ford Prefect is in deep, deep, trouble, the kind that can get you dead. Having spent recklessly, in the unsavory " Old Pink Dog Bar", and no money, except an American Express Card, and they don't accept plastic from a nonexistent planet, that no one has ever heard of ! The murderous bartender, is impatient, luck, The Hitchhiker's Guide, is very prestigious and Ford does write for them, publicity can do wonders ... Returning to the third planet from the Sun (Sol), Mr.Prefect, finally reunites with Arthur, after an extended search, Dent, doesn't answer his home phone, yes, he , got back . Because his friend was too busy teaching Fenny, how to fly ... In an unlighted alley, floating above the ground, the pair, grab each other, acrobatic looping, twisting, and turning, doing things that are not well described, here, she almost hits the pavement, too fast for a long life, Arthur saves the day. Later, scaring passengers in a plane, high over an English town, its people see a real UFO ! Visiting, the couple, meet a rather weird , make that eccentric man, who knows an important secret, so he claims, something about dolphins. On a beach in California, Mr. John Watson, with a genuine weird house, he gives him a fish bowl, Arthur already has one, so does Fenny. In the sunshine, it casts a beautiful rainbow on the sand , writing appears on surface of the dish, they read it. Another very entertaining novel, in the funny series.
Running on empty: Following a highly productive breakthrough period when he was simultaneously knocking out scripts for both Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Doctor Who, Douglas Adams famously struggled with writer's block during the later half of his career as a novelist. Previous Hitchhiker novel Life, the Universe and Everything was itself a re-worked Doctor Who story, and by the time of 4th Hitchhiker novel So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish you can feel the author struggling to find a story to tell.If there is a problem with this novel, it's that there simply isn't enough story here. Previous instalments in the Hitchhiker's series may have been short, but they were packed with fantastic mind bending SF concepts, which are almost entirely absent here. The main storyline consists of Arthur Dent returning to a mysteriously no-longer-destroyed Earth, and having a romance with Fenchurch, the girl who in a throwaway line in the original Hitchhiker's novel had a divine revelation on how to achieve world peace just before the Earth was destroyed by the Vogons. Arthur and Fenchurch's romance is touching, especially a chapter where they both fly through the clouds together, but storywise it doesn't really go anywhere - the identity of Earth's saviours is fairly evident from the books title (though incidentally, why is there a picture of a sea lion on the cover - misdirection?), and Fenchurch never remembers her divine plan for world peace.At the end Adams tags on a coda where Arthur and Fenchurch meet up with Ford Prefect and Marvin (who dies, again) to read God's Last Message To His Creation, following up on the finale of Life, the Universe and Everything, but if anything this feels almost tagged on simply to please the fans of the previous novels. The only ideas that are original to this book, such as the unwilling Rain God, or Wonko's inside-out asylum, are mildly amusing but nothing more.So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish is by no means a bad novel, and thanks to Adams prose it is engagingly readable, but it is a novel all about character - specifically having a few nice things happen to Arthur Dent for a while- and sorely lacking in plot, so don't expect anything much to actually happen beyond Arthur's romance. A pleasant read for fans of the previous 3 novels in the series, but by this stage Douglas Adams just seems to have run out of ideas, and was grinding a novel out for the sake of it.
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favorite part:“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see...""You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?""No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.""Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy.""I did," said Ford. "It is.""So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?""It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.""You mean they actually vote for the lizards?""Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course.""But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?""Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
—Tamie
My review from when I was twelve:Where's Zaphod Beeblebrox? What is going on here? Where's Trillian? Why are they still mucking about on Earth? What is this a romance? Why don't these jokes make any sense? Where the heck is Zaphod Beeblebrox?My review from when I was sixteen:So cute and so clever. So different and original. Now that I'm mature I understand that this is the best in the series. I'm going to go bask in the glow of the first intelligent romance I've ever paid attention to. My review now that I'm thirty-four:A fresh direction for the series that maintains much of the manic wit from the previous books. Confining the action to the planet Earth during the 80s does date some of the jokes (potshots at Los Angeles and toothpick instructions feel stale) but there's a strong complement of imaginative essays and perhaps the best dialogue of any 'Hitchhiker' novel. This is also Adams' first crack at romance, featuring an affair between Arthur Dent and the mysterious but clever Fenchurch. The interactions between the two love-birds are cute and witty, but the plot relies too heavily on themes of fate and love-at-first-sight and the experience ultimately proves heady but light. And perhaps that's for the best, as Arthur and Fenchurch's most memorable date has them learning to fly; this is a tale of romance that literally (but not figuratively) soars.
—Joseph
WARNING: This review contains a slight spoiler.(view spoiler)[At the end of Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in Douglas Adams' five-book “trilogy,” as in the first two — The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe — Arthur Dent pines due to the destruction of his home planet, Earth.Only it didn’t happen. That’s right — in the eight years that Arthur has spent dodging bullets and lasers and otherwise just barely evading death, going back millions of years to the dawn of time on Earth, bemoaning the lack of a decent cup of tea, and having dozens of adventures, Earth has been just fine. In fact, just six months have elapsed back on planet Earth. His house in the West Country hasn’t been flattened to make way for a bypass, nor has the Earth been destroyed by the Vogons to make way for an intergalactic bypass — even though Arthur is certain that he witnessed both destructions. Despite all of that, here’s the earth pretty much as he remembered it, except that everyone he meets remembers a platoon of spaceships hovering overhead at just that time, but chuck it up to mass hysteria. So was this series a complete sham of the Dallas variety where everything was just a dream? What do you take Douglas Adams for? Some Hollywood hack? Of course not! I won’t ruin the book, but, of course, it's more complicated than that -- or as Ford Prefect says in another context, "nothing so simple, nothing anything like so straight-forward" -- although I don't think we'll know the entire story until the fifth book, Mostly Harmless. (hide spoiler)]
—Ivonne Rovira
