Guide to the Guide to the Hitchhiker's guide
Submitted by Darkshadows86
Prologue:
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 roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape- descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think fission-powered watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people 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 metal discs, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small metal discs that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with fission-powered watches.
Many were increasingly 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. Even more said that the oceans were bad as well, and they should have never evolved from those big piles of goop.
And then, one Tuesday, nearly three 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, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Dublin 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, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone- about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
This is not her story.
But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.
It is also the story of a book, a book called The Guide to the Guide to the The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or 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 houses 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 the Celestial Home Care Omnibus: Second Edition, better selling than Fifty Thousand More Things to do in Low Gravity, and more controversial than Oolo Caluid's quartet of philosophical blockbusters: Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes, The Big Book of God's Little Blunders, and Who is this God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Guide to the Guide to the Guide has already supplanted the originally great Hitchhiker's Guide 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 much cheaper; and secondly it has the word Panic inscribed in small, alarming letters on its cover.
But the story of this terrible, stupid Tuesday, the story of its extra- extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.
It begins with a house.
It wasn't a very remarkable house at all. In fact, it really wasn't much of a house at all. Suffice to say: It was a cardboard box.
In said box lived an unremarkable human by the name of Redun Dent. Redun was a very simple man: He'd have to be, to live in a cardboard box.
Redun had only one person he knew through all this. It was the one who gave him food, bread, water, and coffee to brew in the water: Aston M. Vanquish. Aston was not an ordinary human. He was, in truth, an alien from a planet somewhere in the vicinity of Esuegleteb V.
More soon!
Submitted by Darkshadows86
Prologue:
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 roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape- descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think fission-powered watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people 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 metal discs, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small metal discs that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with fission-powered watches.
Many were increasingly 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. Even more said that the oceans were bad as well, and they should have never evolved from those big piles of goop.
And then, one Tuesday, nearly three 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, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Dublin 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, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone- about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
This is not her story.
But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.
It is also the story of a book, a book called The Guide to the Guide to the The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or 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 houses 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 the Celestial Home Care Omnibus: Second Edition, better selling than Fifty Thousand More Things to do in Low Gravity, and more controversial than Oolo Caluid's quartet of philosophical blockbusters: Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes, The Big Book of God's Little Blunders, and Who is this God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Guide to the Guide to the Guide has already supplanted the originally great Hitchhiker's Guide 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 much cheaper; and secondly it has the word Panic inscribed in small, alarming letters on its cover.
But the story of this terrible, stupid Tuesday, the story of its extra- extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.
It begins with a house.
It wasn't a very remarkable house at all. In fact, it really wasn't much of a house at all. Suffice to say: It was a cardboard box.
In said box lived an unremarkable human by the name of Redun Dent. Redun was a very simple man: He'd have to be, to live in a cardboard box.
Redun had only one person he knew through all this. It was the one who gave him food, bread, water, and coffee to brew in the water: Aston M. Vanquish. Aston was not an ordinary human. He was, in truth, an alien from a planet somewhere in the vicinity of Esuegleteb V.
More soon!