100 Fun Facts About The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Which 'holistic' detective did Douglas Adams create?

Dirk Gently: Adams died in 2001 before finishing a third Dirk novel, and its drafts were published unfinished in The Salmon of Doubt.

Which drink does Arthur Dent try to get from the starship's Nutri-Matic machine?

Tea: the machine only serves a liquid 'almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea', and Arthur's lecture on the real thing ties up the ship's computer during an attack.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, why is Earth demolished at the start?

To make way for a hyperspace bypass: that same morning Arthur Dent had lain in front of a bulldozer to stop his house being knocked down for a local bypass.

What is the name of the alien who rescues Arthur Dent from the destruction of Earth?

Ford Prefect, stranded on Earth for 15 years, named himself after a popular British car because he thought the name would be 'nicely inconspicuous'.

Which race of bureaucratic aliens destroys the Earth?

The Vogons dismissed Earth's protests: the demolition plans had been on display in the local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty years.

What is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything?

42 sent fans hunting for hidden meanings, but Adams dismissed one popular theory by saying he didn't write jokes in base 13.

What is the name of the supercomputer that calculated the Answer?

Deep Thought could not say what the Question was, so it designed an even greater computer to find out, which turned out to be the Earth.

What was Trillian's name before she left Earth?

Tricia McMillan met Arthur at a party in Islington, but she left Earth with Zaphod instead.

What is the name of the spaceship Zaphod Beeblebrox steals?

Heart of Gold: Zaphod, as President of the Galaxy, was meant to be officiating at its launch, and he stole it during the ceremony.

In the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, what physical peculiarity does Zaphod Beeblebrox have?

Two heads and three arms: Zaphod says the third arm was fitted recently, just beneath his right one, to help improve his ski-boxing.

Which company built Marvin as a prototype of its Genuine People Personalities technology?

Sirius Cybernetics Corporation makes such faulty goods that its complaints division is the only part of the company to have shown a consistent profit.

Marvin complains that he has a brain the size of what?

A planet: 'Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge,' Marvin moans in the novel.

Who voiced Marvin in the original Hitchhiker's radio and TV series?

Stephen Moore was a vastly experienced stage actor, yet after voicing Marvin on radio and TV he was remembered mostly for the gloomy robot.

Which comedy actor voiced the Book in the original Hitchhiker's Guide radio series?

Peter Jones: the producers wanted a 'Peter Jonesy sort of voice', and after several actors including Palin turned the part down, they asked Jones himself.

The episodes of the radio series are called "Fits", borrowing from which Lewis Carroll poem?

The Hunting of the Snark is subtitled 'An Agony in Eight Fits', which is why the radio episodes carry names such as Fit the Ninth.

The theme tune "Journey of the Sorcerer" was originally recorded by which band?

The Eagles' instrumental had a banjo in it, which Adams felt would give the show an 'on the road, hitch-hiking feel'.

In 1978, the Hitchhiker's radio series became the first BBC radio comedy made in what format?

Stereo: the makers had been told comedy couldn't work in stereo because listeners wouldn't know which speaker the punchline was coming from.

How is the Hitchhiker's book series jokingly described?

A trilogy in five parts: the fifth book, Mostly Harmless, was billed as 'the fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy'.

Which publisher issued the first Hitchhiker's novel in 1979 after BBC Publishing turned it down?

Pan Books: BBC Publications had been offered the book first, yet once Pan held the rights the BBC asked bitterly why it hadn't been offered to them.

Which Hitchhiker's device destroys victims by showing them their true insignificance in the universe, yet fails to harm Zaphod?

Total Perspective Vortex: Zaphod survives only because he is inside an electronically synthesized universe made for him, where he really is the most important being.

What is the name of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe in the second Hitchhiker's novel?

Milliways: diners pay by depositing one penny in a savings account in their own era, and compound interest covers the fabulous bill by the End of Time.

Arthur's Scrabble tiles spell which Ultimate Question?

What do you get if you multiply six by nine? 54, which is why Arthur says he always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe.

What wiped out the Golgafrinchans who stayed behind on their homeworld?

A disease from dirty telephone receivers wiped them out, because they had packed every telephone sanitiser off in the B Ark with the other 'useless' third.

Which London sports venue does Arthur Dent land at in Life, the Universe and Everything?

Lord's Cricket Ground: Arthur arrives on a time-travelling sofa just as a squad of robots from Krikkit lands on the pitch and steals the Ashes.

Life, the Universe and Everything was based on a treatment Adams had written for which television series?

Doctor Who: Adams and Tom Baker tried to get his Krikkitmen story made as a Doctor Who film, and when it never happened he recycled it into this novel.

In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, who provided the replacement Earth that Arthur returns to?

It was part of their Save the Humans campaign; the title is their parting message.

What is the name of the girl Arthur falls in love with in the fourth novel?

Fenchurch is the girl in a Rickmansworth café on the first page of the first novel who finally sees how to make the world good and happy, just before Earth is destroyed.

What job does Arthur settle into on Lamuella in Mostly Harmless?

Sandwich-maker: the villagers believe Almighty Bob sent Arthur to them in a burning fiery chariot, when really he was the sole survivor of a spaceship crash.

What is the full name of Arthur and Trillian's daughter?

Random Frequent Flyer Dent was conceived from DNA Arthur had sold to fund his space travels, and he learns he is a father only when Trillian turns up with her.

Which author wrote the sixth Hitchhiker's novel, And Another Thing..., in 2009?

Eoin Colfer, best known for Artemis Fowl, was personally chosen by Adams's widow Jane Belson, and he admitted the prospect of a new Hitchhiker book terrified him.

Which company released the 1984 Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure game?

Infocom's game had one early puzzle so notoriously hard that the company ended up selling T-shirts reading 'I got the Babel Fish!'

Who played Arthur Dent in the 2005 Hitchhiker's Guide film?

Martin Freeman took the role, while Simon Jones, Arthur on radio and TV, got a cameo as the ghostly image who warns the travellers away.

Who provided the voice of Marvin in the 2005 Hitchhiker's Guide film?

Alan Rickman voiced Marvin, while the robot's old TV costume was refurbished for a cameo, standing in a queue as Arthur does a double-take.

Who directed the 2005 Hitchhiker's Guide film?

Garth Jennings got the job after Jay Roach dropped out and Spike Jonze recommended him and producer Nick Goldsmith, the music-video duo Hammer & Tongs.

Which actor played Slartibartfast in the 2005 Hitchhiker's Guide film?

Bill Nighy played Slartibartfast, who won an award for Norway's fjords and, told to do Africa for the new Earth, started doing it with fjords again.

What do fans carry on 25 May for Douglas Adams?

A towel: the Guide says anyone who sees a hitchhiker still has one will assume he's a man to be reckoned with and happily lend him anything he has lost.

What advantage helped the Hitchhiker's Guide supplant the Encyclopedia Galactica?

It is slightly cheaper, one of two edges that let it supplant the older Encyclopedia Galactica even though much of it is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate.

What is the Babel fish?

An ear-dwelling creature that translates any language, and by removing every barrier to communication it has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in creation.

How do the aliens who capture Arthur Dent torture their prisoners before ejecting them from an airlock?

By reading poetry aloud: Arthur praises the captain's 'metaphysical imagery', hoping for mercy, but both prisoners are thrown into space anyway.

Which species turns out to be the most intelligent on Earth in the Hitchhiker's Guide?

Mice are protrusions of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings who ran experiments on humans all along; the cheese and the squeaking were just a front.

Which world is home to the ancient industry of building custom-made worlds?

Magrathea grew so rich building worlds that the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty, so its builders went to sleep to wait out the slump.

Two missiles fired at Zaphod's stolen ship turn into a sperm whale and what?

A bowl of petunias, whose only thought as it fell was 'Oh no, not again', because it was a reincarnation of Agrajag, a being Arthur keeps killing.

At which Cambridge college did Douglas Adams study English?

St John's College: Adams was rebuffed when he first tried to join the Footlights comedy club, and when he finally got in months later he found it aloof.

A writing partnership with which Monty Python member earned Adams a 1974 Flying Circus credit?

Graham Chapman also co-wrote a TV pilot with Adams, Out of the Trees, but it never became a series and only that first episode was ever made.

In which city did Douglas Adams die in May 2001?

Santa Barbara: Adams had moved his family to California while the Hitchhiker film was in development, and he was still working on its screenplay when he died.

Which conservation charity was Adams a founder patron of, climbing Kilimanjaro for it?

Save the Rhino: Adams wore a rhino costume for part of the Kilimanjaro climb he made for the charity.

What was written on the dashboard of the Tesla Roadster launched into space in 2018?

DON'T PANIC was shown on the dashboard screen as the car, with a mannequin called Starman at the wheel, went into an orbit around the Sun that crosses the orbit of Mars.

Near which Austrian city was Adams lying drunk in a field in 1971 when he had the idea for the title?

Innsbruck: Adams was carrying a Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe, but he told the story so many times that he later said he no longer remembered the moment itself.

Which physicist voiced The Guide Mark II in the 2018 Hexagonal Phase radio series?

Stephen Hawking voiced the Guide Mark II, the edition that in the fifth novel manipulates events so that every version of Earth is destroyed.

What does Wonko call the world outside his inside-out house?

The Asylum: Wonko decided the world had gone mad after reading instructions on a packet of toothpicks, so he built a house to put the world in.

Slartibartfast, the Hitchhiker's planet designer, won an award for which country's coastline?

Norway's fjords were Slartibartfast's proudest work, and he later started giving Africa fjords too. His superiors objected that fjords did not suit a continent on the equator.

Which band named a 1997 single after Marvin, the gloomy robot of the Hitchhiker's Guide stories?

Radiohead called the song Paranoid Android after Marvin's nickname. The album it led, OK Computer, also takes its title from words spoken in the story.

Which band let Douglas Adams play guitar with them on stage at Earls Court as a birthday present?

Pink Floyd became good friends with Adams, a huge fan, and it was he who suggested the title of their 1994 album The Division Bell.

In Mostly Harmless, which real singer does Arthur Dent find performing in a bar on an alien planet?

Elvis Presley turns up alive as a bar singer with a large spaceship of his own, years after the world believed he had died in 1977.

Which Norse god does Arthur Dent challenge to a fight at a flying party in the Hitchhiker's novels?

Thor had been chatting up Trillian, so Arthur challenged him and tricked the thunder god into stepping out of the airborne building.

Douglas Adams is said to have been one of the first two people in Europe to buy which computer?

Apple Macintosh computers won Adams over the moment he first saw one in Boston in 1984, and Apple later used him as a celebrity spokesman.

In the Hitchhiker's Guide novels, Arthur Dent learns to fly by throwing himself at what and missing?

The ground is the thing to miss, and the trick pays off when Arthur trips, takes flight and tosses aside a bomb built to destroy the universe.

Which garment does Arthur Dent wear throughout his years of space travel in the Hitchhiker's novels?

A dressing gown and slippers became Arthur's traditional outfit, still on him years later as he is thrown from one crisis to the next.

Which powerless office does Zaphod Beeblebrox hold when he steals a prototype spaceship?

President of the Galaxy is a job with no power whatsoever: the holder exists to attract attention so that nobody wonders who is really in charge.

Mr Prosser, sent to knock down Arthur Dent's house, is unknowingly descended from which conqueror?

Genghis Khan's blood surfaces in the nervous road builder only as odd visions of Mongol hordes and a fondness for fur hats.

Arthur Dent's alien friend, posing as a jobless actor, really comes from a planet near which star?

Betelgeuse is also home to Zaphod Beeblebrox, a semi-cousin who shares three of the same mothers with Arthur's friend.

At a party in which London district did Arthur Dent try and fail to chat up the future Trillian?

Islington was also Douglas Adams's own corner of London, and Trillian left that party with Zaphod Beeblebrox instead.

Which unlucky Hitchhiker's being is killed by Arthur Dent in every one of its many reincarnations?

Agrajag finally lures Arthur to a Cathedral of Hate to take revenge, and is promptly killed by him once more.

Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, an accidental immortal, vows to do what to every living being?

Insult them, one by one and in alphabetical order: it is his cure for boredom, since he never learned to cope with endless Sunday afternoons.

Hitchhiker's rock star Hotblack Desiato, a year dead to dodge tax, is named after what kind of firm?

An estate agency in north London had the name on its signs. Douglas Adams spotted one while driving, nearly crashed, and phoned to ask permission.

Which Hitchhiker's rock band, the loudest in the universe, crashes a spaceship into a sun mid-show?

Disaster Area play so loudly that audiences usually listen from a well-built concrete bunker some 37 miles away.

In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, lorry driver Rob McKenna is unknowingly what kind of deity?

A rain god in all but name, McKenna is rained on every single day and ends up being paid by holiday resorts to stay away.

The captain of the Golgafrinchan B Ark spends over three years, nearly his whole command, where?

The bath, shared with a rubber duck, is where the captain stays throughout, which says a lot about his very relaxed attitude to everything.

Which actor played Arthur Dent in both the original radio series and the 1981 television version?

Simon Jones was a Footlights contemporary of Douglas Adams at university, and Adams wrote the part of Arthur with him in mind.

Which technique really made the mock computer graphics in the 1981 Hitchhiker's Guide TV series?

Hand-drawn animation shot on film stood in for computers, and the convincing fake displays went on to win a BAFTA.

Which Douglas Adams collection, out a year to the day after his death, holds an unfinished novel?

The Salmon of Doubt takes its name from the unfinished novel inside, a title that nods to the Irish myth of the Salmon of Knowledge.

For which 1989 radio series and book did Douglas Adams seek out animals on the brink of extinction?

Last Chance to See paired Adams with naturalist Mark Carwardine, and their searches ranged from the aye-aye of Madagascar to the kakapo.

Which 1983 spoof dictionary by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd uses real place names as its words?

The Meaning of Liff turns towns such as Shoeburyness and Plymouth into words for everyday feelings and objects that had no name.

Which 1998 adventure game, full of chatty robots, did Douglas Adams create at The Digital Village?

Starship Titanic grew out of a brief mention in the third Hitchhiker's novel, and the game opens with the cruise ship crashing through the player's roof.

Which online encyclopaedia did Douglas Adams found in 1999 as a real Guide written by its users?

H2G2 was sold to the BBC after the dotcom crash, and the broadcaster ran the site for a decade.

In which famous north London cemetery were the ashes of Douglas Adams interred in June 2002?

Highgate received his ashes thirteen months after his sudden death at a gym, aged 49.

What kind of object, numbered 18610, was named Arthurdent two days before Douglas Adams died?

An asteroid about 3.5 kilometres across took Arthur's name on 9 May 2001, and another was named Douglasadams in the author's memory in 2005.

How did Douglas Adams's publisher get the overdue So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish finished?

Locked him in a hotel suite with an editor keeping watch, that is: weeks before the manuscript was due, Adams had written only 25 pages.

Which biologist friend of Douglas Adams had him read at a 1991 Royal Institution Christmas Lecture?

Richard Dawkins later joked in The God Delusion that Adams was possibly his only convert to atheism.

Which night job did the struggling young Douglas Adams take with a wealthy Arab family?

Bodyguard duty meant long night shifts outside the family's rooms. As a student he had also worked as a hospital porter and a chicken-shed cleaner.

Which BBC station first aired the Hitchhiker's Guide, late on a Wednesday night in March 1978?

Radio 4 gave it a 10.30pm slot that disappointed Douglas Adams, yet listeners arrived through word of mouth and reviews in the Sunday newspapers.

Which director floated the audience on a hovercraft for the first Hitchhiker's Guide stage show?

Ken Campbell kept the London show to eighty people a night, wafting them a fraction of an inch above the floor for each change of scene.

Which science fiction award put the Hitchhiker's radio series on its 1979 dramatic shortlist?

Hugo voters named it a Best Dramatic Presentation finalist, in a category normally fought out between feature films and television.

Which BBC unit, known for electronic music, made the effects for the first Hitchhiker's series?

Radiophonic Workshop staff also treated voices such as Marvin's, so his actor had to be recorded apart from the rest of the cast.

Under which title did Douglas Adams pitch a radio comedy that destroyed the planet in every episode?

The Ends of the Earth would have finished off the world a different way each week; only the first demolition survived into the series as made.

Which actor played Zaphod Beeblebrox in both the first radio series and the 1981 television version?

Mark Wing-Davey caught Douglas Adams's eye in the drama The Glittering Prizes, where he played a trendy character who took advantage of people.

Which American designer co-wrote the 1984 Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure game with Douglas Adams?

Steve Meretzky and Adams filled the game's box with joke extras, among them cardboard sunglasses and a bag said to hold a microscopic battle fleet.

Within the story, which firm on Ursa Minor Beta first publishes the Hitchhiker's Guide itself?

Megadodo Publications loses control of the Guide in Mostly Harmless, when the company is taken over by InfiniDim Enterprises.

The Dish of the Day at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe is a talking cow bred to want what?

To be eaten, and to say so clearly: the cow recommends itself to the diners and then heads for the kitchen, which horrifies Arthur Dent.

In the first Hitchhiker's novel, what does Arthur Dent lie down in front of to protect his house?

A bulldozer sent by the local council is the least of his troubles: later the same day his entire planet is destroyed as well.

Which piece of furniture, really a time eddy, carries Arthur Dent from prehistory to modern London?

A sofa, specifically a Chesterfield, drops Arthur and his friend into the middle of a sports match two days before the world is demolished.

In Mostly Harmless, what nickname is given to Persephone, a newly found tenth planet?

Rupert becomes the base of the Grebulons, an alien crew who have forgotten everything and hope that astrology will give them a purpose.

Trillian, who left Earth with Zaphod Beeblebrox before its destruction, is a mathematician and what else?

Astrophysicist or not, she goes on to become a reporter for Sub-Etha Radio under the name Trillian Astra.

Which household objects are living creatures on the Hitchhiker's swamp planet Sqornshellous Zeta?

Mattresses there are all called Zem and live wild in the swamps until they are caught, dried out and slept on.

Which Hitchhiker's author wrote bestsellers on religion, beginning with Where God Went Wrong?

Oolon Colluphid followed it with Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes, and also wrote Well That About Wraps It Up for God.

In the Hitchhiker's novels, what does SEP stand for in the SEP field that hides a spaceship?

Somebody Else's Problem fields work as a cloaking device because the brain simply edits out whatever it assumes is none of its business.

In which cameo does Douglas Adams appear in the 1981 Hitchhiker's Guide television series?

A naked man entering the sea is one of several cameos Adams made in the first three episodes; his face also turns up in an animated Guide entry.

In the Hitchhiker's novels, Frogstar World B's economy collapsed to leave only which kind of shop?

Shoe shops took over the entire planet, a slide into ruin that the story names the Shoe Event Horizon.

Which job has Marvin taken at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe after billions of years?

Parking cars as a valet is how the others find him again, when he calls Zaphod Beeblebrox in the middle of their dinner.

In which part of England is the house Arthur Dent tries to save in the first Hitchhiker's novel?

The West Country is where the story begins. The 1981 television series shot its location scenes in Sussex, Cornwall and the Peak District.