Douglas Adams's 1979 comic science fiction novel — following Arthur Dent's adventures after Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass — the most beloved comic science fiction novel and the source of '42' as the answer to life.
Creates comic science fiction as a literary form — The Hitchhiker's Guide is the first comic science fiction novel with genuine philosophical content; its central joke (that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42, but no one knows the question) is the most precise comic treatment of the absurdity of the search for cosmic meaning.
No recorded contemporaries.
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