...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 digital 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 green
pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the
small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and
most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital 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.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two 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 Rickmansworth 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 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, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero
Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of
philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More
of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern
Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already
supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica 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 slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't
Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its
extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these
consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable
book begins very simply.
It begins with a house.