The Hitchhiker’s Guide series follows the adventures and misadventures of a small set of characters as they blunder around the vast universe. This novel begins the adventure.
The novel starts with a Thursday that begins like any other for Arthur Dent and continued so until lunchtime. That is when the bulldozers arrive at his house. The council wants to build a road through his house and so his home is razed to the ground.
Soon, the earth itself is destroyed as an alien species, the Vogons want to build a galactic bypass and the planet is in the way. Arthur Dent and his friend Ford Prefect survive the Earth’s destruction. Arthur discovers that his friend Ford is actually an alien who came to the Earth to do research for a book that he is writing, called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Ford smuggles himself and Arthur Dent on board an alien spaceship belonging to the Vogons. They are thrown out of that spaceship into space but they are rescued by the Galactic President Zaphod, who happens to be Ford’s cousin. There they come across two other characters. One is Trillian or Tricia McMillan, who is the only other human survivor from Earth. The other is Marvin, the Paranoid Android.
