Guide Note: It was natural that Arthur Dent's ideal beach should seem familiar as he had been there before in one or other of the five earlier versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy compiled by the late Douglas Adams. The only real difference was that the Mk 6 version, also known as And Another Thing . . ., had a new compiler, Eoin Colfer.
And what Arthur did not know was that when this new version was published by the Penguin Group in hardback for $45, nothing would ever be the same again.
No, thought Arthur, this would not be the same without that idiot of a Galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox or that irresponsible Betelgeusean Ford Prefect, who claimed to be his best friend.
What he really missed was the Galaxy's only other surviving Earthling, Trillian.
And what he certainly did not miss were those anally retentive bureaucratic nerds from Vogon.
Guide Note: In thinking this, Arthur was, as usual, both right and wrong. He was right to regard the Vogons as anally retentive but wrong to think they had gone. They were, in point of fact, on their way back at this very moment after erasing the Kneisupian galaxy's last planet, Veeexyz, because they knew the Grebulons had not dotted every gunkblatt and diddlesquat of their orders and two Earthlings had escaped when their planet was destroyed.
Arthur, slightly bored with the view along the beach, thought he would pass the time cruising on the new version of The Hitchhiker's Guide.
Actually, he thought to himself, it did not seem very different from the earlier ones. There were still entries for Zaphod, Ford and Trillian and they sounded much the way they always had, but what was new was a whole section about the problems facing unemployed gods like Odin and Thor.
It was all right for them, Arthur thought miserably, it wasn't their planet that had been destroyed to make room for a freeway. The gods still had their traditional Norse home on Asgard to play with.
Guide Note: This was an easy mistake to make. Arthur might be happy to sit on the beach twirling his thumbs (had he been on the star Hexigrumph, he could have earned a cuphtard, the shells that formed the local unit of currency, for every thumb twirl), but being an unemployed god in a job market suffering from a surfeit of ungodly races was no easy thing to endure.
No-one wanted lightning and thunder or the fires of eternal damnation any more and as for manna, the politicians had long ago devalued that.
Just as Arthur logged off The Hitchhiker's Guide, Ford and Trillian arrived to whisk him away to look at a replacement planet for Earth, the property market having tumbled after the Vogons began charging a zillion percent interest when they found no-one had paid their rates because they were upset at all the stadia being built by the governing council.
Guide Note: As you can see, Arthur was right in assuming that nothing much had changed.
What he did not know was that he shared this opinion with Geoffrey Vine, a Dunedin journalist who had to write a review of The Hitchhiker's Guide or face banishment to the tar and sulphur lakes of some nasty place way down the bottom of the galaxy.
