This is the fourth book in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. The majority of the book is based on earth and really only involves three characters. Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent are both in this story and both spend most of the pages here on earth (I know I am making a wild assumption here.) They only spend the last few chapters together and depart the earth shortly before the end of the book.
Arthur finds a love interest named Fenchurch who also accompanies them into space. You might remember, or not, that in the first book of the series earth is destroyed by Vogons early in that book. Arthur and Ford are both surprised to find it still intact. It turns out that earth was in fact destroyed except that the dolphins of earth’s oceans, knew of the impending doom and transported all of earth’s inhabitants to an earth in an alternate dimension. The dolphins, however, are absent from this version of earth and the title of this book is their acknowledgement and gratitude for all the fish they were able to enjoy while on the original earth.
Towards the end of the book, Marvin the robot makes an appearance as an unfortunate victim of living for a time greater than the age of the universe. He welcomes death as the group of four venture to a site on a distant planet where God has left a final message for his creation, which is, “Sorry for the inconvenience.”
This book is well written in that it always seems to keep your interest, but at the end, you realize there wasn’t much of a plot compared to the author’s previous books. At the time this book was written, Douglas Adams was extraordinarily wealthy from his other Hitchhiker’s Guide books, so maybe his motivation, or imagination was waning when he wrote this. It’s not a bad book, but I imagine not many people would have bothered reading it if it wasn’t part of the popular series. It primarily spends its time exploring Arthur Dent’s quirky personality, which is entertaining, but the book, overall does lack a strong plot.
There are two more books in the series. The next one, Mostly Harmless is purported to be much darker than the previous books. I am not into dark books, so time will tell if I decide to read it.
