The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy discussion

Douglas Adams is my favorite author. I have re-read the Hitchhiker's omnibus dozens of times and collect copies of it in different languages. When I heard about his death, I was devestated because I knew that was it from the person that makes me laugh the most and the hardest.

So, I created this topic in the hope that people will share what books or authors they've discovered that have given them something akin to the feeling of reading Adams' books.

I'll start with The Poem Skull by J.M. Hushour. I discovered this book completely by accident. It was posted as a free book in a group thread, and I downloaded it thinking nothing of it. I only started reading it because it showed up next on my reading list, and I'm so grateful it did!

I haven't finished the book yet. Hell, I'm not even close (it's quite long) but the language, the humor, and the ideas are very much like a sourer, cruder, R-rated flavor of the Koolaid that Adams' served out of the punchbowl. I'm recommending this book because it's made me laugh to the point of tears, and I want other fans that miss Adams' work to be able to experience what I'm experiencing.

Here are a few quotes to chew on, and I look forward to other recommendations:

Shiv hated tea. There was a time and a place for liquids emanating from sacs.

Westin Barton Donovan was a clean-cut, kid-next-door if the next door is a portal crafted out of dragon feces that leads one strait into the boiling crotch of Satan's underwear.

Her plan was simple: she was going to give this asshole gonorrhea. Problem was, she didn't have gonorrhea. Nor did she know where it was readily available.

He seemed to feel something profoundly disturbing. Disturbing as in, say, a Ghandi-sized tumor breaking off of Ghandi and beginning to lash out violently at everyone around it, in a very non-Ghandi-like manner; disturbing as in finding a vein in your hot dog; disturbing as in-

“Time travel, yes,” (view spoiler)[Ruxpin (hide spoiler)] said, matter-of-factly. “It all comes down to tooth decay or what I call Enamelistic Entropy, or E.E., for short.” He jiggled his head and beamed. “You see, Einstein got it all wrong. The E in his famous equation is Enamel not Energy, that is, relativistic mass isn’t convertible into energy at all, but rather tooth enamel. Mass-enamel equivalence is demonstrable through the rate of entropy, itself a universal constant, through the rate of entropy evident in tooth decay.” ...
“So,” [Charles] began slowly, “grinding your teeth at a high rate outpaces entropy—"
“Yes! The natural rate of entropy in this particular universe.”
“— which means that relative to that you are travelling faster-"
“— relative to the rest of the space-time complex, yes.” ...
“So you can travel into the future.” (view spoiler)[Ruxpin (hide spoiler)] nodded. “But how do you travel backwards in time.”
“Simple!” (view spoiler)[Ruxpin (hide spoiler)] jiggled his head. “I grow my teeth back.”

I have recently discovered an author called Ed Halliday, who is brilliantly funny, and one of his books in particular has changed the way I think about life, death and the universe in general. Quite a task! The Expected Demise of Bernard Fish has attracted many comments from people who either don't understand it or absolutely love it, much the same as The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Jasper Fforde. I stumbled across his Thursday Next books, with "The Eyre Affair."

Terry Pratchet, the Discworld series:

'It was a still night, tinted with the promise of dawn. A crescent moon was just setting. Ankh-Morpork, largest city in the lands around the Circle Sea, slept.

That statement is not really true.

On the one hand, those parts of the city which normally concerned themselves with, for example, selling vegetables, shoeing horses, carving exquisite small jade ornaments, changing money and making tables, on the whole, slept. Unless they had insomnia. Or had got up in the night, as it might be, to go to the lavatory. On the other hand, many of the less law-abiding citizens were wide awake and, for instance, climbing through windows that didn’t belong to them, slitting throats, mugging one another, listening to loud music in smoky cellars and generally having a lot more fun. But most of the animals were asleep, except for the rats. And the bats, too, of course. As far as the insects were concerned…

The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend said of a notable hero that “all men spoke of his prowess” any bard who valued his life would add hastily “except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar, and quite a lot of other people who had never really heard of him.” Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like “his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,” and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.

Quimby was eventually killed by a disgruntled poet during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb “The pen is mightier than the sword,” and in his memory it was amended to include the phrase “only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp.”'