Books: Earthbound So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

In ancient days, before the advent of the Sorth of Bragadox, when Fragilis sang and Saxaquine of the Quenelux held sway, Arthur Dent awoke one morning in his modest home west of London to learn from a visiting extraterrestrial that the earth was about to be demolished. It had to make way for a hyperspace bypass. What happened next is too horrible to recount, but several hundred thousand inhabitants of the planet earth are familiar with the tale. That is a conservative estimate of the audience for Douglas Adams' 1979 luna tic masterpiece, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a 1980...