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

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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 sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and a 1982 sequel, Life, the Universe and Everything. The Hitchhiker's Trilogy, which began as a radio serial, has grown to embrace a television series, record albums, several theatrical productions and a computer software game. As a result of all that furious merchandising, Adams, 32, a 6-ft. 5-in., former television script editor (Dr. Who), has become a cult figure at colleges throughout the galaxy. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is billed, with impeccable logic, as the trilogy's fourth volume. It is the looniest of the lot.

Fish chronicles the return of the shy, self-effacing Dent to his home planet after a successful demolition-eve escape. He has spent the intervening eight years hitching rides on passing spacecraft, snacking at duty-free shops on distant planets and encountering such diverse creatures as a lost tribe of ballpoint pens mislaid by former owners, and a race of marketing executives who, despite 573 committee meetings, have still not discovered the wheel ("All right, Mr. Wiseguy . . . you tell us what color it should be"). To Dent's surprise, earth has somehow escaped destruction, but all the dol phins have mysteriously disappeared. The book's title, in fact, is their farewell message. He sets out to find them, making new friends, notably a lady whose feet do not quite touch the ground, and re-encountering old ones, like Ford Prefect, hard-drinking correspondent for the Hitchhiker's Guide, a 6 million- page Baedeker of the cosmos. Prefect is still updating his entries; for instance, rediscovering a New York City river "so extravagantly polluted that new life forms were emerging from it spontaneously, demanding welfare and voting rights."

This is an uncharacteristically earthbound performance for Adams, who until now has needed the limitless expanses of the universe to let him leap backward and forward through space, time and meaning. Still, Fish is the best evidence yet that Adams is not simply a funny sci-fi writer but a bomb-heaving satirist. Consider the spaceship that lands in central London, demolishing Harrods and disgorging a robot that demands, "Take me to your Lizard." On its world, Ford Prefect explains, "the people are people. The lizards are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people." The system, he says, is called democracy. But why do the people vote for the lizards? "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard, the wrong lizard might get in."