To say that Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a book that captured the zeitgeist of the late 1970s and the 1980s is an understatement. Beginning as a BBC comedy radio series, it would mutate into versions in print, on stage, in comics, and on screens small and big, becoming an international sensation. Published as a novel in 1979, it was an immediate bestseller, and its reach with readers only grew as it was expanded by its author into a “trilogy” of five volumes. Douglas Adams’s insouciant way with the definition of “trilogy” is par for his book’s course through outer space, and an emblem of the book’s appeal: It’s silly—cleverly, brilliantly, gloriously, ingeniously, and at times profoundly silly. Despite its technological trimmings and intergalactic itinerary, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a virtuoso performance on the core instruments of British humor, from Three Men in a Boat to Monty Python. Think P. G. Wodehouse in space, complete with the zany names, and you’ll get the idea.