Life, the Universe and Everything

The Universe at War

By the third Hitchhiker’s book, Douglas Adams had begun to feel the pressure of having created a universe that resisted conventional plotting. His solution in Life, the Universe and Everything was to introduce a genuine antagonist with genuine stakes: the people of Krikkit, who have declared total war on every living thing in existence. This is both a darkly funny premise and, in Adams’s hands, a surprisingly affecting one.

The Krikkit civilisation grew up on a planet so thoroughly shrouded in dust and debris that they had never seen a star — had never known the universe existed beyond their own world. When they finally broke through the cloud and saw the night sky for the first time, their collective response was: “It’ll have to go.” This is the novel’s central joke, and it is genuinely chilling as well as funny. Adams understood that the most dangerous parochialism is not aggressive but simply innocent — the logical conclusion of a perspective too narrow to accommodate the existence of others.

Slartibartfast and the Long Dark Tea-Time

Slartibartfast, the planet designer last seen delivering exposition about Earth’s computational purpose in the first book, returns here as Arthur’s somewhat reluctant guide to the crisis. His weary professionalism — he is not enthusiastic about saving the universe but is prepared to do so since he cannot think of a reasonable alternative — is one of Adams’s finest characterisations of middle-aged competence in the face of cosmic inconvenience.

The novel also introduces the concept of the “long dark tea-time of the soul,” a phrase Adams liked so much he later used it as the title of the second Dirk Gently novel. It describes a particular species of existential boredom: not anguish, exactly, but the Sunday-afternoon feeling that nothing means very much and never will. It is one of his most resonant coinages.

More Structured, Less Spontaneous

The trade-off Adams makes in this volume is legible: compared to its predecessors, Life, the Universe and Everything is more coherent as a story and less surprising as a reading experience. The Krikkit War gives the narrative a beginning, middle, and end that the first two books largely avoided. This is satisfying in some ways and slightly diminishing in others — the series’ greatest strength was always its willingness to follow any digression wherever it led, and structural coherence necessarily curtails that freedom.

The Agrajag sequence — in which Arthur encounters a being who has been accidentally killed by him across multiple lifetimes and dimensions — is the most structurally adventurous passage in the book, and also the most demanding of the reader’s patience. Its payoff is real, but it takes time arriving.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A worthy continuation with one of the series’ darkest and funniest central concepts, even if it trades some anarchic magic for narrative tidiness.