How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. (Introduction.1-2)
The very opening of Hitchhiker's Guide tells us how unimportant we all are. It starts with a mix of scientific terms: the western spiral arm of the galaxy is unfashionable, the sun has an unimportant planet at a distance of 92 million miles, and so on. If you know your astronomy, you know that's us. How often do we get a look at our planet from such a cold, distant, scientific viewpoint?
Quote #2
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value—you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you—daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. (3.6)
We don't often think about towels as pieces of technology, the end product in a whole chain of scientific discoveries, but it is. Adams gives us some reason to reconsider towels as technology by showing us everything it can do. While each example has some reminder that this is science fiction, almost every use is something that we could easily be familiar with.
Quote #3
The report was an official release which said that a wonderful new form of spaceship drive was at this moment being unveiled at a government research base on Damogran which would henceforth make all hyperspatial express routes unnecessary. (5.39)
Science and technology march on, but not always quickly enough. Here, Jeltz has just destroyed Earth to make room for a hyperspace express route, but at around the same time, the government unveiled the Heart of Gold, which makes hyperspace express routes as obsolete as cassettes. (We miss you, mix-tapes, but you're obsolete.) If science had only been a little faster, or the Vogons a little slower, we might still have Earth. But that's Hitchhiker's Guide for you, a book in which things rarely work out.