This is part one of a five-part review spanning “The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide,” by Douglas Adams.

Pure genius.

If I had to sum up Adams’ writing in one sentence, that would be it. It is jam-packed full of so much creativity, imagination, attention to detail, and humor that its no surprise his Hitchhiker series has sold for than fourteen million copies. I enjoyed book one, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so much that if I could redo my top dozen favorite books assignment, this would easily find itself in the top five.

Arthur Dent is a thirty-year-old man who wakes up one morning to find a bulldozer outside his bedroom window. A bypass needs to be built, and Arthur’s house must be cleared to make way for construction. He lies in front of the bulldozer to prevent the destruction of his home, and refuses to move. Arthur’s friend, Ford Prefect, comes and tells Arthur that he has to tell him the most important thing he’s ever heard.

Ford is actually a researcher for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the most remarkable and successful book ever to be published in Ursa Minor. He is from the planet Betelgeuse, and is waiting for a flying saucer to pick him up from earth. Ford is an experienced hitchhiker, and always carries a towel with him (a towel is the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have, since it has both practical and psychological value).

However, not even the all-important towel can save Earth’s imminent doom. Suddenly, impossibly huge ships appear in the sky, and a voice announces that Earth must be destroyed to make way for a hyperspatial express route. This is ironic, because before Arthur was worrying so much about his house being ‘dozed over, and now the Earth is being demolished for a hyperspace bypass. However, Arthur is saved by Ford Prefect, who teleports them onto a Vogon Ship. The captain is not happy to see that he has hitchhikers aboard, and eventually throws them out the airlock into the void.

The odds of them getting picked up by another ship in thirty seconds (because that’s how long they could hold their breath) were two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand, seven hundred and nine to one against. Luckily, this happened to be Arthur’s phone number, and the pair was rescued by a ship powered by the Infinite Probability Drive. This ship has the ability to do anything as long as one knows what the chances of it happening are. Ford and Arthur meet Trillian, an Earth women who left the planet years ago, and Zaphod, the Galactic president. Together they go on many unique adventures, any of which would take too much space to describe.

The best thing about this book is by far the humor – and there is a lot of it. The following excerpt is probably my favorite example of how hilarious Adams’ writing can be. It describes the thought process of a whale falling from the sky after it was suddenly called into existence by the Probability Drive:

“Never mind, hey, this is really exciting, so much to find about, so much to look forward to, I’m quite dizzy with anticipation…

Or is it the wind?

There really is a lot of that now, isn’t there?

And wow! Hey! What’s this big thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very, very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide-sounding name like…ow…ound…round…ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground!

I wonder if it will be friends with me?

And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.”

I may seem sick-minded for enjoying a scene in which a whale falls from the sky and hits the ground with a wet thud, but it is more the concept behind it that I find so amusing. Adams goes through the record of the whale’s thoughts from when it began to when it ended. I have never seen anything quite like this in anything else I’ve read. His style of writing is so casual, and yet he really gets in the details about what the whale is pondering as it plummets through the sky. Expect more discussion about humor in the continuation of this five-part series review of Adams’ Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide.