The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams, an English author, drew his 1979 science fiction comedy from the first four instalments of the radio comedy series he had written under that title, and the title he gave the book was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Pan Books brought it out in London on 12 October 1979; 250,000 copies went in the first three months, and it began a series that eventually ran to six books.

Arthur Dent's house is scheduled for demolition, and then so is the Earth, which is being cleared away to make room for a hyperspace bypass. His friend Ford Prefect turns out to be an out-of-work researcher for a book of the same name, an in-universe electronic encyclopaedia through which the story is partly framed. Ford manages to get them both a lift on a passing ship.

The journey involves a two-headed president of the galaxy, a stolen ship fitted with an infinite improbability drive, a chronically depressed robot, the best drink in existence, and the problem of a supercomputer that took seven and a half million years to answer a question nobody could remember. The guide the pair are carrying has two words printed on its cover in large friendly letters: don't panic.

Adams wrote the novel from scripts he had already produced for radio, and the book keeps the asides and footnotes of that format. Arthur Dent, who alone survives the destruction of Earth, is at the centre of its misadventures, and the series continued in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and four further books.