The Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional and Five Tons of Glitter.

“In an extraordinary gesture which it is pointless attempting to describe, Zaphod Beeblebrox slapped both his foreheads with two of his arms and one of his thighs with the other”.

That is just a terrific line and it tickles my brain to imagine Zaphod making that gesture. It seems both sublimely natural and insanely surreal at the same time.

This section of the book is interesting because we get a more in-depth look at Zaphod and his Universal importance, as well as Marvin’s imperviousness to isolation. I would love to read the details from those five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years spent on Frogstar waiting for the return of Zaphod and the destruction of Everything. That whole bit at the Milliways reminded me of the Futurama movie Bender’s Big Score. Though Hotblack Desiato and Disaster Area remind me of Dethklok from Metalocalypse, so maybe that says more about me than anything else. In doing some quick research, I see that Disaster Area is based on Pink Floyd and that Hotblack’s year dead for “tax reasons” mimics Pink Floyd’s living one year outside of Great Britain for the same purposes.

Neat.

The aspect that I find most intriguing is the shift in tone the book takes at this point. The Transtellar Cruise Lines ship scene is disturbing and tragic to say the least. The whole Milliways chapters are far darker and ominous than anything written in Hitchhiker’s and the mood of the book has begun traversing this solemn road.

Even the introduction of Max Quordlepleen takes a noir twist:

“It was not a pretty face, perhaps because oblivion had looked him in it so many times. It was too long for a start, the eyes too sunken and hooded, the cheeks too hollow, his lips were too thin and too long, and when they parted his teeth looked too much like a recently polished bay window. The hands that held the curtain were long and thin too: they were also cold. They lay lightly along the folds of the curtain and gave the impression that if he didn’t watch them like a hawk they would crawl away of their own accord and do something unspeakable in a corner.”