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 nintey-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose...life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has-or rather had-a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concrened with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches...

...And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.

It is also the story of a book, a book called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" -- not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthman.

It is the most remarkable, certainly the most successful, book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor. More popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty Three Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters - Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? So that whingeing Earthling Parallaxis should be very grateful he had a copy!

For after Earth is laid to waste in the Trekk Wars, Parallaxis is let loose in the furthest recesses of the Galaxy armed only with the aforementioned mysterious but indispensable Guide. Follow Parallaxis's cosmic adventures as he is joined by his pretty weird companions: Zaphod Beeblebrox, Ford Prefect, Trillian-the-Astrophysicist-he-met-at-a-party-in-Islington and Marvin the manically depressed Android. He comes to find out the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is 42. Now if he could only remember the question!

By the end of his journey Parallxis will have ventured to places never before seen by human eyes and wonders never imagined by the greatest beings in the galaxy, but since that doesn't pay very well he ultimately decides its better to be a waiter at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Warning Don't Panick and be sure to bring a towel...