The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: 40 years of parody and predictions - Nature

Douglas Adams’s satirical science-fiction classic still seems prescient, writes Shamini Bundell.

“Astonishingly, it is 40 years since Douglas Adams published The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. We’ve since replaced digital watches with smartphones and virtual assistants, and we rarely describe them as “neat”. Yet the themes of the book have hardly dated. As ecosystems are destroyed to make way for roads, artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to get seriously unruly and the Universe continually reveals it’s a lot more complicated than we thought, Adams’s creation and its deadpan surreality never seem to fade.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide began life as a BBC radio comedy in 1978, a year before the first book was published...