LITR 4632: Literature of the Future

Student Future-Visions Presentation 2009

 

Paul Acevedo

23 June 2009

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Presentation

  • Written by Douglas Adams
  • 1978 BBC Radio series
  • 1980 Novel
  • 1981 BBC TV miniseries
  • 2005 feature film

 

  • Arthur Dent, an average person, discovers that his house is going to be demolished to make way for a bypass.
  • As if that wasn’t bad enough, his friend Ford Prefect reveals that he is actually an alien and that the Earth is about to be demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass.
  • The Vogons, a galactic race of bureaucrats, promptly demolish the Earth. Arthur and Ford escape to the Vogon ship. The Vogons torture them by reading bad poetry.
  • Zaphod Beeblebrox, the estranged president of the galaxy, rescues Arthur and Ford on his ship, The Heart of Gold. Zaphod’s girlfriend Trillian is also from Earth.
  • Marvin, the ship’s android, suffers from eternal boredom and depression. “The true horror of Marvin's existence is that no task he could be given would occupy even the tiniest fraction of his vast intellect.”  Quote Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_the_Paranoid_Android
  • The group heads to Magrathea, where they learn that a supercomputer was once built to find the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Its answer was “42.”
  • An even more powerful question was built to calculate the question to the answer of the meaning of life.
  • This computer, it turns out, was Earth. The Vogons destroyed it just five minutes before it would have discovered the question.

 

Objective 1
—Narratives of the Future

  • a.      Apocalyptic
  • The earth blows up right at the beginning.
  • b.     Evolutionary
  • Earth is just part of a much larger picture.
  • c.      Alternative
  • -Time traveling elements, alternate Earths

 

Questions

  • Can you name a romantic element in this story?
  • What visions of the future are present?
  • a.      high tech; virtual reality—slick, clean, cool, unreal, easy with power.
  • b.     low tech; actual reality—rough, messy, hot, real, hungry for power.
  • c.    utopia / dystopia / ecotopia—perfectly planned worlds / dysfunctional world / + ecology
  • d.     off-planet and / or alien contact—exploring and being explored

 

Thanks! I’m outta here.