Rating: 
Summary: The Third "Final" Book in This Series is the Worst
Review: I'm tired of people saying things like, "It was the only fitting end" or "How did you think he would end it?" Hello, people! The series was over! Both LTUAE and SLATFATF are final chapters- this book was entirely unnecessary. Adams didn't need to finish the series, he already had... twice!
Read this novel carefully, try to understand what is being done here. This book is a jab at all of you out there who would not let well enough alone. Adams was upset at the reaction to SLATFATF, and people would not cease begging for yet another installment. So you got what you asked for, and now you're ticked off.
Listen, I would have no problem with the ending, had it been done well and entertainingly. Some of my favorite novels and movies are very dark and feature bad ends for the heros (the Dune books, 12 Monkeys). I have no problem with a change of tone (I personally love SLATFATF), so long as there is a quality story to be told.
I hate wasted characters- If you liked Fenchurch, tough. She is dispatched retro-actively in a space-time accident and doesn't even appear once. Random, Arthur and Trillian's daughter (don't ask), is an entirely pointless character who is best at being annoying. The only thing she is capable of bringing out in other characters is irritation.
Here and there, there are little sparks of brilliance, as if for a brief moment Adams allowed himself to actually enjoy writing about this group of characters that he's obviously grown to resent. However, they quickly give way to the relentless mean-spiritedness of this book.
I wish you knew, Douglas, that there are those of us who were (and are) very grateful for what you had given to us and would have been content had you never written about these characters again.
Douglas Adams is now writing the screenplay for the film version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I only hope he doesn't decide to infect it with the derision and spite that run rampant through this joyless volume.
Rating: 
Summary: Always philosophical, but rarely upbeat. Beware...
Review: People seem to have mixed opinions about the character "Random", Arthur and Trillian's (biological) daughter. Her presence in the story constitutes more of a Statement than a character as such, I think. She is Douglas Adams' way of saying "hey, we all feel lost, alone, helpless, overwhelmed, uncertain where we belong, etc etc etc" Even so, she probably could have been a little more fleshed out... The "Guide Mark 2" is really pretty creepy. It makes you think about some of the big questions, unsurprisingly, if you have read any of Douglas Adams' other stuff... Also, although the plot just goes hogwild for 95% of the book, it really does all pull together at the end. The book is relatively self-contained, compared to some of the others in the series. In general this book is less wacky, and generally a bit darker, than the other books in the "trilogy". Reading this is a little like going to "The Cable Guy", when you are expecting a usual Jim Carey movie. It does make you laugh, but also makes you think, and not always in very comforting ways.
Rating:
Summary: Action, humour, SF satire and post-modern philosophy
Review: Always a lovely read - Adams is very user friendly. He seems to almost have his own genre of which he and Pratchett are the leading exponents. I can't say I laughed out loud too often (although the picture of a drunken Zaphod sticking a birdcage over his second head and badly pretending to be a pirate is hilarious), but it was a very pleasant ride - even if the conclusion is surprisingly bleak for what feels like a light comedy. Like Pratchett (and there are so many 'like Pratchett's, although that's probably in the wrong comparative order) Adams throws in some agnostic themes with his humour, although here the ultimate meaninglessness of life is treated a little less whimsically. It's an interesting hotchpotch of action (and cutting between various cliff-hanger scenes), philosophy, stand-up comic perspectives of the everyday, domestic sit-com, satirical SF, and Douglas' own pleasure in blithely hurling his characters through six impossible things before breakfast. The plot is surprisingly coherent although occasionally incidental. I still would almost be surprised if Adams didn't cite Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 as a thematic and stylistic influence. Here he lets his sensible and considerate astrologer state the theme that it doesn't matter so much what you believe in ('truth' is irrelevant), but you need something as a structure, a lens, to enable you to live satisfactorily. Adams unsurprisingly explains this much better:
"I know that astrology isn't a science ... of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis ... The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people." 'Discuss', huh. Yet another author struggles to reconcile loss of faith in major, particularly religious, concepts of truth with the inner conviction that there are important, good and beautiful things all around - that it's not all just meaningless. And it is a struggle, as in the climax (spoiler warning) Trillian explains to her traumatised daughter who desperately wants to know who she is, where her home is, where she 'fits':
This is not your home ... You don't have one. We none of us have one. Hardly anyone has one anymore. The missing ship I was just talking about. The people of that ship don't have a home. They don't know where they are from. The don't even have any memory of who they are or what they are for. The are very lost and very confused and very frightened. Yeah, ha ha, good one Douglas - hardly Wodehouse light humour. Human condition anyone? I wonder if Adams and Pratchett self-consciously have wanted to be taken 'seriously'? I could see that it could be frustrating for them to be dismissed as merely lightweight because they're so popular. They often contain more articulate thought than works by more academic writers, and shouldn't be seen as lesser merely because they happen to also be very good at amusing and entertaining (quite the opposite). That being said, their books should also come with a flyleaf caveat: "Warning - strong post-modern agenda permeates the following jokes".
Rating:
Summary: Mostly Harmful
Review: When describing The Hitchhiker books to friends, I say that you can pick up any one, open it to a random page, start reading, and get as much from story as you would if you read the entire series start to finish. Now, this is either a sign of Douglas Adams' sheer brilliance, or a sign of his well executed, serial lampoonery. I choose the latter for "Mostly Harmless" and for the rest of the Hitchhiker series in general. After all, brilliant is as brilliant ends. No doubt, the Hitchhiker books are perhaps the most entertaining sci-fi comedy I've ever read. Moreover, at one happy moment ("So Long and Thanks for the Fish") the story rises above episodic, laugh-out-loud comedy, and becomes a tale that one can take a human interest in. Of course, whatever humanity developed there is squished to smithereens in "Mostly Harmless", and that is no surprise. The careful reader should have noted that if there is a single prominent theme in Adams' writing, it is that the human viewpoint is irrelevant, simply a few blips on the probability axis, mostly harmless and dispensable enough to be eradicated from all possibility by single-minded space slugs and zero-minded alien astrologers. But perhaps the most disappointing parts of "Mostly Harmless" are the shallow and painful exchages between Arthur and Random. Therein was much potential for Adams to let us again dare to care about Arthur, above and beyond him being the biggest loser in the universe. Maybe if Arthur had strapped Random and Trillian to a Perfectly Normal Beast and sent them off without alimony or child support, things would have been a lot more interesting. Oh well. Mr. Adams, God rest his soul, was a self proclaimed "radical atheist", so perhaps the lackadaisy nihilism of "Mostly Harmless" , and the Hitchhiker series as a whole, was his answer to the ultimate question. Regardless, the irony is that "Mostly Harmless" is mostly harmful to Adams' magnum opus, which, I think most will agree, is an otherwise uniquely entertaining sci-fi experience this side of the Milky Way.
Rating:
Summary: oh my...
Review: This fifth and final installment in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy is simply amazing. While it seems that a lot of people weren't satisfied with it, I am quite the exception. The tone of the humor in this book (as with SLATFATF) is much darker than the earlier books, but that's just fine by me. I prefer a little darkness. While this book returns somewhat more to the zaniness of the first three books (at least in comparison to the fourth book), it is not entirely wacky. It seems that this book is, in many ways, quite "fannish," there to please fans of the series with cheap thrills and tips of the hat (one example would be the return of the Vogons, which I don't exactly think anybody was clammoring for). However, in the midst of all this, Adams tells a wonderfully adventurous story that ties together in an ending that will leave you stunned and breathless (I'll try not to spoil it, but it's reminiscent of something that happenned in the first book, HG2G). The worst part of the book is that Fenchurch just disappears... literally! And we never see Arthur deal with it! Still, Adams provides us with yet another wonderful character to help reveal the human side of Arthur.... I think it is a wonderful, if unexpected and somewhat unnecessary, end to the series. Trillian returns (although thankfully Zaphod doesn't), but Marvin is depressingly absent. Oh and remember Agrajag, from LTUAE? Well, there's a wonderful tie to that whole thing that you just can't miss. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, go read LTUAE and then read this and laugh along with me. Read it. You'll be blown away.
Rating: 
Summary: good
Review: okay so the ending wasn't all that great, but i still thorougly enjoyed the rest of the book and thought the writing style douglas adams used was quite different from the rest of the hitchhiker books. and anyone who criticises this book for the ending is an idiot because none of them seem to realise that the characters aren't dead at the end, otherwise how would adams make the sixth book that he was planning to write before he was so untimely taken from the world.
Rating:
Summary: HHGTTU
Review: *WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS!!* I loved all of the books,thought the ending to mostly harmless certainly hurt (when I read books, I imagine them to be alive. In addition, I seem to have developed some sort of curse that makes certain that each and every favourite character I ever decide on will die by the end of the book/series/whatever. So Ford dying in the end certainly didn't help my opinion of this book). A lot of people have brought up questions regarding continuity and loopholes with regards to the ending, and I think that this was intentional - My GUESS, is the Douglas Adams purposely ended the book the way he did to be finished and done with it, but to also give people who couldn't deal with the death a simple way out of having to. I cannot deal with the death ( ;) ) so I am pretending in my mind that Ford and the others simply hitch-hiked their way out of the situation, and continued on their way, while sorting out Fenchurch, Zaphod, Trillian/Tricia, and Random along the way, and, everyone did indeed live happily ever after. It could happen.
Rating:
Summary: Well.... not exactly MOSTLY
Review: So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish was, in my opinion, essentially worthless. Therefore, I was much delighted to find that Mostly Harmless does a fair job of rekindling the over-the-top, elaborate zaniness of the original trilogy. Yes, a lot of it won't make sense, but oddly enough, Mostly Harmless seems to make more sense than the rest of the bunch. It isn't quite as inspired as The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, though, nor is it as innocent. Adams' liberal use of the F-word only deters from the likeability of the main characters, though. I didn't like that at all. Perhaps the biggest dividing issue of this book, though, is its ending. I won't spoil it for you, but I'm sure you already know it can't be good. Well.... it is, by no means, a good ending, but it's the only ending that would perfectly conclude the Hitchhiker's "trilogy." A good, solid read that comes close, but not equal to, what Adams initially created.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Ending For A Series That Had A Great Ending
Review: Most of the reviews of "Mostly Harmless" have centered on the fact that "So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish" had such a perfect ending. That is a valid point, but one that should not detract from the fact that the fifth book does have a very clever ending that is very provocative and keeping with the offbeat humor of the series. If there had never been a fourth book, fans of the series like myself would be perfectly happy with "Harmless." The real problem here is that Adams has torn apart a perfectly contained entity to establish the jumping-off point for this book. This upsets people who have invested emotional energy. They may tolerate the universe yanking Arthur around, but they get iritated at the author yanking him around for no good reason. But if "Fish" did not exist, it would play like Adams' trademark absurdity.
Rating:
Summary: For the love of Zarquon....
Review: This book was a decent read, but shy's in comparison to the first four of the series. The wacky zany and highly entertaining universe Adams created is somewhat unsettled by this book. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth for the dedicated fan. I am honestly lead to believe, after having read all of Adams' work, that another book was to follow this one. The issues of Fenchurch as well as there being two Trillian's in the end, plus the lack of Zaphod (with the Heart of Gold) just leaves the door open for a loop hole out of the disturbingly final tone to this book. A loophole I don't Adams was overlooking. While I can appreciate the ideas this book presented, I have to agree with some of the other reviewers here that the previous books filled you with a sort of hope that things would work out for poor and miserable Arthur Dent, as well as, finding it hard to believe that Ford Prefect couldn't find himself out of any difficult situation. While I don't know if I personally could ever get enough of the hitchhiker series, I'm indecisive as which book I would rather have as a finale......
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