Places in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
This is a list of places featured in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
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2 Brontitall 3 Damogran 4 Earth 5 Frogstar 6 Golgafrincham 7 Krikkit 8 Magrathea 9 Milliways 10 NowWhat 11 Ursa Minor Beta 12 External links |
The Big Bang Burger Bar is mentioned by Max Quordlepleen as another place where he performs. It is the opposite of Milliway's in that its at the beginning of the universe, namely the Big Bang.
Brontitall is a planet populated by a highly evolved bird people who live in the right ear of a 15-mile high marble statue of Arthur Dent.
Originally the bird people were ground dwellers, but gradually the planet was taken over by the shoe shops of the Dolmansaxlil Shoe Corporation, apparently thanks to the shoe shop intensifier ray deployed by the corporation in order to keep the populace buying more and more poorly made and ill-fitting shoes. Eventually, the "shoe event horizon" was reached, whereby all of the shops on the planet were shoe shops that made impossible-to-wear shoes. The result was economic collapse, ruin, and famine – the survivors evolved into birds and vowed never to walk on the ground again.
The guide later reveals that the shoe shop intensifier ray "is, in actuality, a phony, designed to make Dolmansaxlil executives feel they are doing something excitingly aggressive, when in fact all they need to do is wait".
On the ground, three clones of an archaeologist called Lintilla discover the strata of shoes, thus revealing the planet's history.
Nearby, a derelict spaceport contains a number of crumbling old spaceships, but one of which is still on power, "delayed" for millennia due to the non-arrival of its complement of lemon-soaked paper napkins.
The inspiration for the events on Brontitall arose from Douglas Adams' frustrating experience trying to buy a pair of shoes on Oxford Street in central London. The name "Dolmansaxlil" was an amalgam of several of the shoe shops he fruitlessly visited.
Brontitall is only mentioned in the original BBC radio show. However, in the books, Frogstar B has some (but not all) of the attributes of Brontitall.
Earth is a disregarded little blue-green planet far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy. It is populated by all sorts of creatures, of which the most important are mice, dolphins and human beings, the latter of whom may or may not be descended from a race of Golgafrinchian telephone sanitisers.
Though often mistaken for a planet, Earth is in reality the greatest supercomputer of all time, designed by Deep Thought to discover the Great Question of Life, The Universe And Everything (to which the answer is 42).
Earth is also home to Arthur Dent and Trillian.
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy describes Earth as "mostly harmless".
Golgafrincham, home of the Great Circling Poets of Arium, decided it was time to rid itself of an entire useless third of its population, and so concocted a story that their planet would shortly be destroyed in some great catastrophe. The useless population (consisting of hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitizers and the like) were packed into the B-Ark, one of three giant Ark spaceships, and told that everyone else would follow shortly in the other two. The other two thirds of the population, of course, did not follow and "led full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone".
The B-Ark was programmed to crash-land on the first planet it came across, which happened to be Earth, and the Golgafrinchans gradually usurped the native cavemen, becoming the ancestors of humanity and thereby ruining the great experiment to find the question for the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
The planet Krikkit is located in a dust cloud composed chiefly of the disintegrated remains of the enormous space-borne computer Hactar.
Due to the dust cloud, the people of Krikkit lead insular lives and never realised the existence of the universe. With the population thus shaped, Hactar built a fake spaceship and crashed it into Krikkit in order to introduce them to the concept of other life. With subconscious help from Hactar, the people of Krikkit build their first space-ship Krikkit One, pierced the dust cloud that shrouded their world, and came face-to-face with the universe. Since the existence of other life did not fit into their world view, they built a spaceship fleet, horrible weapons, and numerous deadly robots, and they began to launch a massive war against the universe in order to rid it of life. The galaxy was initially taken by surprise, but eventually defeated Krikkit after a war that lasted about 2000 years and killed around two grillion people.
As punishment, Krikkit and its sun were sealed into an envelope in which time passed extremely slowly. The envelope was to reopen long in the future, when the rest of creation had died away, so that Krikkit could live out the remainder of the universe's life in the manner they wished.
However, a Krikkit spaceship carrying many of the deadly white robots used in the war, escaped before the envelope was sealed and attempted to retrieve the Wikkit Gate (a key that could unlock the envelope, composed of a Perspex Pillar ("Plastic Pillar" in the American version), a Wooden Pillar, a Steel Pillar, a Silver Bail, and a Golden Bail.) The ship and the gate were thought to have been destroyed, but in fact were merely spread across time.
The robots on the spaceship managed to reopen the envelope, but Arthur, Slartibartfast, Trillian, and Ford Prefect were able to postpone the detonation of the supernova bomb (which would have linked the heart of every major star in the universe, thus ending it) by the Krikkiters long enough for Trillian and Arthur to talk to Hactar, whose influence over the Krikkiters had lead them to become such xenophobes and who had designed and built the supernova bomb, and disperse his consciousness.
The Krikkiters managed to leave other marks besides the destruction of numerous worlds; due to racial memories, the Earth sport of cricket was based on the Krikkit Wars.
Magrathea is a planet whose inhabitants built customized planets for tremendous amounts of money, making Magrathea one of the wealthiest planets in the galaxy. But when the great galactic stock market crash occurred, the Magratheans went into hibernation awaiting the recovery of the economy to the point where their services could once again be afforded. They were later awoken by pan-dimensional beings who had a special order for them; they commissioned the construction of a planet-sized computer named Earth to determine the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, which is required to understand the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
One of the chief Magrathean planet designers was called Slartibartfast, and he designed the coastline of Norway. (He enjoyed doing the crinkly bits and fjords.)
In the radio series and TV series, Magrathea is the location of Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Milliways, also known as the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, can only be visited by time travel, as it exists at the end of time. One of its major attractions is that diners can watch the universe end around them as they eat. The restaurant's bill can be paid by depositing a penny in any bank account of the present time: by the end of the universe, compound interest will be enough to pay the extremely high bill. This is, of course, impossible.
In the book form of the series, the visit to Milliways takes place in book two, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
In the different versions of the story, Milliways is built on the ruins of either Magrathea or of Frogstar World B.
The rich and sunny planet Ursa Minor Beta has the quite peculiar property that most of its surface consists of subtropic coastline. Even more peculiar, on this world it's always Saturday afternoon. Light City, the only city on Ursa Minor Beta, which can only be reached by plane, is the very place where the editorial offices of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" reside.The Big Bang Burger Bar
Brontitall
Damogran
A small, remote, uninteresting planet whose surface comprises a number of small, uninteresting islands surrounded by ocean. Two of these islands are coincidentally named "Easter Island" and "France". The starship Heart Of Gold was built, and subsquently stolen from, here.Earth
Frogstar
The name "Frogstar" is a pun on the "Dog star", a common name for Sirius. In the original radio series, the Frogstar system does not exist and the Total Perspective Vortex is said to be located on "The Frogstar".Frogstar World A
Frogstar World B
Frogstar World C
Golgafrincham
Krikkit
Magrathea
Milliways
NowWhat
The planet NowWhat is physically largely the same as Earth, in that it has the same continents, location in space/time, etc. The difference is its location along an axis of probability. It is a fairly depressing place. The main town is called OhWell. The only major animal to survive (the others all having died of despair) is the NowWhattian boghog, whose only method of communication is biting very hard on the thigh. Mostly Harmless describes it thus:
Ursa Minor Beta