The English author Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series presents a fantastic universe which symbolically can be taken as a parody of our postmodern age, a period of non-stop change and no-boundries in which nothing has a concrete stable meaning. The series displays human being that seems lost in a digital world where philosophical search for the meaning of life and spiritual enlightenment become futile and frivolous under the shadow of the rapid change of technologies. Thus, the books of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series address the problems related to the issues such as culture and technology , language and communication, fate and free-will, reality and unreality. The fifth book of the series, MostlyHarmless, …show more content…
He is in a parallel universe in which he is led by a device called The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Guide, among many other devises like robots, is a product of artificial intelligence that gives written answers and information. For example, the title of the novel Mostly Harmless comes from the definition of earth made by the guide. When some information of earth is demanded from the guide, it only writes Mostly Harmless as a definition of earth. The guide is one of the leitmotifs that emphasizes the human being’s dependence on and even addiction to technological devises. this is the point where the balance of power between human being and machine is destroyed because which one is ruling the other is put in question. Moreover the Guide symbolizes the ephemerality of concepts, fashions, values and reality. Its information is always changing and far from being coherent. It does not guide with rational and reasonable information as seen in the quotation: One encouraging thing the Guide does have to say on the subject of parallel universe is that you don’t stand the remotest chance of understanding it. You can therefor say ‘What?’ and ‘Eh?’ and even go cross eyed start to blither if you like without any fear of making a fool of