I’ve recently had a kind of brainworm I had to get down on paper, or rather on screen as it is nowadays, though it needn’t be. It focusses on ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ and I have of course spent way too much time concentrating on this to the detriment of the work itself, but I can’t resist it. On this occasion though, it yielded fruit, almost literally in fact, and turned out to culminate in something which was a lot less ridiculous than I initially thought. The problem was that despite it not being particularly pointful, I couldn’t get it out of my head.
The ultimate question, so to speak, is this:
How many species of organism could be rescued from Earth after it gets demolished by the Vogons?
This thought originated from the scene in Fit The First where Ford and Arthur are hiding on the Vogon spaceship, having just beamed aboard, and after a suitable pause, Ford tells Arthur, “I brought some peanuts.” When I heard this line, I felt a sense of poignancy that not only had the world just ended, but apparently the only other species of Earth life than humans which persisted, the peanut, would shortly itself be destroyed by Arthur’s digestive juices, and then that would be it: nothing would remain other than Arthur, as far as the listener knows at the time. Further consideration, and further listening, would demonstrate that this was not in fact so. And so begins the highly elaborate glass bead game.
There are, considering the entire trilogy of five books, several categories of life originating on this planet involved. It breaks down thus, and I am going to number the categories because they are quite enlightening:
- Trillian and Arthur themselves. Humans survived the destruction of the planet.
- Organisms whose DNA or other biological traces are on or in Arthur, or stand a chance of being associated with him.
- The same issue considering Trillian. It may seem arbitrary to cleave the two humans in this way, but it turns out to be anything but. I’ll come back to this.
- Other organisms who left Earth before or during its destruction, either canonically or plausibly without evoking the canon.
- Earth organisms who canonically sprung into being due to the operation of the Infinite Improbability Drive.
- Organisms accidentally removed in other ways.
- Organisms mentioned which appear to be from Earth but in fact are not.
I’m going to consider these in reverse order.
Organisms Only Apparently From Earth
Items are mentioned here and there whose origin appears to be terrestrial but is apparently not. For instance, Ford asks the Vogon guard whether the appeal of his job is wearing rubber. Rubber could be considered as originating only from a specific tree originating in Brazil, Hevea brasiliensis, the rubber tree. However, two facts argue against this. One is that latex from other plants can and has been used to make rubber, for instance dandelions. The other is that synthetic rubbers exist and the word could be used less strictly, and may well be. For instance, there is silicone rubber. Hence rubber itself probably shouldn’t be taken to indicate that there are rubber trees of that species elsewhere in the Universe.
This is in fact kind of acknowledged in the books, with the existence of jynnan tonix and ouisghiansodas. Many civilisations throughout the Galaxy have a drink called something like “gin and tonic”, although beyond the name they don’t resemble each other, and it also turns out that there’s another similar coincidence, undiscovered and unacknowledged, in the form of “whisky and soda”. Given this, it’s possible that the various items referred to are not identical to an Earth reader’s concept of those things. They may in fact be almost but not entirely like them. The obvious answer here is tea, as produced by the Nutrimat Machine. It isn’t clear where this originates. Tea is available from the local megamart in a variety of easy to swallow capsules, and the initial creation of the Infinite Improbability Drive required a cup of really hot tea. It isn’t clear why, because hot water might be thought to suffice. Arthur is also made the best tea he’s ever tasted at one point on the Heart Of Gold. Hence for some reason, tea appears to exist, or to have existed in the past, elsewhere in the Universe. However, like rubber the word “tea” has a more generic meaning, referring to any vegetable matter infused in hot water, such as chamomile tea or rooibosch. Even so, Arthur clearly perceives the tea as tea. Two things may have happened here. Either literal Camellia sinensis exists on other worlds or it was obtained from Earth. There is a third possibility which will be considered later.
One fruit is mentioned at least thrice. The Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster is described as having one’s brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. When Ford and Arthur arrive on the ‘B’ Ark, the security guard offers them a lemon with their jynnan tonix. Finally, on Brontitall, the starship is delayed nine hundred years while waiting for lemon-soaked paper napkins. This is quite a striking recurrence. It’s possible that the lemon arrived with the Golgafrinchams on the ‘B’ Ark, but perhaps interestingly the scent of lemon is quite widely distributed through plants on this planet, such as lemon grass and lemon verbena. It’s one of two enantiomers of limonene, the other being the scent of oranges. There are also other lemon-flavoured organisms, such as black ants. The presence of citric acid in an organic life form would probably not be unusual. For whatever reason, something lemony is out there among the stars. Perhaps even a lemon.
Potatoes seem to be another such organism. These are very ancient. The Silastic Armourfiends were ordered to punch bags of potatoes to vent their aggression many millions of years before the manufacture of Earth and therefore the appearance of potatoes as we know them. Again, this could be a generic reference to tuberous root vegetables. Even on Earth we have starchy root crops similar to potatoes, such as sweet potatoes.
A further species, possibly several, crops up in Deep Thought’s original deduction of a recipe for rice pudding. This includes rice, milk, cream and cinnamon in the TV version. The existence of rice is not controversial. It means that rice pudding existed at that point in time. To digress slightly, it’s difficult to know how to refer to deep time in H2G2 because in its universe Earth didn’t exist before a few million years ago, so it’s not sensible to use the conjectured geological time periods such as “Jurassic” before the planet was built. The only real epochs are the Pliocene, Pleistocene and Holocene, the only real era is the Cenozoic, and not all of that. The question regarding Deep Thought here, though, is whether it anticipated the existence of rice pudding or deduced its current presence in the Universe. If it did the former, there’s an issue with why it couldn’t simply use its anticipation of the future course of Earth history to give the mice the Ultimate Question, so it makes more sense to see it as already in existence. The existence of milk in this recipe is pretty unproblematic, as milk is just what we call opaque white potable liquids such as coconut milk, and sometimes even impotable ones such as dandelion milk. Cinnamon, however, is highly specific.
It’s possible to extract a principle from this: there are generic items in the wider Universe which have surprisingly specific resemblances to familiar terrestrial ones. Out there in the Galaxy there is milk and rubber, perhaps unsurprisingly, but also tea, potatoes, lemon and even cinnamon. Incidentally, I have to get this out of my head: the spice Melange from Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ series has similarities to cinnamon according to the now-banned Dune Encyclopedia, so it isn’t just H2G2 which anticipates the existence of interstellar cinnamon (brand new sentence there). There are two other aspects to this. In an infinite Universe, everything is possible according to the Guide, so for example the Babel fish and ratchet screwdriver trees exist, as do sentient mattresses. Just on the last issue, it is kind of true even on Earth that living mattresses and lilos are possible as they did before the evolution of life as we know it since the Cambrian. This means that every species found on Earth does in fact exist somewhere else in the Universe, and in fact that a carbon copy of Earth exists which was not built by the Magratheans. Maybe we’re on that Earth and Arthur Dent’s an alien. The other aspect is that Deep Thought could have designed Earth as a microcosm of the wider Galaxy with organisms resembling those from elsewhere, so it isn’t that there are coincidentally or by convergence life forms elsewhere so much as that they were deliberately put here.
Organisms Accidentally Removed in Various Ways
The main mechanism here is teasers, or as we call them, little green men. These are occupants of interstellar craft who visit Earth and other planets and pretend to be stereotypical aliens. They are presumably also abductors, creators of crop circles, and interfere with cattle. I’m going to assume that the most contact they have with organisms on Earth is in the form of trampling on crop circles, which I also assume they make in the same way as the hoaxers do. Incidentally, although crop circles and UFOs were not widely associated by the public until something like 1990, the association did exist back in the ’70s but was only made in flying saucer enthusiast circles, so to speak. This is of course leading up to the “fact” that teasers take wheat pollen with them when they leave – Triticum aestivum. There’s another aspect to their visit which I will consider under another heading as it’s best considered with Trillian and particularly Arthur.
When the Earth explodes, various particularly tough organisms such as extremophiles might survive in the ensuing cloud of débris. Tardigrades are the obvious example, as they can survive dormant in space, possibly for years. There may even be tardigrades on Mars, and there definitely are on Cynthia (“the Moon”). Another category of organisms this clearly applies to is certain archaeans. Archaeans are microörganisms once confused with bacteria, many of which can survive in extreme conditions such as hot springs. These could possibly survive too, again perhaps in a dormant state.
Zaphod Beeblebrox also visited Earth and took one organism, Trillian, with him deliberately, but probably also took others accidentally. I’ll go into this in greater depth when I consider Trillian.
Finally, Arthur finds an unexpected bottle of retsina:
Vitis vinifera – grape. Used in the retsina Arthur finds on Agrajag’s planet.
Pinus halepensis – Aleppo pine, whose resin is an ingredient of retsina.
Saccharomyces cerevisiae – Brewer’s yeast, found in the retsina.
Infinite Improbability Drive Creations
Several organisms are created when the Infinite Improbability Drive is operated. There are very obvious examples, but I’ll deal with them in order of the timelike curve described by the Heart Of Gold.
The first time the drive is operated, it causes two hundred and thirty-nine thousand fried eggs to appear on the planet Poghril, where all but one person had just died of starvation. This seems at first to imply that it brought Gallus domesticus into existence, but actually it doesn’t. Eggs are a common means of reproduction found throughout the metazoan clade, such as with slugs, spiders and birds. These particular eggs must resemble hen’s to some extent because they seem to contain albumen and yolks and are altered by frying in a familiar way. At no point did they have shells, incidentally, as they were yanked into being without them. They are also high in cholesterol. Even so, I don’t believe these have to be hen’s eggs.
Now for the two most prominent incidents. When Ford and Arthur are rescued, they meet several species of animal on the Heart Of Gold and Ford turns into a penguin. I’m not sure whether to count that because he’s only temporarily transformed. There’s also a five-headed person crawling up a wall, but there are no such organisms on Earth. What there is, however, is an infinite number of monkeys, apparently capuchins. It isn’t clear what happens to any of these species but they don’t seem to be in evidence once normality is restored. That’s not true, though, of the sperm whale and the bowl of petunias. This next bit, therefore, is easy: Petunia and Physeter catadon. There’s even flesh strewn around on Magrathea afterwards. Although it’s straightforward that these species are brought into existence, it’s not so clear that they were alone. The sperm whale could, for all we know, be encrusted with barnacles and contain typical gut flora for a sperm whale along with parasites such as a tapeworm, but the simplest assumption is that the sperm whale is isolated. It’s also fair to question which organisms if any co-occurred with the Petunia, since it is in a bowl and therefore potted in some material. However, again we don’t know that this is so.
Just a side-issue on this: there was at one point going to be a goat on the Heart of Gold after Arthur rescued everyone from the missiles, but this was not pursued. On other occasions, there was a fossilised towel, but nothing is recorded to have happened in that respect when it was operated to escape from the Vogons or visit the Man In The Shack.
There is a flaw in how I’ve considered this. In fact, any terrestrial species could be conjured into existence by the Infinite Improbability Drive, but not in the narrative of the actual stories.
Trillian
Trillian is the most interesting aspect of this entire issue, and in fact she’s why I decided this wasn’t just a frivolous mind game. There is a markèd contrast between Arthur’s and Trillian’s biomes due to the circumstances of their departure and gender, which could in any case be linked.
Trillian was at a party six months before Earth’s destruction. She was surrounded by various alcoholic beverages and snacks. This contributes to her status as a goldmine of genomes, as does her gender presentation. Unlike Arthur she’s likely to have cosmetics, scent and jewellery, as well as residues of toiletries. She was being chatted up by Arthur, then Zaphod, as “Phil”, came along and, well, abducted her right out of that environment, which was not the moribund ecosystem surrounding Arthur as it was being destroyed, but a still-thriving habitat. Many organisms are likely to be held in common between them such as Candida albicans, which is found in the human gut, and in fact many of the microörganisms in their digestive tracts, lungs and body surfaces. Both have, for example, follicle mites – Demodex follicularum. They may also have pathogens, such as rhinovirus, and at a pinch even the likes of fleas and head lice, though probably not. Both have Mentha x piperita – peppermint – in their mouths, or possibly spearmint, from toothpaste.
Here’s a breakdown of what she might distinctively have on her and why:
From cocktails:
Cinchona pubescens – quinine, in bitter lemon.
Juniperus communis – juniper, in gin.
Olea europaea – olive, on cocktail sticks. This is, however, also mentioned in connection with Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters, so it doesn’t count as distinctively terrestrial.
Prunus avium – cherry, also on cocktail stick.
Curcuma longa – cucumber. This is a long shot but not only might this occur in a cocktail but also in a cucumber sandwich. That also means:
Lepidum sativum – cress.
Sinapis alba – white mustard.
(Mustard and cress sandwiches)
Possibly an Abies species for the cocktail stick, but more likely to be Pinus, which was already in the retsina.
Artemisia absinthium – wormwood, if they had absinthe.
Gallus domesticus – hen, if there was advocaat (eggs).
Vanilla planifolia – vanilla orchid, same source.
Citrus aurantium – orange.
Pyrus malus – apple.
Angostura trifoliata – if they had genuine angostura bitters.
Solanum lycopersicum – tomato.
There would also have been snacks, which might allow various nut species to be recovered, such as Anacardium officinale (cashews), Prunus amygdalus (almond) and others. There could also be other things such as trail mix, pork scratchings or Bombay mix, but it would rely on Trillian actually eating it, and having the drinks.
Canapes might contain:
Salmo salar – salmon
Thunnus tynnus – Atlantic bluefin tuna
Allium sativa – garlic
Again, she’d have to eat or at least touch these. Both these categories are very uncertain, and in fact I can add a couple of quite likely ones:
Ananas comosus – pineapple. There are pretty sure to be pineapple cubes on sticks at this party.
Prawn cocktail – it isn’t clear to me which species of decapod is most popular as food.
Much of the above is culturally and historically specific. Wealthier people would have different food available. Trillian is not wealthy, but on the dole, although she may have had social capital from university days or others. Later on, something like sambuca might have become available, meaning licorice, possibly elder (Sambucus nigra). There is a positive wealth of possible organisms here, but also a high degree of uncertainty.
Cosmetics: Many cosmetics are mineral-based. Their ingredients also change over time, trending at the moment towards plant sources.
Lipstick:
Ricinus communis – Castor oil plant.
Theobroma cacao – cacao. Cocoa butter.
Simmondsia chinensis – Jojoba (also possibly in shampoo and conditioner).
Copernica conifera – Carnauba wax. Could also be on lemon rind.
Dactylopius coccus – cochineal insect. Could also be present in food.
Kerria lacca – lac bug. Possibly in makeup or on lemon rind, might also be on nail varnish.
These last two are likely to be less common today.
Eye shadow: exclusively mineral ingredients.
Mascara: big overlap with lipstick.
Foundation: palmitic acid, which remarkably at this stage (1978) could have been from sperm whale again!
Various glycerol-based lipids from a variety of different sources.
Primer: again remarkably, this could in theory be a source of Thea sinensis or Vitis, but I reckon that’s too sophisticated for the ’70s. Another change.
Blusher:
Cetorhinus maximus – basking shark, source of squalene. Could be a couple of other species. Nowadays this is not from animals, but back then it was. There are other species of shark this could be from.
Shampoo:
Cocos nucifera – coconut palm. TBH, this is probably going to be in something on the above lists anyway.
Elaeis guineensis – oil palm. This doesn’t really belong here but there will be palm oil in something.
Conditioner:
Sorbitol occurs naturally in various fruits.
Perfume and scent ingredients derived from various plants, e.g.
Lavandula angustifolia – lavender
Rosmarinus officinalis – rosemary
Rosa sp – there are so many species of rose it’s ridiculous, so I’m not going to narrow it down further than that.
Jasminum officinale – jasmine.
Pogostemon cablin – patchouli (less likely).
It’s uncertain whether these are just various compounds from the relevant organisms or if their actual genomes would be available. It’s also notable that Trillian has a less detailed back story than Arthur, and some of the uncertainty may result from that. This, sadly, probably arises from Douglas Adams’s sexism. His female characters generally seem to be less filled-out than his male ones. Most of his cybernetic characters are also male, with the exception of the Nutrimatic machine. The type of character Trillian has been made to become is, to be fair, not enormously stereotypical because she’s an astrophysicist, but her presentation is typically feminine, hence the massive biological accoutrements. This could be flipped: why isn’t Arthur expected to make this effort? It’s still interesting that if you remove an average woman from 1970s Islington from Earth, you sample a lot more of the planet’s biosphere with her than if you remove an average man from the rural West Country, even though she’s in an urban environment and he’s in a rural one.
Arthur’s turn. Arthur is a six-foot tall ape descendant (nowadays he’s seen as an ape) who works in local radio, and is of course a man. Here’s a list of what he has on or in him at the end of the world:
Felis cattus – domestic cat. When Arthur arrives back on Earth, there is a dead cat in his house, so he may have had a cat. Some fur may exist on his dressing gown. In fact it almost certainly does, and also aerosols from the cat licking her fur.
At this point I should probably mention an organism of ‘Trainspotting’ fame: Toxoplasma gondii. Arthur may well actually be subclinically infected by Toxoplasma, as many people associated with cats are.
Canis familiaris – dog. As Arthur is about to be thrown off the Vogon spaceship, he says he was planning to “brush the dog”, so there may also be dog hairs on his dressing gown. Also, possibly Know-Nothing may have done the same, though this is less likely. In case you don’t know, Know-Nothing is the pub dog in Cottington, Arthur’s village.
Right at the start of the narrative portion of the story, Arthur’s morning routine is described.
Bos taurus – cattle. Arthur makes himself a cup of coffee just before he notices the bulldozers outside. The milk he puts in it probably has cow DNA in it.
Coffea robusta – coffee. Since it’s the ’80s, Arthur probably uses instant coffee, hence robusta rather than arabica.
Toothpaste occurs around this stage. There’s also shaving foam, which may contain Gossypium among other ingredients, and there might even be aftershave although this isn’t mentioned.
Humulus lupulus – hops in the six pints of beer Ford buys Arthur at lunchtime.
Hordeum vulgare – barley used to make the beer.
Saccharomyces cerevisiae – the yeast fermenting the beer and the retsina on Agrajag’s planet, which I’ve mentioned.
Arachis hypogaea – peanuts. “I brought some peanuts” – Ford’s comment which started this whole futile enterprise.
Musca domestica – house fly. Arthur swats flies on prehistoric Earth, possibly not that species but at least one species of fly. This is also Agrajag.
Oryctolagus cuniculus – the rabbit Arthur killed to make his bag out of. Also Agrajag.
Ovis aries – sheep. Wool in dressing gown.
Tineola bisselliella – clothes moth. Possible but unlikely.
Gossypium arboreum – cotton, probably present somewhere on Arthur’s person.
Morus alba – again, possible but unlikely. The white mulberry on which the silk worms making any silk Arthur might be wearing fed.
Bombyx mori – silk worm/moth. Could be present in Arthur’s clothing
Hevea brasiliensis – rubber tree. Might be present in Arthur’s slippers.
Saccharum sp – sugar cane. Unlikely, but he might’ve had sugar in his coffee and that might not have been refined.
Beta vulgaria – sugar beet. Mutually exclusive with the previous species. Also, I’m not convinced white sugar still contains any trace of DNA.
Commensal organisms:
Demodex folliculorum – follicle mite in Arthur’s eyelashes.
Candida albicans – thrush yeast. Present in the gastrointestinal tract of about half of human adults.
Gut flora – a large number of species.
Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus – house dust mite. According to the Infocom game, Arthur has fluff in his pocket, which probably contains this animal. Incidentally, this is the European dust mite. The American dust mite would not have survived in all probability.
Hence Trillian could be associated with thirty-seven named species whereas Arthur, despite the fact that we know a lot more about his circumstances as he left Earth, only has twenty-five. Two of them result from his personal violence against animals.
Arthur may not be wearing make up, but he is wearing mud. He lay down in front of the bulldozer. This means he’s likely to be covered in it, leading to such soil organisms as Caenorhabditis elegans and Colpoda, as well as various fungi.
Ford and Arthur are also covered in pollen. This would vary according to the time of year. Perhaps surprisingly, there are only two short date ranges during which the destruction of the Earth could have occurred. We know from the TV series that the Sun rose at 6:30 am on that day. Due to leap years, the date when this happens moves around slightly and due to BST it might be an hour earlier. We also know it’s a Thursday, although this has been disputed because of the football reference. Assuming it’s 1978, the relevant dates are 6th August (Hiroshima Day, rather appropriately), 3rd May and 4th April, none of which are on Thursday. Considering it’s the Vogons, I like the idea that it’s the last day of the tax year, 5th April. If this is so, likely pollens include alder, elm, willow, birch, ash, and, perhaps surprisingly, rather few herbs. Hence the rather obvious privet hedge buffeted by the wind just before Ford activates the electronic thumb is not shedding pollen and hence would only survive if one of its leaves got lodged in Arthur’s dressing gown or PJ’s. Some other plants would already be shedding but not at their peak, including plane, oak and canola.
Other Organisms Leaving Earth Voluntarily
There are two other types of animal who left Earth or were unaffected by its destruction. One of these was the dolphin. It isn’t clear whether this means all dolphins or a limited or unique species. I’ve assumed it was Tursiops truncatus, the bottlenose dolphin. They left Earth shortly before the Vogons arrived, having failed to be communicate the warning although I’m not sure what we could’ve done to prevent it really. They may have taken a food supply with them or simply had half-digested fish in their digestive systems, so that would include herring, mackerel and possibly krill. Other species include mullet, cephalopods, conger eels, hake, bandfish (in this case I didn’t know those existed in the first place) and porgies. Regarding internal parasites, there’s Cryptosporidium, a protist, Ascaris, a nematode, Giardia, another protist and Nasitrema, a trematode, but the question arises of whether the dolphins would use the opportunity to rid themselves of these or perhaps recognise their role in their health, as they might reduce the prevalence of autoimmune conditions. Whale lice would also be present if they chose to keep them. Just as humans are covered in pollen, dolphins and their prey are covered in phytoplankton, such as diatoms. Hence various single-celled algae can be expected to be salvageable.
The final category appears to be mice and the organisms associated with them. Again, it isn’t clear whether it’s just Mus musculus or several species of mice involved. I’m going to assume the former, but note also that whatever the original mouse was, they had time to evolve. What we think of as mice are of course merely the three-dimensional projections of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings, and being mice is just the day job. Nonetheless, Trillian took her mice with her and can therefore be presumed to have taken their food. Mice are of course omnivorous, like most or all rodents, but are sometimes assumed to be herbivorous. In 1978, mice were fed a mixture of seeds and pellets of some kind which I couldn’t identify but may have been minced up insects or something. The seeds included sunflower, split peas, lentils and presumably peanuts. Mice get parasites like dolphins and humans but it’s unlikely Trillian’s would have any. It’s hard to know whether to count mice as native to Earth in the H2G2 universe, as they aren’t what we think they are.
Several issues remain. One is that Earth being only ten million years ago, all the fossils and evolution presumed to happen up until that point are fake, but after that point are probably real. I say fake evolution because DNA analysis would still show an apparent genetic relationship between, for example, humans and chimps even though chimps are native to this planet and humans are not, or between undoubtedly native organisms which were in fact separate creations or not even from the same planet or even dimension in one case. And this is the really weird thing about this whole constructed Earth scenario: Douglas Adams was clearly “a great fan of science” but his version of Earth is almost creationist, though not exactly young Earth creationist. The arrival of the Golgafrinchams led to the replacement of hominins by alien humans, since humans are aliens, and also possibly the introduction of novel species such as grapes, olives and lemons, and maybe also various other species which also replaced their native counterparts or successfully competed with species in similar ecological niches. Despite all this, all known life on Earth is now established to be related. Is this perhaps because it isn’t just life here which is related, but across the Galaxy? Did panspermia happen? Is it happening all the time? Or did the computer program which ran the Earth have to simulate the wider Universe in order to provide the right data on which to base its calculations? This could mean that Earth simply encapsulates the biomes of the wider Galaxy. Maybe life is just constantly diffusing in and out of Earth’s biosphere and linked genetically to the rest of the Universe.
To conclude, I think this is a good way of illustrating the intentional fallacy. Arthur’s and Trillian’s biomes are quite different from each other, although they overlap. Although Douglas Adams is unlikely to have any conscious intention of writing Arthur as a fuller character than Trillian, if he had written them more equally, Trillian’s biome would have been as certain as Arthur’s. This is in spite of the fact that Arthur is supposed to be “Everyman”, i.e. a close to blank slate, though quintessentially English, in whose position the reader is supposed to place herself. Trillian absconded from Earth in its prime, and because her gender stereotype is more clearly constructed than Arthur’s, she takes more of the planet with her when she goes. It’s expensive being a “girl”, meaning that whereas it’s alleged to be optional to present oneself as feminine as a woman, in many contexts this will place one at a disadvantage or put one in danger. Adams is also sketchier about Trillian’s background because he’s writing about what he knows, and he doesn’t know women in the same way as women know women. Moreover, Trillian leaves Earth willingly whereas Arthur has to be prised away from it even though he’ll die otherwise, which somehow reminds me of “women get sick but men die”. On the other hand, Trillian may be too compliant for comfort.
A few more things can be drawn out of this:
- H2G2 is oddly “creationist”, but “middle-aged Earth Creationist” rather than young or old Earth, despite Douglas Adams being proselytisingly atheist. This is also similar to Terry Pratchett’s ‘Strata’.
- Recent developments in DNA sequencing would be expected to have revealed that there was more than one line of evolution leading to organisms on this planet. Larry Niven did something similar with the Protectors.
- Terms used for certain items in the H2G2 universe are known to have wider references than they are usually used. This is acknowledged in the case of jynnan tonix and implied with ouisgiansoda, but may be much wider than is at first apparent. For instance, it may include “rubber”, “lemon” and “milk”.
- As the H2G2 universe is infinite, there are countably infinitely many identical species to those found on Earth in any case. This too is suggested in the text with the ratchet screwdriver trees, mattresses and the Babel fish.
- What would a gender-swapped version of H2G2 be like? What would this version be like told from Trillian’s perspective? Would gender-swapping include Marvin, Eddie and the Nutrimatic Machine?
A Box Of Chocolates 