Off topic: Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much most of the time. Many soulutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green peices of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green peices of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said even the trees had been a bad move and that no one should have ever left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after a man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Ricksmansworth suddenly realised what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible catastrophe occured, and the idea was lost forever.
This is not her story.
But it is a story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and its conseqences.
It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker's Gude to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occured, never seen or even heard by any Earthman.
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
