To give you a feel for the writing style of this so-called "
trilogy", here's a
parody I wrote just after
Christmas in my
freshman year at the
University of Florida. It owes something to
Douglas Adams' gag about
money not being particularly
unhappy. It also owes you an
apology for its none-too-subtle references to the
season and the
final exams I had just survived.
Please believe me when I say that (1) Douglas Adams doesn't always write this way, and that (2) the real thing is considerably better than my attempt at parody.
The scene opens, as nearly as I can tell after some seven or eight years, on an editor for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the best travel guide anywhere...
Kankaffril Eight pondered slowly whether this particular entry was, in the way a peach cobbler wasn't, just a piece of paper with scribblings on it. He enjoyed pondering. And what was more, he was good at it. He had
been called "Person Most Likely to Ponder" by some, which didn't mean so much when you considered what he had been called by others, especially others engaged in cutting him off in traffic at the time while pretending to be supremely offended by his taste in hanging air fresheners, but all the same he felt as if he had been made to ponder.
In fact, pondering had been made for him, if you asked the older travellers in the Galaxy, but nobody had yet asked them. Their reply was likely to be incomprehensible, since the older travellers had come from Troldanix Gamma, where incomprehensibility had been heavily subsidized as an important form of artistic expression. He pondered nevertheless.
He was pondering particularly in the direction of whether it would be fair to call anything "just a piece of paper". It certainly didn't matter to the author of the entry, since he had long since passed away while trying
to get the post office to accept a package which bore a self-contradictory address. He had hired a team of lawyers to force the post office to accept it, and a new associate in the firm suggested pointing out that its mind-boggling self-contradictory nature qualified it as valid in anything having to do with the post office. He was fired. By the time the partners realized that it was, in fact, a good idea, their client was dead. A further hundred years or so passed while the subsequent generations of attorneys worked on whether their futility and irony might qualify them to receive the package themselves, but they were disappointed to find that not only did the package contain "just a piece of paper", it was not one of the many pieces of paper on their planet which were worth anything.
His idea to call the thing "just a piece of paper", however, would most certainly have appalled the piece of paper itself, for that is what it was. Pieces of paper, or Xantack Laas, as they called themselves, enjoyed
only one pastime, and it is unclear whether they can rightfully be said to enjoy it, since it brings them no joy. Rather, they get a sense of contemplative resentment towards the Universe out of their pastime, which is to be appalled when other creatures pick up a Xantack Laas and scribble on it without so much as thinking what the paper's opinion of the situation is. "It's just a piece of paper," they protest. Or, rather, they would protest, since nobody has yet questioned these insensitive pink bipeds on the propriety of their actions.
It is less clear how the scribblings felt. Their intelligence has never been properly measured, since the first psychologist who attempted to do so used a multiple-choice intelligence test. The scribblings were asked to indicate their answers by marking yet another piece of paper which had been painted with a silly pattern of squares beforehand. To the average human, this would not seem like a peculiarly insensitive request, since the average human has not in fact *been* the marks in question for eons.
The scribblings, however, never allowed a psychologist near them again.