Everything about So Long And Thanks For All The Fish totally explained
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (
1984, ISBN 0-345-39183-7) is the fourth book of the
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series written by
Douglas Adams. Its title is the message left by the
dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspatial express route, as described in
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The phrase has since been adopted by some science fiction fans as a humorous way to say "goodbye" and a
song of the same name was featured in the 2005 film adaptation of
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Plot summary
The book begins with
Arthur Dent, hitch-hiking randomly through the galaxy, arriving at (as the book's blurb describes it) "the last place in the Universe in which he'd expect to find anything at all, but which 3,976,000,000 people will find oddly familiar" - namely
Earth, which was demolished at the beginning of the first book in the series.
After getting dropped off on the planet by a spaceship in the middle of a field in the rain, Arthur Dent walks up to a road where he's surprised by a
car driving by with the bumper sticker "My other car is also a
Porsche" - this is his first indication that he's back on Earth. He is then drenched by a truck driven by Rob McKenna - on whom the clouds continuously rain, because he's unknowingly a Rain God - driving into a puddle of water. The same thing happens with several other cars that pass by, until Arthur successfully hitchhikes in a car driven by a man named Russell.
The point of view changes to
Ford Prefect, who is recklessly causing trouble in the extremely rough Han Dold City. He is almost killed when he attempts to pay for an enormous amount of drinks with an
American Express card, but eventually pays for it by giving the bar a favourable write-up in
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Later he meets a prostitute on the streets whose specialty is telling rich people it's okay to be rich; he tries to show her his
Guide entry for the planet Earth ("Mostly harmless") for which he's owed 15 years' pay, before the latest updating of the
Guide comes through and the entry is - he presumes - deleted. She ends up leaving to offer her services to a guy in a limousine; Ford finds his entry seconds before the updating, but discovers that it isn't being deleted at all: instead, his complete unedited report on the planet Earth is being put into the
Guide. Reasoning that something odd has happened, he leaves the planet immediately and heads for Earth.
Meanwhile, Arthur soon discovers he doesn't like Russell at all. In the backseat of the car is Russell's sister, a beautiful woman who is unconscious, and who Russell calls Fenny. Arthur learns from Russell that Fenny apparently had some sort of mental breakdown in a cafe in Rickmansworth only a few seconds before what he calls "the hallucinations with the big yellow spaceships" - apparently, everybody believes that the destruction of the Earth was a
mass hallucination masterminded by the
CIA. Russell believes that the drugs that the CIA used have taken longer to wear off with Fenny, who he believes is mad because of her repeated saying that she's having delusions that she's living in the real world.
Having made a thoroughly bad impression on Russell, Arthur is dropped off at a
pub: the Horse and Groom, where he was with Ford Prefect the morning that the Earth was - apparently - destroyed. At the pub he sees the Porsche that passed him on the highway and the dog inside it, which he recognises as belonging to his slightly obnoxious friend Will Smithers. Furthermore, he realises that the car is the same one that Will had when Arthur was last on Earth even though Will always changed his car every August - since it was September when the Earth was destroyed and February now, only six months or so could have passed even though Arthur had been away for eight years (including five years on prehistoric Earth).
Returning to his miraculously undemolished home, Arthur finds that in his absence he's received an enormous pile of junk mail and a decorative fishbowl inscribed with the words "
So Long, and Thanks.". Unable to get to sleep, he climbs up onto his roof, where he feels a mysterious connection to the world around him: to the trees, the sheep, and the minds of the people, one of which is fractured - he instinctively knows it's Fenny, but is unable to pinpoint her; he again feels a fracture, only deeper, and finds that the fracture is in the Earth itself - he feels that there are two Earths, separated by a chasm. Arthur then wakes to find himself levitating above his neighbour's flowers (in the previous book, he learned to fly, a simple trick, one throws oneself at the ground, and then misses) - he falls to the ground, limps home and then falls asleep.
The next day Arthur wakes feeling refreshed, and sets to work putting things in order: he clears away the junk mail, rings work and explains he's been away because he'd gone mad, and tries to track down Fenny through calling various hospitals but has no luck. That night Arthur returns to the village pub, and explains his absence of the last several months by having been away in California, and his haggard appearance as having had a '
face-drop'.
Meanwhile, Ford Prefect has incapacitated the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation salesperson on whose starship he was hitchhiking and placed him in suspended animation, and has rigged up a connection to the London Speaking Clock which he makes sure is audible in all rooms of the starship, with the intention of bankrupting them with the phone bill. He leaves in an escape pod and heads for a nearby space station, in order to hitch another ride to Earth.
Two months later, Arthur sees Fenny hitchhiking and picks her up. He offers to drive her to
London but instead she makes him take her only to the nearby train station at
Taunton. He convinces her to talk with him in a pub in the station, and they talk uncomfortably, with bumbling Arthur unable to explain how he knows her already or why he wants to see her again. He finds out that her name is actually
Fenchurch, named after
Fenchurch Street railway station (where she was conceived). He is forced to buy charity raffle tickets from a woman who keeps interrupting their conversation, but in the end gets Fenchurch's phone number on the ticket before she leaves. He later realises that this was the winning ticket and so by giving it up in return for a very lame prize of a record of
bagpipe music, he's lost the number. He falls into depression at having lost contact with Fenchurch again.
Arthur meets Rob McKenna again in a cafe for the second time (the first time being in the exact same cafe, just before he met Fenchurch). Rob tells him how it never stops raining on him, and reveals he's a diary cataloguing the weather around him for the last fifteen years. Arthur suggests he show the diary to someone, which he does - later in the book he's become famous as the "Rain God", and has a lucrative new career of avoiding places for money.
In the previous book,
Life, the Universe and Everything, Arthur Dent found himself living in a cave for five years while marooned on prehistoric Earth. Because he doesn't have much else to do, he decides to try and find the exact coordinates of that cave. He buys a computer in Exeter, and without much skill guesses and articulates a set of coordinates which he thought might have been correct based on the view of the stars from the cave. The narrative informs us that as it happens the guess was exactly correct. When Arthur goes to the coordinates, in modern day
Islington, he "knocked on the appropriate door," and is astonished to see Fenchurch standing before him. Fenchurch admonishes Arthur for not having phoned first, but invites him in and a relationship begins between the two.
In their conversations, they seem to notice that there's something weird about one another. They enjoy each other's company, and talk about their confusion about the world and their experiences. Arthur learns that Fenchurch had felt a "connecting to everything" similar to what he experienced at the beginning of the book, which culminated in the cafe in
Rickmansworth where she'd an epiphany about how to make everything in the world right - that was when the Earth was destroyed, and since then she hasn't been able to remember what her epiphany was. She also seems to think that the Earth really was destroyed, and doesn't believe the experience to be a mass hallucination. He also learns from her that at the same time the Earth was destroyed, all the dolphins in the world disappeared without a trace.
After realizing that Fenchurch's feet don't actually touch the ground, Arthur shows her his ability to fly by diving out of her loft apartment. He helps Fenchurch fly as well and they've sex in the sky over London. They do it again the next night, only with
Sony Walkmen.
Looking for answers, Arthur and Fenchurch travel to
California to meet Wonko the Sane (real name John Watson), a scientist who claims to know why the dolphins disappeared and who is regarded as mad by everyone else. They find his house, which he's named the Outside of the Asylum, is inside out: the outer walls have indoor furnishings and the inside has outdoor-style brickwork and gardening, and the roof bends back on itself. Wonko tells them he built the Asylum to keep the world in after reading the instructions on a packet of
toothpicks, and reasoning that any society that requires instructions for toothpicks must be insane: he always stays on the Outside of the Asylum (for example the inside of the house) which also includes a small stretch of beach.
Wonko shows them a fishbowl identical to the one Arthur found in his house, with the engraving "So Long and Thanks For All The Fish". Fenchurch also reveals she's one as well. Wonko says that the fishbowls are farewell gifts from the dolphins, and that they can find out what happened to the dolphins and the Earth by placing the fishbowls to their ears. Arthur and Fenchurch do so: it turns out that this new Earth is a "shadow" Earth, quite probably an Earth from an alternate timeline, brought into this universe by the dolphins, who all departed the Earth by their own means just before its destruction and have now taken everything on the Earth forward in time onto this new one and departed the planet permanently. The final message given is "This bowl was brought to you by the Campaign to Save the Humans. We bid you farewell."
On the way home they decide to try and leave the Earth to see God's Final Message to His Creation, the address of which he was given in the previous book in the series by
Prak. They wait for a passing flying saucer to come past, which it eventually does, crushing a large part of London and carrying an enormous robot and Ford Prefect. Ford goes on a rowdy pub crawl and then arrives at Arthur's place the next day, where he explains how and why he incapacitated the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation salesperson: apparently his mission was to seek out new civilisation and sell Advanced Music Substitute Systems to their restaurants, elevators and wine bars - or, if the civilisations hadn't advanced that far, to artificially accelerate their civilisation growth until they did.
Ford helps Arthur and Fenchurch steal the flying saucer, and accompanies them to the planet where God's Final Message to His Creation is located - on the trip Ford takes the opportunity to view movies that he never got a chance to see while originally on Earth. When they arrive at the planet, they meet a dying
Marvin (who, because of his extensive and usually unwilling
time travel, is about 37 times older than the universe itself) and help him to read the message, which turns out to be "WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE". Marvin actually likes it, and then dies happily.
Discussion
The novel has a very different tone to the previous books in the series. Partly this is because it's a
romance, and partly because the book jumps in time more than usual. Douglas Adams even humorously puts a side-story in it. Perhaps most notably, there's very little space-travel in the entire book, with Arthur only leaving the new Earth in the final chapters. Adams' editor
Sonny Mehta moved in with the author to ensure that the book met its (extended) deadline. As a result, Adams later stated that he wasn't entirely happy with the book, which includes several jarring authorial intrusions, which fellow author
Neil Gaiman described as "patronising and unfair".
The book also reflects a significant shift in Adams' view of computers. In the previous books, computers had been portrayed quite negatively, reflecting Adams' then views on the subject. However, between the writing of
Life, The Universe and Everything and
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, his attitude toward technology changed considerably. Having been taken along to a computer fair, he became enamoured with the first model of the
Macintosh, the start of a long love-affair with the brand (he claimed to have bought two of the first three
Macintosh in the UK - the other being bought by his friend
Stephen Fry). In
So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, Arthur Dent purchases a computer for the purpose of star mapping; Adams makes only one disparaging comment about this decision.
Literary significance and reception
In 1993 the
Library Journal said that
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish was "filled with loopy humor and pretzel logic that makes Adam's writing so delightful".
Betsy Shorb reviewing for the
School Library Journal said that "the humor is still off-the-wall but more gentle than the other books. The plot is more straight forward and slightly less bizarre than its predecessors".
Further Information
Get more info on 'So Long And Thanks For All The Fish'.
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