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Life, the Universe and Everything has a slightly unfair reputation as the moment the Hitchhiker's books started to fall off. I disagree. The cricket-themed apocalypse plot is genuinely well-constructed, the Krikkit robots are some of Adams's best creations, and the jokes-per-page rate remains catastrophic for productivity.
The book is denser than the first two and the structural irony is set higher (the cricket match in chapter one is doing real work on page 240) and Adams is clearly trying out a register that is not quite comedy and not quite straight SF. The Lallafa interlude in Australia is one of the strangest digressions in the series and one of my favorite passages in his work.
Four stars. Read after the original two, then continue with the much heavier So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish if you want to keep going.
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