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By the fourth Hitchhiker's book Douglas Adams was bored of his own series and wrote something almost no one was expecting: a love story. Arthur Dent comes home to a restored Earth and falls in love with a woman named Fenchurch in the kind of slow, attentive prose Adams had never quite committed to before. The book is half the length of the previous one. The jokes are quieter. The emotional register is genuinely warm.
The flying-while-in-love sequence is one of the most-quoted passages in modern SF for a reason. It is also one of the few times Adams stopped using a punchline to defend himself from an emotional moment.
Whether you love this book depends almost entirely on how much you want the Hitchhiker's series to be Hitchhiker's. If you want a fifth riff on the Vogons, this one will frustrate you. If you are open to the possibility that Adams could write something gentler, this is one of his best books. Four stars.
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