Douglas Adams' Hitch hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' is a riot of imagination, a whetstone for one's capacity to go beyond the known and the familiar, a virtual maelstorm of suppositions, possibilities and contradictions.
The trilogy is immensely interesting, especially the first two. If Rowling went from the familiar to the magical land, Adams goes from the facts of science to the fiction of it.
Inter-galactic travel, scientific propositions regarding time, place, alien creatures unseen and yet imagined vividly, the last two survivors of earth, the concepts of teleporting, time travel, the search for an answer to the Creator of the Universe, etc, (This quote is an example of the logical, yet mad reasonings of an extremely intelligent mind- It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.Ch.20) are all so well mixed in a heady cocktail, the books blow one's mind away.
As I followed Arthur's travels with the manically depressed robot called Marvin ("Life," said Marvin dolefully, "loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it." ) and a fellow traveller from a distant planet, I felt as if I had gone through the whole experience and been there and seen it all. There is no predictability about what might come next, Adams is always yards ahead and so one ends up drinking in a soup of tentacles, two heads, noses above eyebrows, music that is so loud that it causes cataclysmic destruction of an entire planet etc.
Space travel and the relative theory of time have always fascinated scientists and science fiction writers...Adams, you have given that fascination a quirky slant, entirely funny.