The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/Heartwarming

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


In general

  • The end of the first season of the radio series, the second book, and the TV show--Arthur and Ford become stranded on prehistoric earth, which--while overrun with Too Dumb to Live Ancient Astronauts--is also covered with unspoiled beauty and delicious fruits, and Ford and Arthur circumnavigate the globe before returning to their landing spot and embracing the local populace (set to "What a Wonderful World" in the radio series and TV show.)

Specific to the novels

  • The ending of So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish. There's something about Marvin finally feeling happy for once before he dies that just makes one feel all tingly inside.
    • The entire book is a CMOH. Arthur returns home, meets a nice girl, and basically has the life he's been longing for for the past eight years. It's got plenty of Adamsian wit but is sprinkled with a lot of very sweet (and fittingly off-kilter) moments. Of particular note, at least to me, is Ford and Arthur watching Casablanca together. It was the last thing Ford was doing the night before the Earth got destroyed, and his little way of showing that, for all the sarcasm, he actually quite likes humanity. (So much, in fact, that when he helped Arthur and Fenchurch hitch a lift on the spacecraft, the only possessions Ford brought with them were two large boxes of videocassettes of movies.)
    • This little tidbit, in which an old lady on a plane sees Arthur and Fenchurch making love on the wing:

Mrs E. Kapelsen of Boston, Massachusetts was an elderly lady, indeed, she felt her life was nearly at an end. She had seen a lot of it, been puzzled by some, but, she was a little uneasy to feel at this late stage, bored by too much. It had all been very pleasant, but perhaps a little too explicable, a little too routine.
With a sigh she flipped up the little plastic window shutter and looked out over the wing.
At first she thought she ought to call the stewardess, but then she thought no, damn it, definitely not, this was for her, and her alone.
By the time her two inexplicable people finally slipped back off the wing and tumbled into the slipstream she had cheered up an awful lot.
She was mostly immensely relieved to think that virtually everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong.

    • And, of course, the last Guide entry (and, indeed, chapter) of the book, which--unlike most other Guide entries--is happy and uplifting. It tells the tale of a genius inventor who is told to build something to ward off alien invaders, but instead designs a delightful new toy, and the incoming invaders (who are only off to war because they can't cope with things at home) are so impressed by the breakthroughs of this one guy that the two planets set up alliances and trading agreements and everyone lives happily ever after.
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