For all you Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fans -- win and wear the ultimate answer

Why 42?

Forty-two is the answer to life, the universe and everything, in Douglas Adams’s masterpiece, a surreal and goofy romp through the universe.

Enter now!

Why giveaway this?

Because I think that fans of HHGTTG will also enjoy my new book, Alpha Max: An Existential Romp through an Absurd Multiverse. Now, I’m not saying Alpha Max is as funny HHGTTG, because that’s a pretty high bar.

However, I have some earlier reviewers compare this work to that of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and also Kurt Vonnegut. The winner will also receive a signed, first edition copy of my new book!

This was on my to-read list for a long time and I probably wouldn’t have gotten to it anytime soon if I hadn’t landed on Tomorrow Land 36: Ride space mountain! Read a book with either an image of or from space or where the authors full name contains the letters SPACE

I’ve never been a huge fan of reads like this, preferring speculative fiction if I’m going to delve into something in the sci-fi genre, so I wasn’t that hopeful I’d enjoy it. Somewhere along the way, though, I got sucked in to this crazy book and started to enjoy it a lot. It’s all about a mad journey Arthur Dent (a man from earth) makes with his friend, Ford Prefect, (an alien who has been posing as a human for fifteen years) through space.

I’m not going to say much about this because honestly, I don’t know where to start. It doesn’t make a huge lot of sense but then, neither does life and this is precisely the point I believe it was trying to make. I'll just leave you with this, my favourite quote. I think it epitomises the book quite well:

"Look," said Arthur, "would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"

So wierd, but so much fun. C'mon the dice rolling!

It was lovely to learn about all the process that The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (one of my favorite books) entailed in all its varied and multiple forms. Getting to know more about Douglas Adams in the fantastic way Neil Gaiman wrote this was a very nice experience. Four stars!

So I don't know much about this guy as a person (I tend to assume that all super-rich CEO types are at least 40% evil but I've been proven wrong before), but his love for science fiction books (which is mentioned throughout the article I've quoted below) gives him at least a little credit in my eyes.

(talking about his "existential crisis" as a young teen)
"I read a lot of books, and it didn't sound like anything really had the answer to what's the meaning of life," Musk says. "And then it's like, 'Is it all meaningless?' I was reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and it was terrible. No one should read them. It's too depressing. They were not happy people." 

The answer eventually came (as it does for many disaffected teenage boys, even those not reading Nietzsche) through the cult 1979 novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, a writer known, perhaps not coincidentally, for his interest in both environmental conservation and fast cars. 
"I thought Adams was actually quite good because he was making the point that the question is the real difficulty," says Musk. "The universe is essentially the answer, so what's the question? As we strive for enlightenment, we better understand what questions to ask about the nature of the universe. It seems like there's a fundamental good in that. So that seemed like a good way to apply my efforts-- to strive for greater enlightenment." 

[Vogue October 2015, Meghan Daum]