The meaning of life

The works concern Arthur Dent, an Englishman who wakes up one morning and finds bulldozers about to tear down his house. Around the same time, Earth is about to be destroyed by aliens to make way for an interstellar bypass.

Dent is saved in the nick of time by his friend Ford Prefect, an alien who's been masquerading as an actor.

From there, the series is off and running through the galaxies, where Dent is as clueless and overwhelmed as "Futurama's" Fry in the 31st century. (Indeed, Matt Groening's TV series "Futurama" -- which also features a somewhat traditional sci-fi lineup of human male, attractive but caustic female and an easily agitated robot -- shares a sense of humor with Adams' work, which is no surprise, given Groening's love of Pythonesque humor.)

Though "Hitchhiker's Guide" has long been popular, it resisted efforts to become a movie. The project started as a BBC radio series in 1978 created by Adams, who then turned the project into the series of novels. (There were two other radio series and a TV series as well.)

Attempts to make a film date back to the early '80s, and Adams himself worked on a screenplay adaptation for years. He'd finished a solid draft when he died unexpectedly in 2001, and the project was turned over to Karey Kirkpatrick ("Chicken Run").

The film stars Martin Freeman as Dent, Mos Def as Ford Prefect, Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian, John Malkovich as Humma Kavula and Alan Rickman as the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android. (If you don't know who these characters are, see this gallery.)

Examples of Adams' creation abound on the Internet. AltaVista's translator is called BabelFish; an instant-messaging program is called Trillian. Even Deep Thought, Adams' computer, was immortalized in Deep Thought, the IBM machine that lost to Garry Kasparov in 1989. Upon which IBM engineers built an even better computer ...

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" comes out Friday.