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Apr 10, 2016baldand rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
As Arthur Dent himself complains, this parallel universe stuff is confusing. In the last novel of this series the Earth has been destroyed by Vogons but it is still there, or at least some of the time. Trillian is still around, but so is Trish McMillan, who in the parallel universe has not left a party with Zaphod Beeblebrox, to her constant regret. So logically one would think that instead her romance with Arthur Dent would have bloomed, but this isn’t even broached as an alternative. Fenwich, with whom Arthur was romantically linked at the end of the fourth book, apparently has disappeared from Arthur’s life in a strange and unconvincing manner, just as Mella is disposed of at the beginning of the third novel. Arthur doesn’t have a child with Trish, as one might have thought, but with Trillian, and only as an unknown (to him) sperm donor. Random, their daughter, isn’t really raised by her mother, and she rejects her father. Surely this kind of narrative pattern goes beyond a writer’s form of Attention Deficit Disorder, and betrays a deep and unhealthy pessimism on the part of the author about human relations.