I love older science fiction where the author wants to make it known that he thinks homosexuality should be legal and accepted but doesn’t actually want to go so far as to openly depict gay characters… instead, he has his straight characters stand around and make asides to each other or the reader about how In The Exciting Spacefaring Future, Gay People Exist And We’re Okay With That, For The Record.
Not quite that, but that moment in the beginning of H2G2 where Dadams mentions that Ford Prefect learned drinking games from some mining dudes in which Ford would intentionally lose to get topped by the mining dudes
Oh yeah…
Janx Spirit – almost exclusively referred to as “That Old Janx Spirit” – is an extremely potent alcoholic beverage, and is used heavily in drinking games that are played in the hyperspace ports that serve the madranite mining belts in the star system of Orion Beta.
The game is not unlike the Earth game called Indian Wrestling, and is played like this:
Two contestants sit at either side of a table, with a glass in front of each of them
Between them would be placed a bottle of Janx Spirit.
Each of the two contestants would then concentrate their will on the bottle and attempt to tip it and pour spirit into the glass of his opponent – who would then have to drink it.
The bottle would then be refilled. The game would be played again. And again.
Once you started to lose you would probably keep losing, because one of the effects of Janx Spirit is to depress telepsychic power. As soon as a predetermined quantity had been consumed, the final loser would have to perform a forfeit, which was usually obscenely biological.
Ford Prefect usually played to lose.
Tag: hitchhiker’s guide
Me: *is mild-to-moderately inconvenienced*
Me: leaving the womb was a mistake
In the words of Douglas Adams:
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.”
alternatively, also in the words of Douglas Adams:
“In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
do you guys think betelgeuseans are Like That as a species trait or are zaphod and ford just from one super wild rich family

