The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The book begins with a hung-over Arthur Dent waking to the sound of heavy machinery outside his house, which is about to be demolished to make way for a bypass. Arthur lies in front of a digger in protest, unaware that the council’s intentions to demolish his house are a mirror of proceedings that are underway on a much larger scale: a particularly nasty alien race called Vogons (whose poetry is the third worst in the Universe) are in a few minutes going to destroy Earth to make way for an interplanetary bypass. Throughout the story, Arthur is catapulted into myriad surreal situations, each with its own absurd logic. Adams’s points, I think: keep an open mind, question mindless authority at every opportunity and remember that even the very, very improbable is possible.