The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Characters

Meet the Cast

Arthur Dent

Worst. Hero. In the Galaxy. Here's our recipe for Arthur Dent: Take one hero. Now remove everything heroic. Voilà: You've just made Arthur Dent.Okay, that's a little harsh, but only a little. If t...

Ford Prefect

Bad Doctor WhoIf you gave Ford the choice between going to a party and saving an entire world from destruction, he would choose going to a party every time. Since Douglas Adams wrote for Doctor Who...

Zaphod Beeblebrox

"Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe" (12.4)What you should take away from this character profile: Zaphod is the President of the Galaxy who steals the Heart of Gold ship (on his 200...

Trillian

Trillian is this amazing… oh, who are we kidding? Arthur gives Trillian a terrific description, noting that she's "Beautiful, charming, devastatingly intelligent" (13.63).So far so good, but we h...

Marvin

Marvin is EeyoreAccording to Douglas Adams's mother, Marvin the Robot is like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh: they are both severely depressed, and the one activity they do enjoy is telling you all ab...

Eddie

Eddie and the ShipEddie is the most annoying shipboard computer in the history of science fiction, and that includes all science fiction that has not yet been written. Eddie is in charge of the Hea...

Slartibartfast

For a big part of this book, Slartibartfast has two very simple roles: (1) He's the Magrathean planet designer who tells Arthur all about the real story of Earth, including all the details about De...

Deep Thought

Deep Thought is the giant, city-sized computer that works for 7.5 million years to come up with the answer to life, the universe, and everything. The answer is 42—the problem is we don't really k...

Benjy mouse and Frankie mouse

As Slartibartfast explains to Arthur, mice aren't just "white furry things with the cheese fixation" (that's Arthur's understanding of mice, 24.51); they are, in fact, "protrusions into our dimensi...

Majikthise and Vroomfondel

The PhilosophersDid someone say "foolish and absurd"? That means it must be time to discuss the philosophers from Cruxwan University. Majikthise is the older and slightly less ridiculous one; Vroom...

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz and the Vogons (and the Dentrassi)

Jeltz is the captain of the Vogon fleet that destroys the Earth, and he is representative of the Vogons as a whole: he's cruel, bureaucratic, and he writes terrible poetry. Let's take those issues...

L. Prosser

Prosser is a human version of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, just with a more boring name. Like the Vogons, he's in charge of tearing something down; and like the Vogons, he's very invested in the notion...

Lunkwill and Fook, Loonquawl and Phouchg

Lunkwill and Fook are the programmers for Deep Thought. When they show up, they're pretty excited about the prospect of getting an answer to the meaning of life—but pretty soon they're disappoint...

The Cops

The cops who come to capture and kill Zaphod are pure comic relief. This is especially clear if we look at the radio scripts, where these two get the totally ridiculous names of "Shooty and Bang Ba...

The Whale and the Bowl of Petunias

If we were really organizing this page by how much we like characters, the Whale (oh, poor, sweet whale) and the Bowl of Petunias would be at the top of the page.We love these two because (1) they...