Rickmansworth

Market town in south-west Hertfordshire, north-west of London. A single sentence in the prologue of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy places a world-saving idea in one of its cafés.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy	Douglas Adams	backdrop	In a café here a girl works out how to make the world good, minutes before Earth is destroyed.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams (1979)

Source: Original · Readwise highlight

a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place.

• Role: backdrop
• In the book: In the italic prologue, on the same Thursday, a girl in a Rickmansworth café works out how to make the world good and happy. The catastrophe occurs before she can phone anyone, and the idea is lost for ever. The narrator says this is not her story.
• Why it matters: A named real town sets the novel’s tone of cosmic bathos, though the text spends only one sentence there.