For As Long As He Could Remember,

Meanwhile, The Poor Babel Fish, By Effectively Removing All Barriers To Communication Between Different Races And Cultures, Has Caused More And Bloodier Wars Than Anything Else In The History Of Creation.

This Planet Has - Or Rather Had - A Problem, Which Was This: Most Of The People Living On It Were Unhappy For Pretty Much Of The Time. Many Solutions Were Suggested For This Problem, But Most Of These Were Largely Concerned With The Movement Of Small Green Pieces Of Paper, Which Was Odd Because On The Whole It Wasn't The Small Green Pieces Of Paper That Were Unhappy.

Grown Men, He Told Himself, In Flat Contradiction Of Centuries Of Accumulated Evidence About The Way Grown Men Behave, Do Not Behave Like This.

Earth: Mostly Harmless

We Live In Strange Times. We Also Live In Strange Places: Each In A Universe Of Our Own. The People With Whom We Populate Our Universes Are The Shadows Of Whole Other Universes Intersecting With Our Own. Being Able To Glance Out Into This Bewildering Complexity Of Infinite Recursion And Say Things Like, 'oh, Hi, Ed! Nice Tan. How's Carol?' Involves A Great Deal Of Filtering Skill For Which All Conscious Entities Have Eventually To Develop A Capacity In Order To Protect Themselves From The Contemplation Of The Chaos Through Which They Seethe And Tumble.