Do you know what an ipad is?
Douglas Adams didn't, but he wrote about one, 31 years before they were released on the market. Except he didn't call it an ipad, he called it the hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy, a book with thousands of pages that could be accessed by pressing buttons. If in the form of an actual book, it would be far to heavy to carry around.
Most futuristic books appear hopelessly anachronistic once the actual future arrives. Mary Shelley's The Last Man, for example, was published in 1826, set around 2030, and the characters all run around in horse and carriage and sending letters by messenger.
Adams' book (and the whole series) is amazing because in it he writes about technology that the inventors hadn't even started imagining.
Reading this book was weird because I couldn't remember whether I'd read it before. The whole time I kept second-guessing myself. It was familiar but new all at the same time. Maybe I read it when I was a kid, or when I was drunk (less likely), or maybe it was just familiar from the movie (the Zooey Deshanel version).
So, should everyone read this book? I say probably, it's worth it, but it wouldn't be the end of the world if you didn't.
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