Science Fiction Parody and Satire Response

This week, I listened to all of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy audio recordings. Just an FYI, the file for episode four in the website resources cuts off halfway through the episode. Anyway, I really enjoyed this series a lot. I didn't realize it was a radio show before, but I really liked it. It kind of reminded me of the Nightvale podcasts because of the dry humor and some similar themes, but I liked Hitchhiker's Guide better because it had more of a story to it. It also kind of reminded me of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket because of the writing style and humor. The authors had a funny tendency to put ridiculous things very matter-of-factly. These were some of my favorite quotes from Hitchhiker's Guide:

VROOMFONDEL: That’s right. You’ll have a national philosophers strike on your hands!
DEEP THOUGHT: Who will that inconvenience?
MAJIKTHISE: Never you mind who it’ll inconvenience, you box of black-legging binary bits! It’ll hurt, Buster! It’ll hurt! 

--This quote was funnier to hear than to read, but it's still really funny to read.

...they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.

--Hehehe. The paradox!

Lastly...

The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of a summary, people are a problem.

--I found this quote really funny too, but also so, so true! It reminded me of Plato's Republic, in which Plato said that the leader of a government should be a philosopher, but that people would never vote for a person like that:

They don’t understand that a true captain must pay attention to the seasons of the year, the sky, the stars, the winds, and all that pertains to his craft, if he’s really to be the ruler of a ship. And they don’t believe that there is any craft that would enable him to determine how he should steer the ship, whether the others want him to or not, or any possibility of mastering this alleged craft or of practicing it at the same time as the craft of navigation. Don’t you think that the true captain will be called a real stargazer, a babbler, and a good-for-nothing by those who sail in ships governed in that way?

I don't know if the Hitchhiker's Guide people would want a philosopher for a leader, but probably! Man. This radio show was just hilarious. Also, I now know where Radiohead got the name of "Paranoid Android" from. I wish there were more than 12 episodes; I could listen to these forever. Maybe I'll also give Starship Titanic and Firesign Theater a try if I have time...