The international sensation of the book world before Harry Potter was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was fresh, it was funny, it sold a ton of copies, created a passionate fanbase, and spawned a series of sequels. Hitchhiker's was an event and a cultural touchstone. If it seems less familiar now, that may owe to its publication in 1979 or to Douglas Adams' death at 49 in 2001.
Its first sentence takes a curious perspective: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun." Let's take it one phrase at a time. "Far out" describes a location – as well as being a space age exclamation of delight. To whoever is speaking, something is either distant or wondrous.
"In the uncharted backwaters" has a slight tension in it. "Uncharted" means not yet explored or mapped (from the point of view of the speaker); "backwaters" suggests less important or less traveled – if it isn't explored yet, how do they know it is less vibrant? This is the self-centered perspective of someone who treats their own knowledge and culture as the measure of the world.
"Of the unfashionable end" – this again shows the speaker's judgment – they are speaking of something that doesn't match their idea of attractive culture. Strangely, while "far out" is hazy, "uncharted backwaters" are most often on a continental scale, but here we have "unfashionable end" which we most often relate to a part of town. Our guess at the scale the speaker intends keeps moving.
"Of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy" – suddenly, the scale is both vast and precise, and it's not what we would have expected – the previous words leaned toward a much smaller area. Can an entire arm of the galaxy be unfashionable? Surely that vast region could contain multitudes of levels of society.
The last part of the sentence tells us what we can find in this location. There, "lies a small unregarded yellow sun." The speaker finds that sun small and "unregarded," another word like "backwater" and "unfashionable" that suggests unimportance. This sun, on the scale of the galaxy, and from the perspective of the speaker, is nothing of note.
But wait! Our sun is a yellow sun in the western spiral arm of the galaxy. Does the speaker mean that the star that gave us birth, that provides our light and heat and made us possible, is no big deal? The sting in the end of this sentence, as it lands on the word "sun," normally the magnificent and huge energy source around which our world literally revolves, is that our sun is inconsequential, and so we, who depend on it, are even more so. We are used to measuring the world from our point of view. Here, instead, we find ourselves at the small end of someone else's hierarchy.
I see two main sources of humor in this sentence. One is the mixing of levels, from neighborhood to galaxy, that creates a wry absurdity. The other is that final reversal of perspective, a surprise hinging on the strong final word.
I also note that the sentence appears to predate the invention of commas.
Graphical elements by Ken Silbert
Photo by Kyle Goetsch on Unsplash