The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy characters

Appears from the start

An ordinary, mild-mannered Englishman whose morning begins with bulldozers arriving to demolish his house for a bypass. Bewildered and often still in his dressing gown, he is swept off the planet moments before its destruction and dragged through a series of cosmic events he barely understands. He spends much of his journey confused, indignant, and wishing for a decent cup of tea.

Appears from the start

Arthur's friend of several years, who has passed as an out-of-work actor but is in fact an alien from a small planet near Betelgeuse and a roving researcher for the Guide. Stranded on Earth far longer than he intended, he keeps his composure in a crisis and rescues Arthur by hitching them both aboard a passing spaceship just before the planet is destroyed.

First appears in chapter 3

The captain of a Vogon Constructor Fleet, a bureaucratic and thoroughly unpleasant alien who oversees the demolition of Earth to clear the way for a hyperspace bypass. Devoted to paperwork and procedure and proud of his own extremely bad poetry, he inflicts a recital of it on the two stowaways he catches before having them thrown into space.

First appears in chapter 4

The flamboyant, self-obsessed former President of the Galaxy, who has two heads and three arms and a talent for outrageous stunts. Acting on impulses he does not fully understand himself, he steals a remarkable new starship, setting in motion the chase and the voyage that sweep up the others.

Also known as Tricia McMillan

First appears in chapter 5

A clever human woman with a background in mathematics and astrophysics, whom Arthur had once met and failed to impress at a party on Earth. She left the planet earlier in the company of Zaphod, and she now travels aboard his stolen ship, one of only a handful of humans left after Earth's destruction.

Also known as the Paranoid Android

First appears in chapter 11

A robot aboard the stolen starship, built with a vast intellect but afflicted by overwhelming boredom and depression. Convinced that his abilities are hopelessly wasted on trivial tasks, he complains constantly and views everything with gloom, though his gifts prove unexpectedly useful.

First appears in chapter 22

An elderly designer of planets on the ancient world of Magrathea, who takes special pride in crafting elaborate coastlines. Kindly and a little wistful, he leads Arthur through a vast hidden factory and reveals the astonishing truth about what the planet Earth really was and why it was built.

First appears in chapter 25

A colossal supercomputer built long ago by a race of hyper-intelligent beings to determine the Answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. After calculating for millions of years, it delivers a result that its makers find both simple and useless without knowing what the actual question was.

First appears in chapter 31

Hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings who appear in our world in the humble form of laboratory mice. They are the ones who commissioned the building of the Earth for a grand experiment, and they take a keen and self-interested interest in what may have survived its destruction.