Don't Panic

If you've never read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, you're missing out on an incredibly funny bit of science fiction and satire.  Please read this book. 

Something to entice you:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. 
Orbiting this at a distance of roughtly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

Some pertinent information on Vogon poetry:

Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe.  The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria.  During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem 'Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning' four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.

An exciting new method of space travel

The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace...[something respectable physicists] couldn't stand was the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field neeed to flip a spaceship across the mind paralyzing-distances between the farthest stars...Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab...found himself reasoning this way:  ...all I have to do to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is.  He did this, and was rather startled to discover he had managed to create the long-sought-after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air.  ...he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smart-ass.

HHGTTG  Links Coming Soon