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Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious
days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich, and largely tax free.
Mighty starships plied their way between
exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward among the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days men were real men, women
were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all
dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before - and thus was
the Empire forged.
Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed
of because no one was really poor - at least no one worth speaking of. And for all the richest and most successful merchants
life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd
settled on. None of them was entirely satisfactory: either the climate wasn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon,
or the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was exactly the wrong shade of pink.
And thus were created the conditions
for a staggering new form of specialist industry: custom-made luxury planet building. The home of this industry was Magrathea,
where hyperspatial engineers sucked matter through white holes in space to form it into dream planets - gold planets, platinum
planets, soft rubber planets with lots of earthquakes - all lovingly made to meet the exacting standards that the Galaxy's
richest men had naturally come to expect.
But
so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy
was reduced to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over
a billion hungry worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars as they labored into the night over smug little
treatises on the value of a planned political economy.
Magrathea itself disappeared and its memory soon passed into
the obscurity of legend.
In these enlightened days, of course, no one believes a word of it.
Kakrafoon
The planet of Kakrafoon was once a desert planet, until major global changes in
the entire environment were wrought by a Disaster Area (qv) concert. Disaster Area
Disaster Area, a plutonium rock
band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the
loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within
large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, while the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote
control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet - or more frequently around a completely
different planet.
Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets
girl-being under a silvery moon which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.
Many worlds have now banned
their act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band's public address system contravenes
local strategic arms limitations treaties.
This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries
of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the
University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and his Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax returns, in which
he proves that the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent. 
Golgafrincham
Golgafrincham is a planet with an ancient and mysterious history, rich in legend,
red, and occasionally green with the blood of those who sought in times gone by to conquer her; a land of parched and barren
landscapes, of sweet and sultry air heady with the scent of the perfumed springs that trickle over its hot and dusty rocks
and nourish the dusty rocks and nourish the dark and musky lichens beneath; a land of fevered imaginings, particularly among
those who taste the lichens; a land also of cool and shaded thoughts among those who have learned to forswear the lichens
and find a tree to sit beneath; a land also of steel and blood and heroism; a land of the body and of the spirit. This was
its history. And in all this ancient and mysterious history, the most mysterious figures of all were without a doubt those
of the Great Circling Poets of Arium
Bethselamin
The fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative
erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete
while on the planet is surgically removed from you body weight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory there
it is vitally important to get a receipt.
Enteropia
Enteropia is a planet beriddled with meteor storms. But don't worry
if a meteorite hits you - the Ardrites will replace you at no extra cost.
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