Random Dent
Originally prophesied by her father, Arthur Dent, after he hears a Vogon for the first time ("I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one."), a disillusioned, teenaged Random Frequent Flyer Dent (the in-vitro progeny with Trillian Astra) is found in the novel Mostly Harmless. The line is followed up in the novel Mostly Harmless and the radio series The Quintessential Phase, the 2005 radio series adaptation of this book. The new Poe-reminiscent black bird version of the Guide manipulates her (as it has the Grebulons and Ford Prefect), so she is indirectly responsible for the destruction of all possible Earths.
Early in the novel Mostly Harmless, Arthur travels from planet to planet by donating to "DNA banks", finding that for semen deposits, he can travel first class. Trillian, wishing to have a child, finds some of his sperm in a DNA bank (which was very easy, since he was the only donor of the same species) and uses it to conceive Random.
Shortly before the events of the novel And Another Thing..., Random is kept in a dream sequence and frozen along with all the other main characters thanks to her telling the Guide Mark II to safeguard their lives. In her dream she is Galactic President and highly successful (having been rescued from Earth by a suspiciously girlish troop of unicorns) and marries a flaybooz (a large, guinea-pig-like creature named Fertle) to annoy her mother. When the Guide's batteries run out, she is released from her dream with all the other main characters. The events of the book then occur. Strangely, she seems affected by her dream sequence and often laments the loss of her position and her 'husband'. By the end of the book, Arthur proposes to go with her to find a good university for her to attend.
Appears in:
- the novel Mostly Harmless
- the novel And Another Thing...
- Quintessential Phase
In the radio series The Quintessential Phase, adapted from the novel Mostly Harmless, she is played by Samantha Béart.
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Famous quotes containing the words random and/or dent:
“... the random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there.... These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and “fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,” in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)