Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis is on track to be my favorite book we have read this year by far. Though I hesitate to call it "science fiction," the book fits well into the category of speculative fiction and has more in common with "social science fiction" than fantasy. Social science fiction tends to disregard technical and physical practicality of the situations involved and place emphasis on the reaction of modern society to impressive (or simply ubiquitous) new technologies. Examples you may have heard of include Feed, Minority Report, We'll Remember it for you Wholesale (the basis for the movie Total Recall), and Gattaca. Many dystopias could also be classified as social science fiction.
As a work of social science fiction, The Metamorphosis certainly makes no attempt to explain how its situation came to be (Gregor must have... uh... metamophosed during the night) and jumps right into exploring how people would treat a monstrous vermin even if they suspected it was one of their family members. However, it goes about it in a style that reminds me of an author of a less serious form of speculative fiction.
Helpless protagonist, ridiculous situations, deadpan narration. Remind you of anything? Anything involving petunias, towels, mice, horrendous poetry, and pan-galactic gargleblasters?
The fact that Kafka's writing reminds me of Douglas Adams only makes me like it even more. Granted, Kafka is slightly more serious in how he goes about the story, but a number of thematic elements are common between the two authors' writing.
Like Gregor Samsa, Arthur Dent is a guy with an unimpressive job (works at local radio station) who wakes up one day facing a horrible calamity (destruction of the earth) but focuses on a more local issue (his house being bulldozed to make way for a bypass). Dent realizes a bit more than Samsa that the things around him make little sense, but his goals are still largely unreasonable considering his situation (trying to continue a normal human lifestyle when human life is nearly extinct).
Dent's humanity isn't necessarily degraded in HHGTTG, but he is certainly a fish out of water (insect out of proportion?) in the weird galactic setting dominated by dolphins and mice. Instead of not being human making him somehow lesser than those around him, it's the fact that he is a human, a species that merits no more description than "mostly harmless."
The other modern work of speculative fiction The Metamorphosis brings to mind is the movie District 9 directed by Neill Blomkamp, at least in the sense that it includes the premise of "guy gets turned into a giant insect/insectoid alien and is promptly ostracized by society." My guess, though, is that at no point in the book will Gregor Samsa don a mech suit and battle the minions of a xenophobic security firm.
I don't recall ever hearing Kafka compared to D. Adams before, although students who like the one often tend to be fans of the other. I wonder if Adams ever mentioned Kafka as being among his influences: there is a similar sense of what Camus calls "the absurd," although Adams seems to relish this quality more than the two more serious Europeans. It's tone, in fact, where they seem to diverge most strikingly: Kafka's tone is dark, and the comedic aspects are a surprise, almost inadvertent and possibly unintended; Adams's tone is light, despite the actually pretty dark themes he explores, and the comedic aspects are the very engine of the narrative--the reader is fooled into digesting bits of existential insight while thinking they're just having a fun time flying around the universe.
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