Jay Marcyes

 The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number,
an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary
representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete
nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42
will do' I typed it out. End of story.

website for writing and reading science fiction and fantasy. Also check out baen which is kind of the same thing.