Happy Birthday Douglas Adams! Google Celebrates With New Doodle

Happy Birthday Douglas Adams! Google Celebrates With New Doodle

Happy birthday to perhaps one of the finest science-fiction writers of all time Douglas Adams! The man behind the novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy would have turned 61 today (March 11, 2013) and among those paying tribute to him were Google, who decided to make their latest Doodle an homage to the writer.

As The Independent explained, clicking on the left of the Doodle opened a door from which Marvin the paranoid android from Hitchiker’s appears. Meanwhile, Babel Fish appears if you click on the Don’t Panic button to the right of the Doodle. There are references to Adams other works too however, not least The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, which is depicted by a cup of tea.

Adams died aged 49, from a heart attack in Santa Barbera, California, bringing to a tragically premature end of a life that had seen him write one of the most famous sci-fi books of all time, in Hitchhikers, as well as the much-lauded Dirk Gently series. He’d also written for Doctor Who, Monty Python and worked for the BBC as a radio producer, and was well-known for his environmentalism and activism. Adams wrote the novel for radio, and it was serialized on BBC Radio 4 in 1978, becoming one of the most successful things ever aired on the station. It was made into a film in 2005, starring Martin Freeman and Zooey Deschanel.

Martin Freeman starred in a 2005 adaptation of Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy