Douglas Adams’ birthday celebrated with interactive Google Doodle

Google has rolled out another of its homepage doodles, celebrating the birthday of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams with an interactive gizmo on its UK site. The doodle simply cries out to be clicked on, with different parts of the animation reacting to your mouse and bringing up characters and other elements that fans will recognize from the much-loved books.

So, click on the door on the left, and you’ll find Marvin the paranoid android waiting, while the “Don’t Panic” control calls up a brief Babel Fish animation. Adams addressed the problem of thousands of interplanetary languages in his most famous book with a living translator, resembling a fish, that when inserted into the ear could convert any speech to something the wearer would understand.

Hitchhiker’s Guide isn’t the only work of Adams’ to be referenced, however. The cup of tea is a nod to the Dirk Gently series, for instance, more specifically the second novel, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.

Adams died in 2001, having not only written best-selling novels but Doctor Who scripts, and was known for his love of technology as well as his staunch atheism which earned him a dedication from notorious biologist and God-arguer Richard Dawkins. There’s more on Adams at his Wikipedia page.