via The Guardian

The life and work of science fiction and comedy writer Douglas Adams has been marked by a Google doodle.

Adams was probably best known for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which started life as a radio comedy before being published as a “trilogy” of five books, the first published in 1979. It was later turned into a Hollywood film.

The doodle marks the anniversary of his birth. Adams was born on 11 March 1952 in Cambridge and died in 2001 at the age of 49 in Santa Barbara, California after a heart attack.

The doodle features many of the touchstones of Adams’s popular writing.

It displays a cup of tea - a reference to one of his Dirk Gently detective novels, called The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. It also shows a towel, an item Adams wrote was essential when travelling in space).

With a click of a lift door on the doodle, one of Adams’s most enduring characters from the Hitchhiker novels, Marvin the paranoid android, is revealed.

There are many references to the Hitchhiker’s Guide. With many clicks, some of Adams’s best fictional inventions, including the Babel Fish, which can be inserted in your ear to translate any language, are on show.

Adams worked with Graham Chapman of Monty Python and is credited for working on some of their sketches, but his career only took off with Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

He also wrote three episodes of Doctor Who starring Tom Baker.

He became well know for his atheist views, conservation and love of technology. As well as his works of fiction, Adams also wrote about some of the most endangered species in the world for his book Last Chance to See.