It's a dreary Monday morning here on planet Earth, but Google is bringing a ray of sunshine with an irresistible Google Doodle celebrating novelist Douglas Adams, who would have turned 61 today. Adams authored the very funny, imaginative and irreverent five-novel series Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which began as a radio play on BBC in 1978. Today's interactive doodle makes numerous references to the series, including but not limited to that indispensable towel and Marvin the paranoid android. Pressing the "Don't Panic" tablet reveals another layer of whimsical animation, which culminates in the universal nerd shibboleth "42."
Adams was born in Cambridge in 1952 and died of a heart attack in 2001 in California at the age of 49. During his career as a novelist, he also wrote the Dirk Gently detective novels, called The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, as well as three episodes of Doctor Who starring Tom Baker. Adams, a passionate conservationist, also called attention to endangered species in a radio series Last Chance to See. "We put a big map of the world on a wall," his collaborator, zoologist Mark Carwardine told the BBC. "Douglas stuck a pin in everywhere he fancied going, I stuck a pin in where all the endangered animals were, and we made a journey out of every place that had two pins."
Adams's legion of fans includes graphic novelist and author Neil Gaiman, who tells the Washington Post, "Douglas Adams was a genius. He was a profound and brilliant British humorist who was also a very reluctant novelist. Most writers become novelists because they like writing novels. Douglas wrote a radio series that then became a huge and enormously successful novel, so he found himself stuck as an incredibly reluctant novelist who would have to be locked in a room by his publisher to finish a book.” (“I love deadlines,” Adams once said. “I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”)
Anyway, please excuse us while we take the rest of the day off to reread Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; it's been too long!
