Google has created one of its most elaborate doodles yet to celebrate the 60th anniverary of the first book publication by Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction author whose works included the novel Solaris.

The animated doodle features a pensive character with a striking resemblance to Lem who, after some thought, comes face to face with a giant robot. Visitors to Google can use their cursor to interact with the robot, whose chest appears to contain a rather unreliable calculator.

The doodle's fairly lengthy animation sequence ends with the message that the art was inspired by Daniel Mroz's illustrations for The Cyberiad, a series of short stories by Lem.

The writer produced a range of poems, essays and short stories during the late 1940s and 1950s but his first major work, Hospital of the Transfiguration, was only published in 1955 as the weight of ideological censorship began to lift following the death of the Joseph Stalin.

The Cyberiad, published in 1965, was a key work, although Solaris remains Lem's best known work – first published in 1961, it was made into a film by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and by the US director Steven Soderbergh in 2002.

Lem died in 2006 at the age of 84 after suffering from heart disease.