Posted on 06/25/2009 10:24:26 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
With the loss of Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Crichton last year, the survivors of the elite group of twentieth century science fiction authors has dwindled. Such greats as George Orson Welles, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov had already passed away. One of the last surviving greats is Ray Bradbury, currently 88. Mr. Bradbury is known for such classics as Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, and The Martian Chronicles.
Recently Mr. Bradbury has taken his passion for books to new heights, campaigning for the Ventura County Public Libraries. He explains, "Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."
Perhaps out of concern that the internet is displacing printed works, he let loose some colorful comments about the internet and its worth in The New York Times this week. He comments, "The Internet is a big distraction. Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo!
(Excerpt) Read more at dailytech.com ...
fyi
Something Click-ed This Way Comes
Ray Bradbury is right. Anything created by Al Gore is suspect in my mind.
By this logic, books then, are simply paper.
And ironically, I never would have had the benefit of Mr. Bradbury’s opinion without the internet.
Who would have thought that a man who seemed so able to envision the future could have so completely missed the meaning of the internet. It is not meaningless or a mere distraction; it is a tool as powerful as the printing press once was. It changes everything, and we are living at the time when it was born.
We have a winnah...
Who is “George Orson Welles”?
but since the Internet is meaningless, so is Mr. Bradbury’s opinion of it ;-)
Unless you want no wine before it's time it's H.G. Wells or Herbert George Wells as he was known to his momma.
Thanks.
I think he meant H.G.Wells. George Orson Welles—Orson Welles—wasn’t a science fiction writer, that I know of.
I adore him.
“Who would have thought that a man who seemed so able to envision the future could have so completely missed the meaning of the internet. It is not meaningless or a mere distraction; it is a tool as powerful as the printing press once was. It changes everything, and we are living at the time when it was born.”
Well, Bill Gates (who REALLY should have known better) admitted that he didn’t see it coming, either. But I’d say that at 88, Bradbury’s a bit set in his ways now. I met him once in his late 70’s, still a pretty dynamic guy.
I was on the internet, with a PC, in the early-mid 90’s; it took a good amount of money, hard technical skills and sacrificing a goat to get it work (Windows 3.1 had no TCP/IP stack out of the box, as I recall). And when I saw what it could do, I thought that it (and HTML) were the greatest inventions since fire. Too bad I didn’t capitalize on them much.
/johnny
Bradbury is right.
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