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 ...
>> By this logic, books then, are simply paper.
Yeah! But what the heck, if we’re gonna get all reactionary about it, let’s go all the way back to papyrus scrolls. Or stone tablets! That’s the ticket! Just think how *fit* we would all be if we carried all our documents on stone tablets instead of PDAs!
FR is distracting, but not meaningless.
Ass-i-mov had the great library in space with special people that could discern movements in masses of people.
And Bradbury, with his unreadable Carbuncles of Mars, hates the internet.
I submit that RAH was at least as forwardthinking as Ass-i-mov. And both were more forwardthinking than Bradbury.
Just honest opinions.
Flame suit isn't on. I'm going to close the laptop and go to bed and see, tomorrow, what my opinion has wrought.
/johnny
Geez, did he say the same thing about radio?
The Internet is the biggest library ever.
“Bradbury is right.”
So what are you doing here?
What is he talking about? Evidently the author has never heard of Nivin, Pournelle, Weber, Drake, Sierling, Flint, and many others. There are plenty of Sci-Fi authors around who are just as great as Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury.
The literati gushed over Bradbury because he wrote about book burning. But frankly as science fiction Fahrenheit 451 was mediocre. It was good, but it wouldn't be on my list of greats.
My ex was building his own computers in the mid-1970s and was online (with an intranet, and later with DARPANET) in 1978. I must have been one of the first recipients of emailed love-notes in 1978. He kept trying to get me interested and bought me my first PC in 1981. Kept emailing me from work in 1985 and telling me what errands I should run for him. This somewhat diminished my enthusiasm for the internet.
I do clearly remember him telling me, ca. 1986, that this was the future and soon the whole world would be connected.
I spent a lot of time on the net with 3.1, to download the first slackware distro.... at 14.4k
/johnny
Philip Dick was may favorite SF writer. Never got in Bradbury much.
The internet would really suck on Mars, given the ping time is 31.78 minutes according to Wolfram. It would be necessary for Google to set up a mirror server on planet, in which all content, including especially the cache, would be replicated using a super high speed pipe and special protocols designed to minimize turn-arounds.
Seriously, the internet is the biggest thing to happen to media since Gutenberg.
Bradbury is a tired old man. I hope to become an old man, just no where near as tired, please God!
Bradbury, like the covers of his first-edition books, is cracked with age.
>> My ex &etc
How could you dump a cool nerd like that??!? Shame on you.
My recollection is you needed to download something from down under, Trumpet Winsock or something like that.
That wouldn't Bradbury, was never a hard SF writer. Or even a painter of "a more different than you imagine" future (that would be Cordwainer Smith).
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