Ray Bradbury wants to go back to the moon so that we can colonize Mars, but first:
“I think our country is in need of a revolution,” Bradbury said. “There is too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people.”
I’m pretty sure an effort to colonize the Red Planet would take quite a lot more government, not less. And more machines for that matter, which also might not go over so well with Bradbury:
“We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.”
Bradbury wrote darkly about bookburning in “Fahrenheit 451,” but he sounds ready to use a Kindlefor kindling. “I was approached three times during the last year by Internet companies wanting to put my books” on an electronic reading device, he said. “I said to Yahoo, ‘Prick up your ears and go to hell.’ “
Ah well. He had some good stories back in the day.
beltane
No government, no machines, no technology-maybe he means we should tame the power of the mind to will ourselves to Mars.
Needs more LSD.
Alwhite
*SIGH* Its sad when a beloved author reaches senility and does not have a PR agent to clean up the ranting of an obviously shriveled mind.
All that is missing “AND YOU DAMN KIDS GET OFF MY LAUNCHPAD!”
Dave
Well, this girl will be disappointed in Ray’s odd turn towards crazy-dom. (NSFW lyrics)
El Cid
Something wicked this way creeps.
Steve
Bradbury used to be a brilliant sci-fi writer. Now he just sits around yelling at the kids to get off his launchpad.
El Cid
The Galtian Chronicles. I sing the Norquist Electric.
chopper
old technophobes are funny.
“too many damn machines! and i want flying cars, dammit!”
ellaesther
Too… many… Internets…?
Oh, Mr. Bradbury. I haz a sad nao.
Chyron HR
And yet [Insert Your Favorite SF Author Here] is dead! What a world!
Davis X. Machina
He’s just canceling out Kurt Vonnegut, may he rest in peace. For every geezer, there’s an equal and opposite geezer.
licensed to kill time
First thing we do, we kill off all those other internets. Too many tubes!
MikeJ
W is for Wingnut.
flukebucket
Hell. He is only 9 years old. (McEstimate)
cleek
oh well, we can probably blame this on age.
i’ve got a copy of The Martian Chronicles sitting on my desk, waiting its turn in the books-to-be-read queue, and i’d hate to have to have it tainted by the rantings of the author (looking at you Orson Scott Card, Matt Ridley, Mark Helprin and Scott Adams).
DougJ
Why would anyone be against putting books on a Kindle?
Breezeblock
HEY YOU DAMN KIDS GET OFF MY PLANET!
Alwhite
@El Cid:
Well, he did write “Death is a Lonely Business” and “A Graveyard For Lunatics” so those fit the theme without editing!
I’ll add a couple of other lesser known titles:
Let’s All Kill Government and Farewell Socialism
why is this waiting moderation?
Scott
I’m an absolutely colossal Bradbury fan, and I own and have read almost all of his books.
But his attempts to write or speak about politics have tended to be spectacular failures in recent years. After “Fahrenheit 9/11” came out, he attempted to claim ownership of the title and said it was wrong of Moore to take the title of his movie from the title of Bradbury’s book — neglecting to remember that one of Bradbury’s best-known books got its title from Shakespeare.
Later, he tried to claim that “Fahrenheit 451” had nothing to do with censorship. Which is nice, except for the fact that he’s stated multiple times in the past that it was about censorship.
I love the hell out of the man, but I wish he’d shut off the TV and either retire or write some more stories…
cleek
@DougJ:
depends how warm that Kindling gets.
does it reach 451F ?
Bootlegger
I remember the Illustrated Man as quite progressive. But maybe it was just weird and my teenage mind is remembering it as something I’d agree with now.
DonkeyKong
“Get off my iron oxide martian lawn!”
Michael
Never liked Bradbury.
ChrisS
Pretty much sums up most of the conservative movement in my estimation.
jeffreyw
Bee fried air. I haz a sad.
El Cid
Commandingheights 451.
Violet
@DougJ:
Hey, Doug, did you see that Tunku has another insightful column:
Lolz. In August? Really?
chopper
@ellaesther:
why, one of his staffers just sent him an internet the other day…
Spaghetti Lee
Oh, dear old Ray, I do love your stories. And you are a smart guy, although being 90 years old might be catching up with you. Don’t make me hate you, Ray.
Brachiator
As I think Ann Laurie alluded to in one of her posts, the new book by Mary Roach, Packing for Mars, is a hoot and a half, a decidedly off kilter look at some of the preparations for long distance space travel. For instance,
For all his crankiness, I continue to esteem Bradbury for keeping the faith in the value of libraries, “the people’s university.”
Elizabelle
I saw that.
Allann from the LATimes reader comments:
“[loved Bradbury but] Too bad he turned into a disgruntled old coot.”
Yup.
Although if there were a way to send the Tea Partiers to Mars, I am all for that. Money well spent.
Alwhite
The more I read of this the angrier I get! I worked for NASA for a number of years & the number of great inventions that are currently makes billionaires out of mediocre businesspeople that came directly out of the government spending that took us to the moon is astounding. As a nation we got much more out of the moon missions than what we paid in but most of it ended up going to corporations that exploited the work.
No corporation is going to invest the cost of getting to Mars so that 30-40 years from now they can make the next generation of mediocrities rich. I may burn a copy of F451 myself!
Lysana
Bradbury has such a strange relationship with technology that he’s never gotten a driver’s license and insists that his only truly SF novel to date was Fahrenheit 451. Stuff like The Martian Chronicles can’t possibly happen, so it’s fantasy.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I don’t agree with his politics, but I am going to adopt this phrase: ‘Prick up your ears and go to hell.’
Zifnab
Well, if the Science Fiction writer says we should go to Mars, then who are we to listen to those stupid scientists? :-p
Mnemosyne
@Bootlegger:
No, I think you’re remembering correctly. Bradbury’s of that same odd generation as Charlton Heston, who really did march for civil rights in the 1960s and yet turned sharply right in his old age.
In a weird way, Bradbury is the one who’s misremembering his own work.
Spaghetti Lee
@ChrisS:
I’m more sympathetic to the “Why can’t things be like they used to be” crowd than the modern “rip up everything and replace it with fascism wrapped in greed” iteration of conservatism, especially given that the latter is in reality what’s tormenting the former, even if the former is convinced it’s Kenyan sociamalists and teh gayz. Things change so fast these days that it’s probably impossible not to outlive one’s way of life.
TR
Didn’t a lot of Heinlein’s stories have Galtian supermen as space pioneers, making their fortunes with just the contents of a Conestoga wagon at the furthest reaches of interplanetary travel, well beyond the influence of useless academics and moochers? Or is libertarian paradise supposed to be something beyond subsistence, that is, more than that which you can build with your own two hands, those of children your wives bear, and your herd of sentient pack-animals? I thought space travel was the last, best hope for those Randian types to enjoy all the fruits of their labor.
ellaesther
@chopper: On a dump truck!
DougJ
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It is up there with “boom goes the dynamite” and “hear me now, believe me later”.
Crashman
Our rockets to the red planet will be built not by some bean counting bureacract, but by gloriously independent john Galts. Assembled by force of will, American ingenuity, and the invisible hand of the marketplace, the rockets will cost next to nothing because they will be spared of government waste.
/McEstimate
//Bradbury’ed
scav
@TR: That and a little incest at times and odd things involving your own clones, think so, sounds about right.
Mike in NC
The guy will turn 90 next week. Will he live long enough to see President Gingrich sign the “Fahrenheit 451 Act” into law?
mr. whipple
Get your fucking machines off my lawn!
NobodySpecial
Most sci-fi writers are closet fascists.
J.W. Hamner
@TR:
Yes, Heinlein was a pretty hardcore libertarian… who also seemed to develop a disturbing obsession with nubile young women later in age… science fiction seems to have a very high concentration of right wing views for some reason. Orson Scott Card… author of the great Ender’s Game… is a complete loon as well.
Bill White
As for burning Kindles, XKCD is pretty good, here:
http://www.xkcd.com/750/
blahblahgurgleblegblah
What is on the moon or mars that we – humanity – could possibly want? Gravity on moon is 1/6g and Mars is about .40g. Humans are not evolved to survive in that environment. Were we to go, our bodies in just a few generations would change such that the human form there would be unable to even survive here for even a short visit.
Terraforming planets is not only a horribly huge and unnecessary expense, to do so on those planets in orbit around our sun is folly. The moon and Mars are out due to the gravity differential. Venus is out because of its slow rotation and greenhouse atmosphere. The rest of the planets are out due to their positions outside relative to the habitable zone around our star.
Want to live in space? Build large rotating space colonies in orbit around planets and nearby asteroids with resources humans need: like hydrogen, oxygen and metals. Titan looks like a good bet. A few tens of kilometers in diameter and you’d have enough surface area to house millions within the rotating tube. With the right artificial gravity constant for human habitation.
Bill White
Q: What is on the moon or mars that we – humanity – could possibly want?
A: Platinum group metals might be one answer
NobodySpecial
Saddam’s nuclear weapons.
MikeJ
@NobodySpecial: Tell China Miéville , or Corey Doctorow. Or maybe actually read some of the genre.
Pangloss
We can name the Ray Bradbury Mars project “Icarus,” because it will use the same wax and feather technology.
batgirl
@Alwhite: I was having a conversation with someone in a start-up pharmaceutical company last week about the difficulty of finding investors in this economy, and she said they wouldn’t have made it without government grant money.
Ah, capitalism — government funding, private profits. But according to McArdle, if we question pharma profits then we are all going to die because they won’t do research anymore.
Kill me now.
Warren Terra
Just by chance and unaware of its occurrence, I missed Ray Bradbury’s 90th birthday party at the Bookfellows bookstore in Glendale by a couple of hours on Sunday. A lot of people truly treasure him, and it’s an inspiration that he’s active and lucid enough to be so emphatically outspoken, if sadly also so totally wrongheaded, about so many things at such an advanced age.
Oh, and as someone who adores browsing and buying used books, and so is arguing against my own interest here (as the used book, and especially the cheap used book, is a logical eventual casualty of electronic books), let me just say that Mr. Bradbury’s stance against electronic book distribution, a mechanism that has the potential to put his words in the hands of millions of kids and travellers unlikely to heft or even to see his printed books, would disgrace the honorable name of Ned Ludd, a man who, despite the use to which his name has been put, was an activist not against the march of technological progress but against the exploitative millowners who cast aside the laborers made redundant by the new machines, leaving them to starve in the streets.
Paris
GET OFF MY MARS, BITCHES.
NobodySpecial
@MikeJ: Methinks you need to brush up on the use of the word, ‘Most’.
TR
@J.W. Hamner: I read a pretty awesome recent Card novel about a plot that took out the Pres and VP with rocket attacks. The the conspirators, the ‘Progressive Restoration, started attacking major metropolitan areas with ED-209s. And it was up to partiotic ex-marines to use their 2nd amendment remedies to stop them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_%282006_novel%29
Crusty Dem
If you notice there’s a subheader in that story, click the asterisk and it says:
*Ray Bradbury is the founder and sole member of Luddites for Space Exploration (LSE). LSE advocates utilizing paleolithic technology for human space exploration and colonization and is currently accepting grant proposals for human and horse-powered interplanetary launch vehicles. For more information, visit http://www.were-luddites-so-were-not-on-the-fucking-internet.biz.”
Apparently they moved too slowly to get the .com or .org addresses.
Chris Gerrib
Bradbury was never much into technology. He launched his Mars rockets from Ohio, for Pete’s sake! (It did lead to a cool scene of “rocket summer” – the rocket heat melting snow.) No, he’s not a technologist.
J. W. Hamner @ 43 – Heinlein was a libertarian. There are a lot of currently active SF writers who are quite liberal. See, for example, John Scalzi, Tobias Buckell, Robert Sawyer, Elizabeth Moon, Eric Flint – I could go on.
Studly Pantload
In his day, the man was as much a poet – if not a veritable shaman – as he was a storyteller. Since he’s really not in much of a position to influence public policy, I’m OK granting him the leeway to be the cranky old guy the kids laugh at even though he scares them.
Hob
@beltane:
Hey, it worked for John Carter, probably because he was a good old-fashioned Confederate gentleman. That version of Mars isn’t very hospitable though– there’s more swordfighting and being eaten by monsters than I really want to deal with, even if everyone is hot and naked.
LM
I took his Zen and the Art of Writing to the used book store a dozen or so years ago–couldn’t make myself reread it after hearing Bradbury go on a long toot about how much women like to be slapped on the bottom at parties and by their bosses and even passersby. Sigh.
If you want to read a great newcomer, try Paulo Bacigalupi. His book Windup Girl (next on my reading list) won the Nebula last year. His Ship Breaker is one of the best sci fi books I’ve read in years. It’s set on the Gulf in some unspecified future where impoverished crews who live on the beach barely squeak by stripping old wrecked oil tankers of copper wire, metal etc. to sell to makers of big clipper ships. It totally creates and pulls the reader into a different world, and the writing’s brilliant.
Jay in Oregon
@DougJ:
If I remember correctly, Harlan Ellison has come out strongly against ebooks of his works as well. I think it boils down too “ebooks mean it’s easier for people to steal my stuff.”
Which is hilarious, since you can find pirated (bookscan) ebooks for just about anything and everything. In fact, I just looked at a Bittorrent tracker and found a torrent of over 600 ebooks, including 7 by Mr. Bradbury.
So good luck putting that genie back into the bottle…
quaint irene
How many internets are too many?
Sounds like somebody is threatening to go McCain-cranky on your ass.
Jay in Oregon
@J.W. Hamner:
…that he was related to.
(I’m thinking of how tangled the Howard family trees eventually became — not to mention the fact that Lazarus Long ends up getting it on with not one, but two chromosome-flipped clones of himself, as well as his own mother.)
Sarcastro
If I remember correctly, Harlan Ellison has come out strongly against pretty much everything.
Joel: Hey! They’re arresting Harlan Ellison.
Crow: Good!
The Other Chuck
Nothing wrong with liking nubile young women, if that’s all it was. The problem is he seemed to like them too young. And related. I only hope he got it out in his books.
I never liked Heinlein as an author and even less as a social commentator. And Bradbury’s style reads like something from the 19th century. Now Greg Bear, there’s a sci-fi author I actually like.
growingdaisies
There are not a lot of entirely lucid, reasonable 90 year old people. I have a 90 year old relative who spends his free time furiously berating people who pull into his driveway. It’s his driveway, and he doesn’t want people using it to, uh, turn around as the end of a dead end street.
When I’m 90, I hope my family does me the courtesy of keeping me waaaaaay away from microphones.
Bradbury was a great writer. Unless there’s previous evidence of him being an unpleasant person, I really can’t hold the nutty “get off my lawn” comments of a near-centenarian against him.
gf120581
As someone who loves Bradbury’s work, I’ll chalk this up to either (a) the ramblings of a 90 year-old man who’s going senile or (b) the grumbling and ravings of a 90 year-old crank who doesn’t understand the modern world (which is especially understandable coming from Bradbury, who writes about nostalgia and longing for the past like few writers can). This reminds me of his bitching when Farenheight 9/11 came out and he accused Michael Moore of stealing the title from him (never mind that he swiped Something Wicked This Way Comes from Shakespere).
The rants against technology are not surprising; Bradbury
s never been much of a tech guy (I don’t think he’s ever had a driver’s license). It’s a stretch to even call him a sci fi writer, as he’s mainly a fantasist (even with his so called “sci fi” work like The Martian Chronicles). He’s never been one like Asimov or Heinlen who’s been interested in the technical aspects of space travel.
gf120581
@Sarcastro:
Yeah, Ellison’s pretty much a professional bitch artist. Not that I complain about that, because sometimes he’s pretty much on the mark. Read the section on his work in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, for example, if you want the story on how he got himself kicked off of writing the first Star Trek movie.
cleek
@LM:
yeah…. while it has received nearly universal high praise, i fucking hated that book.
New Yorker
This actually makes me chuckle a little bit. It doesn’t strike me as the ranting of a tea party-ish loon, but the ranting of a old curmudgeon. It makes me think of “The Simpsons” episode where Grandpa wrote to the President complaining that there were too many states and to “please remove three”.
Spaghetti Lee
would disgrace the honorable name of Ned Ludd, a man who, despite the use to which his name has been put, was an activist not against the march of technological progress but against the exploitative millowners who cast aside the laborers made redundant by the new machines, leaving them to starve in the streets.
Problem is, the latter follows the former very, very often.
DFH no.6
Been reading SF (or whatever the fuck anyone wants to call the overlapping mix of genres encompassing “science fiction”, “sword&sorcery”, “fantasy”, etc.) for nigh on to 50 years now.
From Anderson and Anthony and Asimov to Ellison, Le Guin and Morris, Tolkien and Vonnegut and Zelazny, and tons of others (good, bad, and indifferent) in between, including Bradbury.
Bradbury’s reputation far exceeds his talent and actual writing, IMAO. He’s one of those SF writers who supposedly “transcends” the alleged “pulp” status of the genre, often being acceptable as “serious” fiction to English departments and librarians. But really, he’s a third-rate hack (and a sterling example of Sturgeon’s Law, falling squarely in the “90% crap” category).
Heinlein, of course, is even worse.
Bradbury’s laughably oxymoronic statements and attitudes presented here by Kain show that the Tea Party mindset (best encapsulated by “keep government hands off my Medicare!”) is not just for fat, old, white, crazy, sore-loser Republicans (though perhaps Mr. Bradbury is also a member of that set — wouldn’t be surprised at all).
Peter J
Most people won’t read a book staring at hours at a computer screen (but then a lot of them are perfectly fine reading books on a ipad…), and even if you were ok doing that, a computer, even a lap-top isn’t as portable as a book.
But with e-ink readers, there finally is a good way for people to read e-books. And that also means more pirated books.
Peter J
I think Pandora’s book ;) has been opened…
Brachiator
@DougJ:
Margaret Atwood is another writer who has not totally embraced ebooks, but who sees plusses and minuses.
On the other hand, being a working writing, she isn’t too happy with the “no copyright evah” crowd:
Interrobang
Ray Bradbury has been a wingnut for a long time. He misses the world he thinks he grew up in, and has long since forgotten that the world wasn’t actually like that when he was a kid; it’s just his rose-tinted nostalgia goggles.
Question: Is there any character anywhere in Bradbury’s canon anyplace who could even be construed as being nonwhite?
artem1s
@blahblahgurgleblegblah:
personally i think they should skip terraforming and planet colonization and go straight to this…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld
and yes, even as a teenager it seemed to me that most of the SF I was reading was terribly fascist and misogynistic. Horny teen aged part of me loved Heinlein for his soft core, the emerging feminist found it childish and backwards. Then Lazarus Long started to delve into incest and that was the end of that fascination.
Stephenson is about the only SF I read now and I’m not really sure you could call it SF when it comes to the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon.
Stolen Dormouse
I met Bradbury in 1970 when he was somewhat active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. In particular, he came to speak at an anti-War teach-in at Caltech and gave a strong talk.
It makes me sad to see him turn right in his later years.
(He always looked at technology with a jaundiced eye, and was more of a fantasy writer than a “hard” science fiction writer.)
J.W. Hamner
@cleek:
Different strokes and all that… but I really enjoyed that book. I found the setting to be unique and interesting, since I don’t really know anything about Thailand… and found the post apocalyptic world caused by global warming + GMO warfare to be a strong hook.
Peter J
Maybe that argument is why she still wants physical books? Cause if somebody went into her house a stole a book, that would be like her going into somebody’s garage and steal their lawnmower.
Someone stealing her book online, not so much.
Warren Terra
@Brachiator:
I agree with her stance on copyright, but the interviewer rather dramatically misrepresents what Google Books proposes to do. It’s not to let people read complete books that are within copyright without paying the rights holder; if anything, by making those books more accessible, it’s just the opposite.
Cris
I love the thought of colonizing Mars, but I have to acknowledge that it ain’t gonna happen.
Mnemosyne
There’s an interesting documentary with Ellison from a couple of years ago called Dreams with Sharp Teeth. He’s a fascinating guy, but I completely understand why his wives and girlfriends keep leaving him.
You can watch it through Netflix streaming if you want to be an anti-Luddite.
Brachiator
@Warren Terra:
Yeah, I take your point. But here I wanted to post up some of the Atwood interview and let interested readers take a look at the whole thing. The Bradbury bashing was getting to be unfair, with the implicit assumption that any issues he had with technology was just because he was an old crank.
On the other hand, I don’t know myself how the google project deals with paying royalties to writers, or to their heirs.
Mnemosyne
@Interrobang:
There are the black heroes of “Way in the Middle Of the Air” in The Martian Chronicles, but that story has been censored out of recent editions since apparently some idiots find it offensive.
Mnemosyne
@Peter J:
So if I mug you at the ATM and take the cash out of your wallet, that’s theft, but if I hack into your account and electronically transfer your bank balance to my account, it’s not really stealing it?
tavella
What, you don’t think rapey Orientalism where everyone in the future is brain-damaged and forgotten how to make wind and water power work is the greatest?
RoonieRoo
I’ve met Bradbury twice at two different talks he gave and then later mingled with the people attending. This was in the 80’s and later in the 90’s. He was a complete asshole in both decades. Frankly, I don’t see what he says now as any change from what he was saying and acting like back then.
He was a narcissistic prick then and he’s a narcissistic prick now.
cleek
@tavella:
they can make a spring so strong that it takes four giant elephants to wind, but they can’t make a solar panel ?
Bob L
Speaking of Ellison I was at some Sci-Fi convention once and walked passed this open door for some seminar. I glance in, I had no idea who the speaker was, couldn’t hear a word the he was saying, but from his body language and the sneering expression on his weaselly face the the word “jackass” flashed threw my mind, Then I realized it was Harlan Ellision. The guy just oozes obnoxiousness.
Limbaugh and Beck are nothing new.
Bimbos of the Death Sun is a story about a thinly disguised version of Ellison being murdered at a Sci-Fi convention.
Cacti
Speaking of space exploration, government and whatnot.
If private industry does everything better, when will they send a man to the moon…
Like the U.S. government did 41 years ago?
Ty Lookwell
@LM:
If you want to read a great newcomer, try Paulo Bacigalupi. His book Windup Girl (next on my reading list) won the Nebula last year
I don’t know if you’re into audiobooks, but I just finished the unabridged audiobook of The Windup Girl and it was… fantastic. The narration by Jonathan Davis was absolutely perfect for the novel, together the result was really moving. One of the best audiobooks I’ve heard in the past few years.
LanceThruster
I was at a panel discussion for JPL’s Planetfest ’81 (done for ABC’s Nightline) with Carl Sagan, Ray Bradbury, Bruce Murray, Gene Rodenbury, and Ted Koppel moderating (Koppel told a wicked funny joke about a “golden urinal” – punchline: “Hey Clarence! I think we found the guy that p!ssed in your saxaphone.”).
Bradbury told a story about how anti-nuclear activists outside the fence of a nuclear plant were hypocrites or Luddites or something as we would eventually solve all the problems associated with nuclear power and that anyway it was wrong to stall progress.
My brother let out a loud and solitary “Boo!” in back of the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Bradbury said some sort of comeback resulting in wild applause (including my own).
Bradbury then quipped, “I can tell by your reaction that you get it…and that the rest of you @ssholes don’t know what I’m talking about.”
I from then on referred to it as “the night Ray Bradbury called my brother an @sshole.”
It’s almost three decades later and I know a little more about the lies told in defense of the nuclear power industry (remember the phrase “Power too cheap to meter”?).
I think I owe my brother an apology.
Brachiator
@DFH no.6:
I know what you mean. That’s why it’s ridiculous that his peers in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America would name an award in his honor. Must be a bunch of hacks.
tavella
They can genetically engineer giant elephants and humanoid sex toys, but not bacteria that make hydrocarbons. They can create springs that are hundreds as times as energy-dense as TNT, but they can’t make a windmill. Somehow it’s not economical to ship your extremely expensive and years in the training humanoid sex toy home by sea, despite the fact that it was economical to ship Chinese manual laborers across the Pacific by sailing ship pre-hydrocarbon era. Etc, etc.
It’s a book for people who want to wallow in fantastic misery and pretend it’s realism.
Spaghetti Lee
Why is being suspicious of technology suddenly a mark of wingnuttery? There is a school of anti-globalist, anti-corporate thought on the left that is suspicious of certain technologies.
LanceThruster
@Bob L:
In the recent documentary about Ellison, he is a self-described “cranky old Jew”. See: “Dreams With Sharp Teeth” – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1018887/
To me, his most redeeming quality is his atheism, as he regularly mocks and rejects any sort of supernatural bunkum.
I’m entitled to my opinion”? NO! I’ve got news for you, schmuck! You’re entitled to your INFORMED opinion!
~ Harlan Ellison
LanceThruster
@LanceThruster:
Picture of the panel towards the bottom of this link – http://jplarc.ampr.org/calling/1981/sep/sep81.html
~ Thanks to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Amateur Radio Club ~
malraux
@Mnemosyne: If I steal something you no longer have it. If I break copyright, then you still have it, I just have a copy of it.
Flugelhorn
Kain… how does it take more government to go to Mars? What? We have to have government take-over of agriculture and energy production for us to colonize Mars? Does the government assimilate unions as civil work forces for us to colonize Mars? Please… Outside of the whitty sounding retort that it arms you with, how exactly does colonizing Mars necessitate bigger government? Why be so purposefully obtuse and disingenuous for a cheap soundbite that dematerializes on the first pass by anyone with a hint of sense?
Mnemosyne
@malraux:
You can make whatever rationalizations you want to make yourself feel better about stealing from other people. It’s still theft.
Anne Laurie
Can’t believe nobody has referenced the Bradbury quote Driftglass uses as a subheader:
Bradbury was always a fantastic storyteller / poet. He’s never been interested in the “science” part of “science fiction”, and I don’t see why a writer who got his start in the Saturday Evening Post (not to mention the Hollywood factory-studios) should ever have been mistaken for a technophile.
Incidentally, I can’t find them now, but from the most recent press photos, Harlan Ellison has morphed into Truman Capote.
malraux
@Mnemosyne: Well, no. Its copyright violation (which is legally worse than theft as the punishments are usually way worse). One is civil, the other criminal.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“science fiction seems to have a very high concentration of right wing views for some reason.”
Good sci-fi is projecting the impact of technology on society, asking a bunch of “what-if” questions. That tends to bring up meta-political questions. Some writers have been on the right (Poul Anderson, Heinlein [but Heinlein started on the liberal end of the spectrum]. Orson Scott Card is another Charles Johnson – lost his reason after 9/11), but many on the left.
H.G. Wells, the granddaddy of SF, was a Fabian (and unfortunately credulous when it came to Soviet propaganda about its society.)
Pohl & Kornbluth’s “The Space Merchants” is about as intense a parody of capitalism as you can get. Similarly with Phil K. Dick’s “Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich. Asimov, being from NY Jewish stock, was also solidly on the left. A.C. Clarke was as well, IIRC. LeGuin,
And there’s many overt leftists still – Iain M. Banks, Ken McLeod, China Mieville, Stephen Brust, Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross.
And culture shit-stirrers like Moorcock, Blish, Aldiss, JG Ballard. And it’d be hard to put the cyberpunk generation of authors in the “conservative” camp.
J.W. Hamner
@tavella:
Dude, it’s a story. I’m pretty techno-optimistic myself… and thus don’t find the world in the book to be very plausible… but analyzing science fiction for “realism” is pretty silly. I mean, whatever, but that kind of nit-picking is the very worst of nerd stereotypes. What kind of sci-fi qualifies as “realistic” to you? Do you really think it couldn’t be easily torn apart in a similar manner?
Mnemosyne
@malraux:
I’m afraid you’re mistaken about that: copyright infringement is, in fact, a criminal matter, not a civil one.
tavella
It’s not a matter of sci-fi, it’s a matter of basic storytelling logic. If a book can only be made to work by assuming everyone in it is deeply, deeply brain damaged as well as basic laws of science no longer work, it’s not a good book.
Even without that, the wallowing in rape and the Orientalism creep me out.
cleek
@J.W. Hamner:
i though the tech holes were pretty glaring in that one. all those holes tavella listed seem pretty obvious, right? and obvious holes deserve at least a little explanation – maybe something like “solar power can’t work because of the permanent haze” or “wind power doesn’t work because the wind doesn’t blow hard enough in Thailand any more. doesn’t have to be 100% scientifically sound, but IMO, a writer should show the reader that he at least thought about this stuff enough to realize he has to brush it away somehow. seems sloppy otherwise.
but mostly i hated the characters: every one of them except the Windup herself.
Triassic Sands
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Sadly, Ol’ Ray has stolen this from Joe Orton, and it is the title of a 1987 film that was based on the life of the British playwright.
So, don’t give Ray credit for anything other than an uncredited theft of someone else’s intellectual property (so to speak). Of course, Ray is so effin’ old that he probably doesn’t remember where he heard it.
Perhaps, Ray can now write his autobiography, “Someone Senile This Way Comes — Too Many Machines” on a 1950s vintage manual typewriter.
Tim in SF
I met Bradbury.
He’s kind of an asshole. Big disappointment.
asiangrrlMN
@cleek: Well, after reading your review of the book, I can tell you that I will not be reading it. Same ol’ same ol’ in my opinion. Ugh. Full disclosure: I do not read sci-fi in general.
@tavella: And your pithy sum-up of the book makes me even less inclined to read it, if one can be less inclined than zero (McEstimate).
I don’t care for electronic reading, but I don’t think it should be slaughtered. It has its place, I suppose. I fully acknowledge that I am a Luddite in several ways.
RoninJin
@Sarcastro: LOL, nice. I just watched “Mitchell” about a week ago
cleek
@asiangrrlMN:
i wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t have a really high tolerance for rape scenes. which excludes everyone i know, or want to know.
Douglas
Since we’re throwing around non-conservative SF writers… Jack Campbell.
Well, I don’t actually know his politics, but at least his Lost Fleet series is what liberal military SF IMHO should be – laws of war are to be respected (and treating surrendering enemies – not to mention civilians – humanely pays off in the long run), torture does not work, the protagonist DOES NOT have a fist fight to show how macho he is, the enemy is never just simply “evil”, the only time glory was ever used, IIRC, was negatively…
LanceThruster
At that same PlanetFest ’81 conference, I was at a lecture by Poul Anderson about sci-fi writing and the realistic depictions of alien worlds and future technologies.
I asked him what he considered the most exotic yet realistic scenario he had read.
With barely a moment’s hesitation he said, “A Matter of Gravity” by Randall Garrett (see: http://75.95.141.45:8080/Garrett/Bibliography.htm )
I was pretty jazzed as I had read it when I had a subscription to “Analog” magazine.
J.W. Hamner
@tavella:
@cleek:
None of the technical holes you two point to even occurred to me, to be honest, because I don’t read fiction books like they are arguments to be defeated. If anything I figured the situation was particularly bad in Thailand… since it sounded like Japan and the Midwest of the US at least were doing pretty well. Obviously if you couldn’t enjoy the story because of those problems then it is what it is.
I can see the objection to the fairly explicit sexual abuse. I’m not sure I get the “Orientalism” angle however… I thought it was nice to set a sci-fi novel in a non-Western nation for once… since, especially with global warming, that kind of apocalypse isn’t going to hurt rich Western nations as much. Like I said, I don’t know anything about Thailand, but if there are some horribly offensive characterizations of Asian cultures that I missing then that’s another story.
kormgar
The sad thing is that all of his books are already available on electronic devices. It’s just that, because he is unwilling to sell them in a digital format, the only option a consumer has to read his books on their e-book reader is to pirate.
Mnemosyne
@kormgar:
I have to admit, that drives me frickin’ nuts and is the one time I’m actually willing to seek out a pirate copy. If a legal copy is available, I’d always prefer to go with that because it’s a lot less trouble (plus I can complain and get a refund/new version if the formatting is wacky or pages are missing). But if I’m standing here with my money in hand and you refuse to let me give you money for the thing I want to purchase, well, I may end up looking for it on BitTorrent.
PanurgeATL
@ChrisS:
Then what do we do as ways of life (a) multiply and (b) are potentially used up faster and faster? Won’t we need to give each other more space in that regard?
I’ve always had this idea that part of the conservative coalition was culturally driven by Seventies people who were made Officially Unhip by the rise of punk; these people then become part of a coalition with at least some of the “squares” they might once have fought, because (as they see it) they now have a common enemy. (I still tend to think that more political coalition-building than not is tribal and interest-driven; the policy comes as a justification later. But then I tend to think that’s more true right than left of center.) “Hippie-punching” is popular on both sides. Where does this all lead? Is this why people have withdrawn from politics to such a great extent over the past few decades?
Mark Centz
When The iPads appeared at the local fruit stand, I went in and played around on one and found one of the apps being demo’d was a Cliff Notes app. I idly opened it up and literally lol’d when the book being Noted was F 451. I asked the staff if others had found that amusing, but got a quizzical response. That book belongs to another era, the current one has certainly moved on.
Pegging Heinlein as Right or Left is just missing out on what he was trying to think about. ‘Coventry’ pretty much eviserates The Libertarian worldview, and his views on ‘free love’ (as it was know in those times) and religion and theocratic states ( part of his future history of the US, and not a good thing in his eyes) were never left behind for him and he would have mocked Newt relentlessly. But his later work was crap, no doubt.
morzer
@asiangrrlMN:
Being fair, we’all vicious snarling jackals indulge in electronic reading on a regular basis, if only to get our next hit of the ‘Juice.
Fax Paladin
@LanceThruster: Are you sure that’s not the Hal Clement “A Mission of Gravity”?
Shalimar
@Bob L: Harlan Ellison at least was a left wing radical. He was in the Selma to Montgomery march, also marched with Chavez, was a strong proponent of the writer’s guild, etc etc etc. And he was a brilliant writer and maybe still is (I haven’t read anything he has written in the last 25 years). So not much in common with Limbaugh and Beck unless they have reputations for being unrelenting assholes in person. Which Ellison also reportedly is, moreso than anyone else I can think of offhand. He is a very complicated person, admirable in many ways and disgusting in others.
morzer
@Shalimar:
I heard him read with Neil Gaiman a few years back. He had a rant about crucifixes in hotel bedrooms, and wore unattractive orange leather shoes. I can’t say the story he read impressed me, and in fact I can’t even remember what it was about.
Jon H
This is why I sincerely hope the life-extension cryogenics live-forever people fail, and fail miserably, ending up with nothing but non-functional frozen heads in liquid nitrogen and depleted bank accounts.
Because you just know that if people start living to 200 years old, it’s going to start this bad at 80+ and get worse for the following 110 years of mounting bitterness.
LanceThruster
@Fax Paladin: Thank you for the proper title and author. I kept doing searches to try to make sure I got it right, but clearly screwed up. Sorry to attribute a wholly incorrect “quote” to Poul Anderson.
Much appreciation. In that case part of my memory was working as I remember reading it in a sci-fi anthology and was puzzled by my own “Analog” citation.
I clearly need to qualify certain statements of “fact” with phrases such as, “If I recall correctly…”
RoninJin
Well, if you need a theme song for the new Ray Bradbury Fan Club…
luminous muse
@Interrobang: One of the two main characters in Bradbury’s best book “Something Wicked This Way Comes” is black.
My favorite book growing up. (Jerry Garcia’s as well.)
If you think Bradbury’s latest rants are bad, around 5 yrs ago he was just gushing about how GWB was the most wonderful President ever. Sickened me.
mclaren
Now, c’mon, guys, the man is in his eighties and wheelchair-bound. Plus he’s had some very good ideas. Years ago he proposed a monorail in HelL.A. to alleviate traffic.
By the way, he’s right about cellphones. Why the fvck do you people use cellphones? They’re a stupid waste of money. You’re paying hundreds of dollars a month to some greedy creepy telco monopoly so you can yak about your dog while waiting in line at the supermarket.
Ditch the cellphone. Bring a book and read it. Preferably Bradbury.
And stay off my lawn!
mclaren
@DougJ:
Because any asshole can remotely erase ’em at the touch of a button. If you “buy” a Kindle book, you don’t really own it — you just happen to have leased it for as long as the monopolistic giant corporation decides it will let you temporarily read it, but the instant that corporation sees an opportunity to make more cash, that “book” (pattern of electrons) gets remotely erased and it’s gone, daddy, gone, the love is gone.
“How Amazon’s remote deletion of e-books from the Kindle paves the way for book-banning’s digital future.”
Cory Doctorow has long pointed out the insuperable problems with these kinds of DRM-laden restriction-chained uncopyable limited-lifetime proprietary schemes. Google “Amazon’s Orwellian deletion of e-books” at boingboing.net by Cory Doctorow, or google the great talk Doctorow gave at Microsoft lambasting DRM.
And what happens, by the way, when the iPod and the iPad and the Kindle disappear and go to Tech Heaven along with the Kaypro II computer and the Coleco Adam and the Cromemco workstation and the PC Jr. and the Apple Lisa?
No platform lasts forever. All hardware eventually goes obsolete.
But when you lock information (books, music, iPad apps) to a specific piece of hardware with DRM, guess what? When the platform goes away, the information dies too.
This has already happened — digital music vendors “sell” (rent) people music in DRM locked formats and then when the music vendor decides they’re not making enough cash and shuts down their servers, the DRM-locked music becomes unlistenable.
When you buy a book, you own it. You can give it to a friend. You can loan it to your roommate. You can copy and paste paragraphs from it and send ’em to people on your email list.
When you rent a book on a Kindle, you can’t do any of that.
Boycott the Kindle!
Anne Laurie
@Jon H:
Behold, Struldbrugs! That Jonathan Swift, such a prescient sci-fi guy!
Srsly, I agree with you. I’m all for improving the quality of life — the sheer quantity, not so much.
liberal
@Mnemosyne wrote:
LOL! Pointing out the distinction between rivalrous and nonrivalrous goods is a mere “rationalization”?
Marci Kiser
I don’t think this is out of character for Bradbury, really. His stories have always had at their core a fear and distrust of the loud and smelly machine world of adults. It’s why his Mars is a fantastic un-place, his space explorers little boys in a forest, his technology magic boxes with nothing under the control panel. It’s a naive view, and a simplistic one, but he’s made quite a career of selling sentiment by the word.
His appeal has always been the urge to return to a childhood where everything ran on magic, and you needed nothing else.
mclaren
@Marci Kiser:
Tell the pelicans in the Gulf of Mexico how great the loud and smelly machine worlds of adults is, kiddo.
Personally, I think we could all use a little magic in our lives.
Jay in Oregon
@mclaren:
Or buy books in electronic formats with no DRM. I don’t know about the Kindle .mobi format, but the EPUB format that iBook uses has DRM as an option — I own several O’Reilly technical books that are sold as DRM-free EPUBs.
Hell, EPUB is literally a zipped collection of (X)HTML files with a custom XML file for the table of contents and book metadata.
Annoyingly enough, the DRM that Apple uses is not the same DRM that Borders, Kobobooks, etc. uses. Fortunately, there are means of stripping the DRM off of the non-Apple EPUBs, and it’s only a matter of time before Apple’s is broken as well…
sphex
I really wish I hadn’t read that.
asiangrrlMN
@morzer: Wait. You got to see Neil Gaiman read? Now I doubly hate you!
@cleek: Yeah. Can’t do it. Even if it is of an engineered person. This is the kind of shit I need to know before I read a book.
morzer
@asiangrrlMN:
*chuckles* Then I won’t tell you about going for a drink with him afterwards.
Josh
Yeh, Bradbury’s been conservative and out-of-touch for a while: it was in the Nineties on Politically Incorrect that he said, “Is there any man here who hasn’t pinched a stranger’s bottom as she passed by?” and was surprised to learn that Bill Maher hadn’t. As to the question of his inflated reputation when he didn’t write as well as (for example) Sturgeon and had a narrow range of themes, I think the very fact that he didn’t follow the Heroic Engineer or Novel Scientific Fact model of SF made him more acceptable in middlebrow literary outlets. Evan Brier has a book with a chapter on why Fahrenheit 451 became very canonical very fast.
Comrade Sock, I’m afraid Card has been on the Right all his life, and his fiction sometimes reflects that. Heinlein did start out a socialist; Asimov (born in Belarus), Pohl, Kornbluth, Klass, and Merril were into Marxism as youngsters, and except for Klass stayed on the Left; Clarke’s hard to pin down; PKD was a pro-lifer and tried to turn Disch and other friends in to the FBI. Russ and Delany are still on the Left but stopped writing SF long ago; Ellison has a claim to progressivism but is, as noted, thuggish, and hasn’t written anything memorable since about 1991.
I’m saddened that the lists people are coming up with of SF writers on the Left tend to be British. The U.S. still has Kim Stanley Robinson, Eleanor Arnason, Terry Bisson, Karen Joy Fowler (yes, she still writes SF stories), Suzy McKee Charnas, Lisa Goldstein, Michael Swanwick, James Morrow (best-known for gorgeous atheist fantasy), Kelly Link, Ursula Le Guin, Alan De Niro, and all sorts of groovy Lefties: the most interesting political discussion I’ve seen in recent years has shown up the the SF blogosphere (places like Angry Black Woman).
Darkrose
@Brachiator: I have got to get this book. Body functions + space travel = WIN!
Why yes, I’m really a 12-year-old boy….why do you ask?
Darkrose
@mclaren:
Yes, the Kindle has its downsides, and in general, I’m not a fan of DRM.
However, I spent most of this past weekend on planes. Even with the 20 minutes on each flight when I couldn’t use it, my Kindle was a godsend. No more trying to balance the number of books needed to keep me from being bored with the weight of my carry-ons. And no more aching wrists from holding 600+ page hardcovers. Works for me.
Marci Kiser
@ mclaren
I’ll be sure to do that love, right after you remind penicillin to be a bit more magical.
Peter J
@Mnemosyne:
No. Unless you believe that money is infinite.
If you copy an e-book or an mp3 file, the original is still there, it’s not gone. I guess if you hacked into a computer, transfered an e-book or mp3 file to your computer and then removed it, then it would be the same as hacking a bank account transferring the money.
Dr. Morpheus
@Peter J:
To continue the money analogy, then by pirating the copyrighted material you’ve created the copyright equivalent of inflation.
It’s no different than having a printing press in your basement where you print up dollars and lamenting the fact that counterfeiting is a crime.
“The original money is still there, I’m just making a copy!” doesn’t excuse the crime of counterfeiting nor should it excuse the crime of pirating copyrighted material.
While I’m against DRM I’m also against the “information should be free”, “it’s not theft, it’s copyright violation!” rationalizations.
The author/artist/musician created something that you value, otherwise you wouldn’t waste your time downloading it. What do you give back in return for that value you’ve received?
it used to be money, now it’s just a freeloader attitude.
Peter J
@Dr. Morpheus:
Counterfeiting, be it money, a painting, or a pair of designer jeans isn’t theft.
If you rob the bank, do a museum heist, or steal clothes from a store, then it’s theft.
For the rest of your argument, I’ve never advocated that information be it books, movies, or music should be free.
I do believe that the price of these things will be adjusted due to how easily these things will be traded, but also due to piracy.
What I have argued here other than the above is that by supporting e-readers, publishers are digging their own graves, and authors are opening up themselves to a scale of piracy that they have until now been shielded from.