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Ray Bradbury Has Died
dsinc was the first to note, but an anonymous reader writes "Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, the dystopian novel about the logical conclusion of many trends in modern society, and many other works that have inspired fans of speculative fiction for decades, has died at the age of 91 in Los Angeles, California, Tuesday night, June 5th, 2012. No details on how he died were released, but I suspect it may have had something to do with the Earth orbiting the sun over 90 times since he was born. I guess we'll have to wait to be sure."
...is found in that man's works. He is the reason my Mom understands the wonder of extraterrestrial life, the temptations and costs of technological solutions to social problems, and has any clue as to what her son is thinking.
I owe that man a great deal more than I've spent on his books.
What a ride...
And "R is for Rocket" I read 40-some years ago. They were collections of Bradbury short stories.
Rest in peace, but is it too late to Fuck me, Ray Bradbury?
Obviously this is all about the transition of Venus across the sun. Just like the comet took Mark Twain, Venus has claimed Bradbury!
I loved his book Celsius 233.
Trolling is a art,
>> Fahrenheit 451
So is he going to be cremated with his greatest work then?
Fahrenheit 451 wasn't about censorship. I know 100 people who know nothing else about the book except cliff notes or what they got off wikipedia are about to make that comment. So I'll save you the trouble. It was about TV and the mental wasteland that he thought it represented.
My wife never liked science fiction. One evening I chose "Something Wicked This Way Comes" to watch on DVD and she rolled her eyes at my choice.
After watching, she said to me "now I know why you read all that stuff. That was great!"
A true master of the art has passed.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-author-ray-bradbury-dies-at-91-m,0,1934126.story
thegodmovie.com - watch it
at the Denver Performing Arts Center. The plot elements have held up fairly well over the decades. It was written at the dawn of the television era when Bradbury witnessed TV taking over suburban lives. This fear has been re-echoed every generation since with PCs, the web, and mobile devices displacing family life and and books.
On a sad note, it is sad (redundancy win!) to see him pass on.
On the bright side, maybe we'll finally have him stop changing what the meaning of Fahrenheit 451 is. Did he ever change his mind on the whole "Wait, it isn't about censorship at all. It really is about stupid kids watching TV all the time instead of reading. That is the important message." (not an actual quote).
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
Are you saying that his death was caused by centrifugal force of the earch circling the sun? What a ghastly way to die.
While a little overlooked (and dated, to be fair) now, The Martian Chronicles were one of the first sci-fi works I read as a kid and were a big part of making me a fan of the genre. Like all of his works, they were simultaneously beautiful and sad.
Farewell, good sir; you put humanity under the microscope with your writing and, whether we liked what we saw or not, we needed to see it.
Having been an avid scifi fan since 5th grade, Ray Bradbury was up there with my favorites of Heinlein, Herbert, and Asimov. Everytime I hear "Major Tom", I think of a short story by Ray Bradbury.
Mark Anthony Collins
If I had penned this gem: "Author of dystopian novel about the logical conclusion of many trends in modern society, Fahrenheit 451, and many other works that have inspired fans of speculative fiction for decades has died at the age of 91 in Los Angeles, California, Tuesday night, June 5th, 2012. " Could it have been made more torturous?
Author of Enyo: Up and Running from O'Reilly Media
What really bothers me about 451 is how just about everything but the book burning turned out true. If you remove that aspect from the book, you'd have a hard time separating it from the United States of today. I can't read it without being unnerved. Immersing ourselves in our electronic entertainment rather than our lives, advertisement everywhere, complete lack of empathy as a social standard, constant, ignored wars, distaste for pedestrians, rampant anti-intellectualism, near identical suburbs everywhere.
It was a brilliant extrapolation from 1953, and I wish it wasn't so close to reality.
And "R is for Rocket" I read 40-some years ago. They were collections of Bradbury short stories.
Indeed, I too cut my teeth on Ray Bradbury's works for fantasy and science fiction. Recently I discovered an edition of 100 of his collected short stories (chosen by the man himself) that appeared to include most if not all of my favorites. For anyone looking to discover/rediscover, this is an inexpensive and fairly comprehensive route to take. These stories are written for a younger mind but are still enjoyable to me.
It might have been because I had not dealt with death on a profound level yet but his short story "Kaleidoscope" from The Illustrated Man was permanently etched upon my mind. Now Bradbury is a shooting star providing wishes and dreams to the young minds who read his works. Personally I feel that hundreds of years from now, Bradbury will join the ranks of Hans Christian Anderson, Road Dahl, etc and his works will be seen as mandatory classics for readers. Like all modern writing, some of these stories aren't the most original in their nature but they are perfect to capture a mind and set someone on a course for endless reading. It's a sad day to see such a wonderful mind pass but I will do my part to immortalize him through recommendations.
My work here is dung.
One of the more vivid images in ray's stories were the hordes of rockets fleeing Earth for new opportunities on Mars. I thought this was transposition of the settling of US West and displacement of Indians which would have still been in the living memory of Ray's grandparents when he was a child. The success of DragonX last week is private door opening into space after half century of government monopolies.
Okay lets see
The Shadow Government folks line up here
The Aliens Did it folks line up here
The He isn't actually Dead folks line up here
who else do we have??
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
It was the transit of Venus! It was jealous that Ray gave Mars all his love, and pulled some sneaky, underhanded gravitational alignment whatsis! Damn you, Venus! Damn yoooooou!
I'm from the generation that had schoolteachers who couldn't stop talking about how great the 60s were. So, Bradbury epitomized the 60s SF writers who thought that computer technology would "oppress" us, and women in the future were supposed to behave just as submissively as 1950s women. Thanks to that strain of thought, my generation was discouraged from pursuing computer careers.
What really bothers me about 451 is how just about everything but the book burning turned out true.
WHY DO YOU THINK IT'S CALLED A KINDLE MOTHERFUCKER?!!![*]
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Ray Bradbury is one of the reasons I look back fondly on my childhood.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
ran their first sci-fi issue this month.
Here's his piece "Inspiration for the Fire Balloons"
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/04/120604fa_fact_bradbury
While I remained earthbound, I would time-travel, listening to the grownups, who on warm nights gathered outside on the lawns and porches to talk and reminisce. At the end of the Fourth of July, after the uncles had their cigars and philosophical discussions, and the aunts, nephews, and cousins had their ice-cream cones or lemonade, and we’d exhausted all the fireworks, it was the special time, the sad time, the time of beauty. It was the time of the fire balloons.
It wouldn't have been a problem if he didn't have the totalitarian state and their Firemen enforcers.
If he changed the plot so that people were just too lazy or stupid or to read becuase of TV, then his point would gotten across.
Doesn't really matter though. That what's makes his work great literature - it can be interpreted differently equaly well.
New question I'm asking everyone: What's the book that, like a character at the end of Fahrenheit 451, you'd recite from memory?
Mine's "1984".
One assumes that he has asked to be cremated?
I owe Mr. Bradbury and his golden age of science fiction brethern a great deal. It was his writing and that of Wells, Verne, Assimov and others which pulled me up from a path of near illiteracy to being an avid reader.
If there is an after life, I hope Bradbury, Verne, Clark and all the others have already started writing for the inhabitants. They'll be better off for it.
Never ascribe to malice or conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
I just looked at a few wikipedia pages and saw this thing that he wrote about a transistor radio in the 1950s. It is exactly the way you might describe someone talking on a cell phone if you walked outside your door right now:
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.
No, he didn't predict cell phones or anything like that, but he recognized one of the first victims of the epidemic that went on to swallow us all.
so what? another carbon-based unit is returned to the environment
Rest in peace Mr. Bradbury. Your work introduced me to the wonders of literary scifi, and the world has never been the same since.
"I'm aware of his work."
Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it.
No details on how he died were released, but I suspect it may have had something to do with the Earth orbiting the sun over 90 times since he was born.
For that matter, he could have been the one letting the earth orbit the sun all this time. I guess we will be waiting with bated breath to know if it is possible for the earth to orbit the sun without him.
Sorry for feeding the troll, but this is from late in Bradbury's life (age 90).
"I'm a Zen Buddhist if I would describe myself," he says. "I don't think about what I do. I do it. That's Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down."
Full article, worth the read:
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-08-02/living/Bradbury_1_ray-bradbury-dandelion-wine-sam-weller?_s=PM:LIVING
It is unwise to ascribe motive
Mine are Solaris and The Flop, both by Stanislaw Lem.
Y'see, this is why celebrity is a terrible idea.
Because Bradbury was a genius, a master of empathy, and one of the most far-seeing writers of his century. I can't think of a more evocative piece of writing than "Dandelion Wine".
That said, you're right (if a trifle impolitic). He was a total neo-con.
I really do try to avoid personal knowledge about artists whose work I enjoy. It seldom works out well.
Given the limits and frailties of the human memory, he could have written a follow-up about the mangled misremembered books:
A Tale of Two Cities - Christopher Dickins look at Minneapolis and st Paul.
Moby Dick - Herman Mullers classic tale of Captain Arabs search for the perfect tuna salad sandwich.
Macbeth - The story of the first girl to own an Apple Macintosh.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I happened to be touring a university campus (UCLA? Berkeley?) and saw a poster for a talk he was giving, and bought a ticket on a whim. He was a fascinating speaker, and it was intriguing to hear him re-engineer and expand on Fahrenheit 451. What a treat. Afterwards, he gladly stayed behind and autographed books for quite a while.
I also remember something about him being arrested in Paris, France for being 'drunk and in charge of a bicycle'. What's not to like?
RIP.
Use to love watching it. thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ray_Bradbury_Theater
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Martian Chronicles was an early favorite, but the one that stuck with me as a young kid was The Veldt, which I was lucky enough to have read and seen on film in school.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
Ray Bradbury wrote touchy feelie, technologically very light science fiction. As a fan of the hard stuff (Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke et. al. - I prefer SF that requires a working knowledge of vector calculus and differential equations to really appreciate) his stuff always seemd pretty fluffy fare. I always summed it up as the science fiction beloved by English teachers everywhere, becuase if you took an English course in the 60s and 70s, and any SF was going to wind up on the reading list, it was inevitable that it would be Bradbury...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Is probably his greatest short story and it's not even Sci-Fi. Thankfully, it is all over the internet, so, if you've never read it, drop everything and go read it right now. It's great.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I'll never forget him telling the story of how this guy he had never met gave him a start in a little known side career, designing amusement park rides. My friend had been impressed with a story he had written and suggest Ray for scripting the story for the ride back in the early 60s. It was several years after that they finally met and became friends. His kind words meant a lot to all that attended the wake. He was a gentleman and one of the truest artists ever in fantasy and science fiction. He may have passed but his work will be read a thousand years from now if for no other reason than his brilliant insights into humanity during this time in history. History books can give dry facts but Ray had a genius for telling what it was like to be a live during the 20th century. That aspect of his work was just as important as his unique tales of the fantastic. It was the humanity in the stories that made them excel beyond his contemporaries and become truly timeless.
In eighth grade, I was assigned "The Halloween Tree". This was my first exposure to the concept that reading could actually be an enjoyable experience, rather than simply being a tedious chore standing in the way of going out to ride bikes. Thank you for that wonderful gift Mr. Bradbury.
FTFY
And to Ray Bradbury I credit my lifelong fascination with the Red Planet. Edgar Rice Burroughs helped, sure, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and others too, but the saga of human colonization and pathos of the dying Martian civilization with their crystal cities and sandships, well, it leads me to hope that someday we'll settle there.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
And yeah, my memory is that good.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
...the old America - that America of optimism, high expectations, and truth before all - is dying with them.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
There isnt a better way than going hunting to the past and killing a butterfly.
I feel like an old friend has died, and I've been near tears several times today. I grew up on his stories. I deeply identified with his characters - especially Douglas Spaulding. I read Dandelion Wine almost every year, and it's always new.
He influenced my writing style more than anyone else, as well as his encouragement to write something every day, whether I want to or not.
His stories were always about more than just the setting - science fiction was simply a vehicle for him to communicate deep truths.
I've been remembering all day a scene in Dandelion Wine in which Great Grandmother says goodbye to her family, and then settles into bed to try to find the dream that was interrupted when she was born. I hope you find your dream, Ray. Sleep well, old friend.
Apache guy, Open Source enthusiast, runner
Newsflash: The quality of an artist's work is not tied to how closely their political positions match yours. Whatever else he was, Bradbury was an excellent writer.
Another icon of science fiction and a prophet of science is gone. I began reading his work as just a boy and spent my entire life enjoying all his brilliant works of art. It is so sad to lose those that make us stop and think. Those who make us wonder. Those who gave us the idea's that we are turning into reality now. I will miss him sorely as I miss the others who have gone before him. He has gone into that long night. Sleep well my friend, you deserve it.
I'm old, not dead. Well that's my 2 cents worth, your mileage may vary. I say what I think, not what you want to hear.
Rest in peace, Mr. Bradbury.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Easy: Garfield Pulls His Weight
The Ringworld Engineers - Larry Niven
Oops, forgot a quote: "Nobody laughs in church, not even tourists." :)
Ray Bradberry wanted the title of this work to be the temperature that book paper catches fire. He searchd through the public libraries research section but couldn't find the answer to that question. He tried contacting several paper companies but they didn't have the answer. He finally called the local fire department and asked them what temperature paper catches fire at.... THEY KNEW!
"I guess we'll have to wait to be sure." Sure that he died?
Bradbury hated e-books:
But he relented in 2011, when his publishing deal was renewed. His agent said: "We explained the situation to him, that a new contract wouldn't be possible without e-book rights. He understood and gave us the right to go ahead."
Very nice. Shove it down his throat. Were I he, I'd have taken the book out of circulation and let the publisher suck wind.. At 90, he certainly didn't need the income much longer.
Your novels brought me uncountable hours of entertainment, joy, sadness, thrill, and always a sense of wonder and magic.
Okay, here's a new wrinkle on Copyright.
A *huge* problem is that it's one rule to fit them all and becomes that becomes a Procrustean Bed. (NEAR ELEUSIS, in Attica, there lurked a bandit named Damastes, called Procrustes, or "The Stretcher." He had an iron bed on which travelers who fell into his hands were compelled to spend the night. His humor was to stretch the ones who were too short until they died, or, if they were too tall, to cut off as much of their limbs as would make them short enough. None could resist him, and the surrounding countryside became a desert. http://www.goines.net/Writing/procrustean_bed.html )
So even a silly ICanHazCheezburger Caturday pic has the same legal context as enterprise software and a $300 million movie.
What if copyright were proportional (your choice of equations, maybe Fibonacci?) to the amount of dollars times man-hours put into it? So a fun little graphic might get say 12 years of protection, but a $300 Million movie that took 17 years *just to get out of the studio* maybe enjoys the bigger terms. Then the catch is you can pay money to extend your copyright. So Disney gets to keep their Mouse, but nearly forgotten Christopher Anvil stories from 1956 would be in public domain by now.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
RIP Ray Bradbury. In 1999 I waited for about 4 hours in a line that wound around the downtown Denver Barnes and Noble to meet him and have him autograph a book. At the beginning of the event the book store manager announced that he would only stay for 2 hours to autograph books. The 2 hours came and went and the line was still very long. He then announced that he would stay until every last person had his or her book signed. He stayed until long after the usual store closing and signed every book. One of America's greatest authors and a true gentleman.
Sig expected Real Soon Now.
Ray Bradbury wrote "All summer in a day", the story of prejudice on Venus where an earthling's Venus-born schoolmates no longer believe in the sun. In a reflection of the rare beauty of a total solar eclipse, or the rarer phenomena of a Venus the sun only appears once every 7 years on Bradbury's Venus. Mr. Bradbury might have appreciated that his last day on earth coincided with a rare alignment between Earth, the Sun and Venus where...
No one in the class could remember a time when there wasn't rain.
“Ready?"
"Ready."
"Now?"
"Soon."
"Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?"
"Look, look; see for yourself!"
The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.
It rained.
It had been raining for seven years; thousand upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.
"It's stopping, it's stopping!"
"Yes, yes!"
Fellow midwesterner Mark Twain famously wrote: "I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'"
Bradbury wasn't as sardonic as Twain. He preferred walking to driving, but this preference raised suspicions of cops in Waukegan Illinois. He turned his confrontations into Fahrenheit 451. As one of the most prolific writers in the world, he should be remembered for his love of language and life. Ray has inspired millions of writers and scientists with his prolific writing and love for language and life. And if you can read one of his first short stories, "The Lake" without shedding a tear over how short our time is on this planet... I don't know.
"In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating." -- Ray Bradbury (1920-2012 R.I.P.)
Hi there. I'll reply to you because your point touches some of the profound differences between fiction and non-fiction.
On the bad and/or dull side of Non-Fiction, are works that simply "do nothing for you". CIA Factbooks come to mind. Neat for 12 seconds to make sure you're not mistaking Zimbabwe for Zambia, but then the rest of the 700 pages does nothing for you.
So yes, there unstated elements of non-fiction required to make it interesting, such as being in the fields you like.
Same kind of thing with fiction. At its best, fiction takes normal life, smooths out the stupid flukes and errors to sculpt a fairly theoretical message from the author. I tend to like science fiction in this regard because it can make up entire future timelines to make its point. So again, done right, there is a message, a mood, behind the words. At that point, you can work backward. "What mood would I like to read about now?" Then with a little skill and practice, you pick an author most likely to hit your mood, then read *vertically* along that author's story set. For example, I like O. Henry because he describes a simpler time in New York and all the hardships of an immigrant melting pot, but manages to not insult the characters. Or my newest find, Christopher Anvil, who was between 20-40 years ahead of his time, writing stories that are just finally showing up in news stories today.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Quoting the first line of the book [with some poetic license]:
IT WAS A PLEASURE TO RETAIN.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
On the bad and/or dull side of Non-Fiction, are works that simply "do nothing for you". CIA Factbooks come to mind. Neat for 12 seconds to make sure you're not mistaking Zimbabwe for Zambia, but then the rest of the 700 pages does nothing for you.
I dunno, simply learning new things is pretty interesting. I'd rather have the CIA factbook with me on a desert island than any work of fiction. When you think about it, "The population of Zambia is 12,000,000" isn't really any less interesting than "a fictional beggar said 'There's only a few of us left.'"
Same kind of thing with fiction. At its best, fiction takes normal life, smooths out the stupid flukes and errors to sculpt a fairly theoretical message from the author.
Couldn't the point have been better made with a well crafted essay? e.g. I always found George Orwell's essays far more interesting than his allegorical fiction. After all, he actually shot that elephant, despite his best efforts not to. The pressure of the "coolies" who he was supposed to be superior to was too much. That's a pretty profound thing to think about. Animal Farm on the other hand, never happened, and it's unclear what relevance it actually has to anything. The dynamics between the animals in Animal Farm could be completely a figment of Orwell's imagination. If such a thing could happen, who's to say it would go down the way Orwell portrayed?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Our gerontologists and general culture freak out at the concept of curtailing or repairing the genetically caused damage that we call the aging process. Career suicide to say that something could possibly be done, someday, if we start trying to find out how.
If dying of old age is natural and expected, then so should dying of cancer be. Neither are pleasant deaths, and should be eliminated as causes. But one is being done, and the other not, for largely religious and superstitious reasons. Odd that our greatest fear is our greatest blind spot in medical research.
If we ever lick even a part of the puzzle, it'll be by accident. Let's hope.
Ray Bradbury. One of the damned greats. Almost the last of the Campbellian era of science fiction, when we actually called it by its right name.
n/t :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Its called stimulating your imagination. In your case you appear not to have one. I pity you.
Bradbury never let facts or science get in his way. Whether it was his annoying religious beliefs or the embarrassing gush of "Golden Apples of the Sun", he and reason were strangers.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Just showed the "Fuck Me Ray Bradbury" video to my girlfriend this morning. What an eerie coincidence...
-
Ray Bradbury couldn't find a major publisher willing to take on "Fahrenheit 451". It was first published in serial form in Playboy in 1954. It was only afterwards that it became a noted novel.
People don't give Playboy any credit, but they were actually often quite edgy and on the forefront of a lot of new fiction and ideas throughout the 50, 60 and earlier 70s.
Why should how much time or money I spend on the creation of something, have to do with how long the copyright lasts? An author who spends 50 years writing a novel should enjoy a longer copyright than an author who churns out a better book every few years can only have a shorter length? Seems like that will encourage creators to horde their creations.
To fix copyright, shorten the term. 25 or 50 years. Allow people like Disney to trademark their characters (on an annual basis for a fee). Sorry you can't use Mickey Mouse, but you can make copies of steamboat willy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything
"Why should how much time or money I spend on the creation of something, have to do with how long the copyright lasts? "
Because it's a rough indicator of economic cost. 25 years even is too long for funny little graphics, small software apps, and possibly even songs. Cultural propagation is the overlooked benefit from something not under copyright in the internet age. We all look and snicker and "share" (read: copy) stuff on the social sites - for these small categories we're effectively treating these small items as 0 copyright already. That is the nature of my concept. On the other hand, when you see stories like "X programmer copied stock trading software" we go "oh, okay, now that's a Bad Thing", simply because it's a high end item.
It's a devastating problem in non-fiction books. It's well known that there is a curve where nonfiction has very low sales below certain "best sellers". Yet the value of the knowledge in a non-fiction book might be the highest value in any non-software copyrighted entity. (Facetiously, referencing the other $100 college degree thread, 5 books/semester * 2 semesters/year * 4 years = a college degree.)
My rough overall point is that not all categories are created equal, and copyright could use reform by dividing it into certain kinds of categories.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"Couldn't the point have been better made with a well crafted essay?"
I don't think so, because according to literary convention, there are many emotional tones essays are "not supposed to have". The easiest example is that fiction can take time out for excitement such as trying to evade Agent Smith in the Matrix or a courtroom drama or defusing a bomb while there are airplanes shooting at you. More subtly, fictional characters operate in their context, so they can "show not tell" aspects of the theme, such as swearing when the situation gets really hard (because only one candidate will be left standing in the space ship commander test). In an essay you'd be stuck with "this is a very difficult test and there will be emotional problems among the candidates."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The Pedestrian - my favourite - also about Leanard Mead; but I am not sure if this was written before or after Far. 451.
Luckily I have not yet been taken to The Centre for Regressive Tendencies.
RIP.
This reminds me of something I always thought as a child.
I'd watch gameshows, they would give away either prizes or trips.
I always thought the trips were a waste.
"why, after all, would I want a trip. It's done and gone, and then you have nothing. Give me the items!".
Then, i got older, and learned otherwise.
and if you already are, then...wow, I have nothing else to say.
Since this has degenerated into a series of copyright rants, I will make a modest proposal.
Since IP is property, declare its value, to be taxed annually, everywhere -- frequently, in many jurisdictions.
And as in claiming races, require the holder to sell the rights to whoever offers to pay the declared value.
Allow the holder to release IP to the public domain, ending its tax burden.
That should get older IP into the public domain. And get immortal corporations to rethink sitting on rights forever.
That isn't nearly as bold as Dean Swift's contribution to modesty and propositions.
--
Law of truly large numbers - almost all numbers are larger than you can imagine.