Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Ray Bradbury died.

What does this have to do with soccer?  Nothing. However, we need more than soccer in our lives.

I like Ray Bradbury's earlier works.  Farenheit 451 was ground breaking, read that when I was quite young.  I liked the Martian Chronicles; at the time I was a big fan of "hard science fiction" with rocket ships and technology - these stories explored the human side of science.  Then he drifted into fantasy, and I sort of stopped reading his stuff.  There was a huge paradigm shift in science fiction, away from science and predictions of the future; everyone turned to fantasy works. Now, I like swords and magic as well as the next guy, but I missed the future stuff.  Almost nobody was able to predict how computers would change our lives and society; all the SF writers thought we would have atomic powered cars and FTL transport capabilities; little did they realize that we would have computer driven cards and the Internet.

Science is coming back into Science Fiction; and Ray would have been right up there, reminding us that for every alien we crush beneath our treads, the loss dimishes humankind.

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