Some mornings you wake up and realize your sci-fi heroes might have lost the plot. This is one of those days.
"We've got too many internets," legendary author Ray Bradbury tells the Los Angeles Times' Hero Complex blog. "We have got to get rid of those machines."
Bradbury's latest political rant is filled with such diaphanous criticism. He rails against big government, cellphones, e-books and other such phantoms of postmodern society, and says the United States "is in need of a revolution."
He's also mad at Barack Obama, not because the White House helped fill the black holes on banks' balance sheets with taxpayer cash but because the president won't reboot travel back to the moon. In Bradbury's mind, that's an egregious shame which is forestalling the post-human technological singularity that we all deserve.
"We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars," he said. "Then when we do that, we will live forever."
How we're going to do either without "too much government" or "too many machines" was not covered in Bradbury's rant, which preceded his 90th birthday Sunday. But what can you expect from a sci-fi author who says all his work, save the stunning Fahrenheit 451, is not science fiction at all? If The Martian Chronicles is to be considered to reside outside the matrix of sci-fi, then perhaps Bradbury's anti-science rant should be considered to reside outside the realm of reality.
See Also:
