Ray Bradbury Still Hates The Internet

from the well,-he's-way-over-30 dept

Wed, Jun 24th 2009 7:02am — Mike Masnick

Karl points us to an interview with Ray Bradbury where he rails against the internet:

"The Internet is a big distraction," Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

"Yahoo called me eight weeks ago," he said, voice rising. "They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? 'To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.'

"It's distracting," he continued. "It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere."

Tell us what you really think, Ray. Though, actually, this isn't a surprise. Way back in 2001, we wrote about another interview with him, where he called the internet a "scam" perpetrated by computer companies. If all this seems strange for the guy who wrote Farenheit 451 about the evils of book burning and the wonders of being able to access all kinds of information... it turns out that's because we all (including his biographer) misunderstood Farenheit 451. In an interview a couple years ago, Bradbury explained that the book wasn't about censorship at all. It was really about the evils of technology such as television:

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

So it turns out he just loves books. That's it. Not the ability to get more content or be able to read more. Books. Physical books. None of this "air" stuff and those annoying "factoids." Perhaps, as he gets close to being 90 years old, he's simply proving the point that fellow science fiction author Douglas Adams once wrote:

1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

I would imagine that point 3 gets worse over time... even if you're an acclaimed science fiction writer.

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Filed Under: ray bradbury

54 Comments

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Rabbit80, 24 Jun 2009 @ 7:07am

Don't ya just love the Late Douglas Adams - He was a genius!
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spaceman spiff, 24 Jun 2009 @ 7:21am

Senility strikes RB!
Has he forgotten his own series of SciFi shows on TV some years ago, The Ray Bradbury Theater? If he was so set against the "evils of television", why did he do 6 seasons of the show? If it wasn't for the internet I wouldn't have known about it!

Sorry Ray, but you need to get with the times. I'm an old codger myself (60+) now, and though there is a lot to dislike about the internet, there is a LOT that would be impossible without it, like being able to talk (and video) for free with my family that is spread all over the globe!
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:Lobo Santo (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 7:32am

Re:
So very true. The world became a drearier place the day he died.
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Dark Helmet (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 7:43am

Be fair
Maybe he just needed a diaper change...
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SteveD, 24 Jun 2009 @ 7:45am

Last week a friend of mine recommended a sci-fi book, and I dutifully trudged into town to scour the (last) two bookshops for a copy. My search was fruitless, and as a last resort ventured into the local library for the first time in several years.

Not only did I find what I was looking for, I emerged with an old Patrick O'Brian novel, a guide on SLR Cameras and a copy of Locke's essay on Human Understanding. I'd found more interesting content in 10 minutes of walking round a library then an entire days worth of carefully customised RSS feeds had brought me.

Looking past the easily-critiqued technophobia of Ray Bradbury I believe he has a point; Libraries are worth preserving.

The internet, while a brilliant means of communication, suffers from an extreme form of...sympathetic resonance. People gravitate to sites and content that supports what they already believe in. Is that really a good way to learn?

The thing that digital content has never really been able to replicate from the physical (despite the best efforts of Netflix/Amazon) is Serendipity.
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Rebel Freek (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 7:47am

Re: Be fair
Depends...
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jun 2009 @ 7:51am

"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says,

WRONG Bradbury! I know Napoleon likes water parks from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure"
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Dark Helmet (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 7:52am

Re: Re: Be fair
You want to have some real fun, let's organize a burning of Ray Bradbury books in front of his residence and watch the old man freak out, tape him coming out on the front lawn in his bathrobe, post it to Youtube, and then finally, FINALLY we will have a firm definition of irony...
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duane (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 7:58am

Re:
The Internet UR doing it wrong.

The Internet is all about serendipity. Don't get me wrong, I love all my libraries. I've got three I visit on a regular basis and I use the online system to request books that I see on the Internet that I'm too cheap to buy.

However, sites like popurls, Digg, Slashdot and Metafilter regularly led me down very weird paths full of new learning and the best part is I can just bookmark it and come back to it later. I never have to return the link like a library book.

Also, nothing against real books, but 1 thumb drive holds about a bazillion books. I like the feel of a real book in my hands, but since I don't own a secret underground lair, my bookshelf space is very limited.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jun 2009 @ 8:04am

so the entire world misunderstood his book. Is this because?

a) the world and his dog are just too stupid
or
b) Bradbury just isn't as good a writer as he is cracked up to be
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Chris, 24 Jun 2009 @ 8:05am

Different Things to Different People... inadvertently.
I'm sorry to hear that such a clever and influential writer of science fiction seems to disagree with my personal views on the internet and it's value, but it won't keep me up at night.

I can see the intended theme in Farenheit 451 now that it's pointed out, but that wasn't what I walked away with. I did get a strong distrust of marketing. The scene on the train with everyone singing to jingles still causes me to ask anyone doing it around me to please stop. I had some trouble resolving the "Art as Advertising" idea because of it. There was a line; art over here, ads over there. But I realized that it wasn't really so, there was no functional difference. I've focused more on the mechanics of advertisement and how it effects my decision making (no, I am not thinking Arby's). I still won't abide by people singing along with radio jingles and actively avoid the normal steady drone of tasteless and banal marketing that is thrown at me. But now I'm not above checking out a funny commercial on the internet once one is pointed out or acknowledging a well done ad I accidentally catch on TV.

Mr. Bradbury is allowed to get as crotchety as he likes and he's doing a good thing for a valuable media by supporting print books. To the best of my knowledge he hasn't put his weight behind the destruction of the internet. He's allowed his opinions and he's still a great man in my book.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jun 2009 @ 8:08am

Re:
But we never said kill the library...

Sadly as everything becomes marketed and everyone has an angle for money things get dumbed down. Everything not a quick google search away is impossibly far away. Games have become rather boring, if you strip away all the razzle dazzle flashy stuff most big ticket games now a days are barely better than Pong.

Movies are devolving to action and sex and can't even be bothered with an interesting plot twist... or a plot twist at all!

TV Shows are moving towards displaying real life for everyone to see, because we can't pay writers to write thought provoking ideas.

Is it sad and regrettable that people would rather listen to a minute of a dude talking about capping dudes and smoking weed than sit down and listen to Mozart? Sure.

However is it wrong? No it's not wrong, it's just how the world works. We live in a society that is driven by money. If libraries die its because they couldn't make money. Not because internet goons came over and burned all the books.
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Chris, 24 Jun 2009 @ 8:11am

Re: Re: Re: Be fair
I don't think he gets around so well anymore.

I assume you are joking about this, but under the circumstances it's in poor taste. Books and the internet both have their place in the world. It isn't a contest no matter what the opinions of some authors. Be educated, be aware and you'll be living the concept behind the book better than he is.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jun 2009 @ 8:13am

Most of the books I've read, I've only learned about them because I saw them on an internet forum somewhere being discussed. Then I could log to that same internet forum after reading them, and discuss them with a lot of people. A lot of these books weren't even available where I am (English books, I live in a Spanish speaking country) so I ordered them online. There's also this wonderful place called the Gutenberg Project, where you can find pretty much every single book written that's in the public domain, and download it, for example, into a pocket PC and read them before going to bed. You don't even need a light, because the pocket PC provides its own light.

Oh yeah and paper sucks.
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Eric (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 8:14am

As an EXTREMELY avid book reader (I personally own over 300 books stashed all over my house) who is known by name in my local library, and has a picture up in one of my old elementary schools for reading around 90% of the library (they didn't knock me off for the encyclopedias lol) and also read books on my computer which I get off the internet (sometimes you just have to wait for the entire series to come out before you buy it in the special box set you know they will release) The only problem Ray Bradbury has is that he is older, he does not know all that is available, and at his age, probably doesn't care. Let an old man have his beliefs, it will not change the truth about the world. And besides, he is partially right, how many of us know kids who sit in front of the tv all day? Now my kids will never do that, but too many parents allow their children to do that. And it will only hurt them in the end overall.
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Dark Helmet (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 8:19am

Re: Re: Re: Re: Be fair
Yes, joking. Irony is amusing to me.
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Overcast (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 8:29am

Internet... books... Television..

All the same, it's just a matter of what people WANT to look for.

Sure; you can sit and rot your brain watching idiotic cartoons all day or watch a documentary on Shakespeare - the idea is to have enough content to please many different people - like a library.
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Overcast (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 8:31am

Re:
Last week a friend of mine recommended a sci-fi book, and I dutifully trudged into town to scour the (last) two bookshops for a copy. My search was fruitless, and as a last resort ventured into the local library for the first time in several years.

Not only did I find what I was looking for, I emerged with an old Patrick O'Brian novel, a guide on SLR Cameras and a copy of Locke's essay on Human Understanding. I'd found more interesting content in 10 minutes of walking round a library then an entire days worth of carefully customised RSS feeds had brought me.

I looked high and low for a particular book - couldn't find it at the library - yes; I do go there on occasion. I did; however, find it on Amazon - and a used book store in my area. The used book store won out on that - but I would have bought it from Amazon otherwise.

The internet has been one of the best tools ever developed to find books... lol
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Ron (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 8:32am

Ray
My early exposure to SciFi was from reading Bradbury's books; still do enjoy them. Oddly though, I never knew he was a techophobe. When I saw him speak at a local college some years back he commented on how he never learned to drive and I thought, "How eccentric". But, his talk was not against technology but instead focused on imagination. To be fair, the Internet at that time was a text based bunch of chat rooms so maybe he did not have all the resentment he needed to produce the quotes in the article. Ah well, Ray, your writing stands well and is memorable. And, you're still eccentric.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jun 2009 @ 8:36am

"as he gets close to being 90 years old"

I think he's just becoming senile.
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hexjones, 24 Jun 2009 @ 8:44am

How revisionist Ray! 451 isn't about books even if he says that now. If it was, then the people at the end would be scrambling to chisel books into stone or something, not memorizing them. It's about information.
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Jim C, 24 Jun 2009 @ 9:08am

New World Order
Judging from the mean spirited comments about Ray I'd say you all need to take a look in the mirror. Last I knew everyone had the rights to their own opinions. So Ray does agree with you. In your new world order that apparently gives you free license to belittle, berate, and condemn the man. I don't know about you but I was taught better.
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interval, 24 Jun 2009 @ 9:18am

Re: New World Order
@Jim C: "I don't know about you but I was taught better."

Ok, how about this as a measured response to Bradbury: The man is obviously a fool, a Luddite, and a curmudgeon. One quick scan of the current news out of Iran should show intelligent people that the internet has a little more to offer than "nothing". For all you can say about the internet, and I agree, you can say a lot that's negative, at the very least the internet has given governments & regimes pause. A bit more than pause actually.
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Rob, 24 Jun 2009 @ 9:32am

"It's distracting," he continued. "It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere."

What Mr. Bradbury somehow manages to miss here is that the real value of a book is "in the air somewhere" as well, being that the real value of a book comes not from the paper or the ink, but from the information contained within. What is information? It is not the letters or words, it is simply something that happens within your brain as you read the words on the page and interpret them. A book in and of itself, sans the intangible information is entirely meaningless.

I would like to say that I ought to give Mr. Bradbury a break on this one, but it really does bother me quite a bit that a visionary such as himself could be so short-sighted and closed-minded, even at the age of 90.
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Ima Fish (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 9:36am

"It was really about the evils of technology such as television"

That's the interpretation I was taught in high school, way back in late the 70s. My teacher stressed again and again that Bradbury was not arguing against any sort of censorship of ideas, but against how technology trivializes ideas, to the point where ideas have no meaning.

To put it another way, the government in Farenheit 451 did not censor books because the ideas were dangerous, the people of Farenheit 451 wanted books banned because they were conditioned by technology to find the discussion of real ideas to be unpleasant.
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Jason, 24 Jun 2009 @ 10:07am

Re: Re: Re: Re: Be fair
Chris, I assume you are a serious person, so I highly recommend even more etiquette discussions with a guy who wears a mask to parody Darth Vader.
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Jason, 24 Jun 2009 @ 10:15am

Re: Different Things to Different People... inadvertently.
I'm lovin' it!™
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Dark Helmet (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 10:16am

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Be fair
"Chris, I assume you are a serious person, so I highly recommend even more etiquette discussions with a guy who wears a mask to parody Darth Vader."

And whose Schwartz is bigger than yours...
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Jason, 24 Jun 2009 @ 10:18am

Re: New World Order
I'd say you need to look at your own self-deconstructing comments in the mirror, but then, they'd be much harder to read that way.
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SteveD (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 10:24am

Re: Re: But we never said kill the library...
"But we never said kill the library..."

Indeed, Mike didn't cover that part of the article. But it was the message Bradbury was trying to get across.

"We live in a society that is driven by money. If libraries die its because they couldn't make money. Not because internet goons came over and burned all the books."

This isn't about those with money deciding what has value in society, as libraries are nearly always publicly funded services. Libraries exist to elevate those without any money as much as anything else.
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BillH, 24 Jun 2009 @ 10:26am

Ray's love of books (and libraries?)
Don't know about Ray's library (wonder when the last time was when he went to his local library?) but mine is busier than ever & one reason is because they've made good use of the internet. It's easier to browse the collection, see what's available, reserve materials & then extend the loan online if needed. It's always full when I go in & the library has lots of popular support (the town residents voted in a local lib tax when the county shut down the county-wide system).

When the old analog world of crotchety old guys shut the libraries down (their choice of service to shut down to save money was truly weird) much of the opposition to closure was expressed & organized using Ray's dreaded internet. Doug Adams was right about Ray.
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SteveD (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 10:28am

Re: Re: The Internet UR doing it wrong.
"However, sites like popurls, Digg, Slashdot and Metafilter regularly led me down very weird paths full of new learning and the best part is I can just bookmark it and come back to it later. I never have to return the link like a library book."

Indeed, but such sites are ultimately the product of their communities, and for voteup/votedown models (as Reddit and Digg use) the content that comes up to the top of the pile is what has the best general appeal for that community. It becomes this self-reinforcing loop where all descent is quickly voted out.
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JohnForDummies (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 10:31am

What I find amusing is that stories like "The Veldt" and his book "Farenheit 451" are actually inspiring some of the technologies we use today. The walls made of television screens. Virtual Reality. Being able to walk from room to room, and the music/lights/HVAC/etc change with your presence. And all the while, he wasn't trying to promote it, but take a stand against it!
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SteveD (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 10:31am

Re: Re:
"The internet has been one of the best tools ever developed to find books... lol"

Indeed, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
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Jason, 24 Jun 2009 @ 10:35am

Factoidal Internet and TV...
...are honestly more like cultural byproducts of a lousy education system than problems inherent to the media themselves.

In school we were practically taught to worship factoids and meditate over them so that we could have great success in our factoidal tests and quizzes. Sadly, I even remember so-called essay questions where the answers were expected to be completely unstructured lists of facts rather than any meaningful arrangement of the course content.

No, I don't think technology is somehow evil. We are.
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CheckersSpeech (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 10:54am

In the air somewhere?
"It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere."

The same thing could be said about friendship or any other personal relationship -- And relationships are what a lot of the internet is all about. Older people especially come to the internet just to reconnect with family and friends.

Bradbury might not need relationships since he's rich and famous, so he can just wall himself off with his books.

(Hmm, remind you of a Twilight Zone episode?)
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jun 2009 @ 11:17am

Re: Re: Re: But we never said kill the library...
then why do they keep asking for money from me!
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Chris, 24 Jun 2009 @ 11:42am

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Be fair
I can be serious, he can be Rick Moranis. As long as we're all civil we can all contribute.

I've got nothing against anyone who posts here, nothing personal at least. But I believe that what we say online, even anonymously or though a joking persona, has a value and an impact. People are informed from it to a personal extent and I'd rather have the detail I added be part of this conversation than not speak up. Even at the cost of sounding too serious, which I'm aware is a capital offense in some corners of the net.
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JEDIDIAH, 24 Jun 2009 @ 12:52pm

Re: Re:
> Last week a friend of mine recommended a sci-fi book, and
> I dutifully trudged into town to scour the (last) two
> bookshops for a copy. My search was fruitless, and as a
> last resort ventured into the local library for the first
> time in several years.

The last time this happened to me I picked up an electronic copy of the relevant tome online. Fortunately the author in question isn't a luddite and he has many of his earlier works available online as teasers.

Now I have a rediculous number of his books in hardcover no less.

Any library or bookstore is what you make of it. You can just as easily fixate on the manga or romance section as you can some other part of it that you can get pretensious over.
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JEDIDIAH, 24 Jun 2009 @ 1:19pm

Re: Re:
> TV Shows are moving towards displaying real life for
> everyone to see, because we can't pay writers to write
> thought provoking ideas.

No. Reality TV is a side effect of a writers strike. It's all about avoiding the cost of real writers and possibly avoiding a lot of the production costs of "normal TV" as well.

Those that write for a living are still quite capable of producing work of substance. The real question is whether or not those that buy this stuff (TV networks) want to bother.

In that regard, any medium that gets artists closer to those that consume the work is ultimately better. The problem with TV is not the technology but the supply chain associated with getting material produced. TV and movies are expensive to produce and TV in particular is made to sell advertisements.

The advantage of books is not so much the lack of shiny things but the fact that one can be produced by one guy with nothing more than a typewriter. You might even get an opportunity to hear this guy read his work to you at a local con.
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Dark Helmet (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 1:44pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Be fair
I actually try to refrain from overly serious replies, mostly becuase the comments I feel compelled to reply to here tend to make me extraordinarly angry. Instead, I attempt to use humor to make a point. Today, that point was creative heroes of mine that turn into revisionist, ironically hypocritcal timewasters make me very, very upset.

"I've got nothing against anyone who posts here, nothing personal at least."

Nor do I. Love you buddy.

"But I believe that what we say online, even anonymously or though a joking persona, has a value and an impact."

Me too. Tried to make an impact through humor. The image in my mind of burning books in front of RB's house has a very strong, albeit sophmoric/South-Parkish appeal to me.

"Even at the cost of sounding too serious, which I'm aware is a capital offense in some corners of the net."

I have dispatched Mega-Maid to suck all of the air from your immediate surroundings. Other than that, we're good.
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jiminoid (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 1:54pm

Re: Re:
Smoke weed and sit down and listen to Mozart...that's probably what he would have done...'"hehe I'm so great..."
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chris (profile), 24 Jun 2009 @ 1:56pm

can you blame him?
the internet has been on his lawn for like 8 years. come on internet, get a haircut and get a real job and leave this guy's poor grass alone!
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David Scholes, 25 Jun 2009 @ 2:51am

Ray Bradbury
Is Ray nearly 90 now? I didn't realise.

I've been reading his stuff for a long time.

Better late than never I finally got published myself. You can read about it at:

www.StrategicBookPublishing.com/ScienceFictionandAlternateHistory.html

Or check out a few of my other short science fiction stories at: http://www.sffworld.com/community/story/3744p0.html

Cheers
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notacynic (profile), 25 Jun 2009 @ 10:17am

Re: Misunderstood?
or c) He's even better, creating layers of meaning that even he isn't aware of.
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Anonymous Coward, 25 Jun 2009 @ 8:20pm

Re: Senility strikes RB!
Has he forgotten his own series of SciFi shows on TV some years ago, The Ray Bradbury Theater? If he was so set against the "evils of television", why did he do 6 seasons of the show?

I don't think he really had so much to with directing or producing the show. I think it was more like they paid to use his name and some of his stories. Not like, for example, Hitchcock.
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Anonymous Coward, 25 Jun 2009 @ 8:35pm

Re: New World Order
Last I knew everyone had the rights to their own opinions.

And that includes those with opinions about Ray Bradbury.

Pot, meet Kettle.
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A guy named Harlan, 16 Mar 2010 @ 1:33pm

I love how the original interview given by the LA TIMES makes sure to note that Bradbury had an enormous flat panel tv screen in the background playing FoxTV no less. Pulleeeeeeease. Bradbury owns NO large screen TV and he hates the big networks Fox included. LA TIMES isn't worthy to untie this man's shoelaces. But I expect that from scum like them.
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A guy named Harlan, 16 Mar 2010 @ 1:43pm

PS yes I'm aware the NYC times says he has a giant screen TV but they are lying. His TV is regular size and he only watches TCM movies on it! As for the internet its mostly garbage and by the time you separate the crap from the good stuff you've wasted a day. oy vey.
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Living Hour, 17 Aug 2010 @ 5:49am

Give Him Some Slack
I think we should cut Ray Bradbury a little slack here considering he is 89 years old. The fact that he made the comment the internet is "meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere” demonstrates that his faculties are not once they once were. He will always remain a great author nonetheless.
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stephen marotta, 20 Nov 2010 @ 3:59pm

maybe
maybe he has a freakin' point.
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Max Andrew Maldonado, 13 Mar 2011 @ 12:40pm

In the end it will all settle down.
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Aug 2011 @ 1:17am

Ray simply feels information on the internet sinks in less deeply because of its vast quantity and easy availability. Having to work a bit to find something, feeling the texture of pages in your hands, knowing the words are still there on your bookshelf, calling to you, all create a more natural and character-building relationship with knowledge. Look at the state of the world--who's to say the internet isn't responsible? We got to the moon without it; now we can't even get into orbit. Why? Because an internet-culture is a lazy, shallow culture, raised to expect easy entertainment and instant gratification. I've been in Ray's basement and it's a wondrous labyrinth of art and culture. He had to find every one of those books, paintings, keepsakes, and love it enough to pay for it. The internet is what you make of it. What most people make of it is an abomination.
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Harlan Ellison, 30 Aug 2011 @ 5:13pm

Re: Re:
"my thumbdrive holds a bazillion books" yeah you doofus and you won't read one of them once you get it on that drive. Bradbury is right.
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