Too many machines

[cosmolinguist]

This is a sad story, because a human being's wishes are not being respected, because the quotes and descriptions of him seem tailored to make him out to be a cranky old dinosaur (which maybe he is -- I don't know Ray Bradbury -- but since this is the only way I can expect the media to protray someone who has priorities above making money, I can't tell if it's an accurate reflection of him or not...

And because of this quote:

Book industry insiders said it was ironic that a science fiction writer should have been so opposed to the idea of electronic reading devices.

I'm so tired of the idea that SF is for -- and by, apparently -- techies. Code monkeys, gadget gurus, early adopters... and no one else.

Anyway, Ray Bradbury's not a science fiction writer. He says so himself (quoted in Wikipedia):

First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see?

The Martian Chronicles doesn't include any of the details of the spaceships that get Earth people to Mars. It doesn't expound on how Martian evolution necessitated the morphology of its sentient beings to be the way they are. There's nothing science-fictiony about it. People just lump it into that category because it's about going to another planet, and aliens, and all that.

And there's nothing "ironic" about the writer of Fahrenheit 451 being concerned about the negative effects of modern media. Another quote from Wikipeda:

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.

Someone should tell those "book industry insiders" that they wouldn't need to worry about whether Fahrenheit 451 would be an e-book if it were written by someone who likes e-readers, because it wouldn't have been written at all.

Comments

[drjon.livejournal.com]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15968500

However, Mr Bradbury's agent said the deal had become unavoidable.

"We explained the situation to him that a new contract wouldn't be possible without e-book rights," Michael Congdon said.

"He understood and gave us the right to go ahead."

This is really, really weird. I am tempted to call bollocks, but I think there's something not being reported.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what's weird - the publisher would like to make more money by making e-books (and wishes to protect against Ray Bradbury changing his mind and selling the e-book rights to someone else), and Ray Bradbury would rather take the money than insist on his principles or go looking for another publisher.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

I'm so tired of the idea that SF is for -- and by, apparently -- techies. Code monkeys, gadget gurus, early adopters... and no one else.

But you don't have to be a techie to enjoy future technology? Any more than you would have to be a techie to use a mobile phone.

All I took away from the quote is that Ray Bradbury doesn't know what science fiction is, which I'm not entirely surprised by to be honest.

Someone should tell those "book industry insiders" that they wouldn't need to worry about whether Fahrenheit 451 would be an e-book if it were written by someone who likes e-readers, because it wouldn't have been written at all.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean (partly since you seem to be reacting to something that I can't see anyone saying), but all the people I know with e-readers have in part got one because they already have houses full of books.

[cosmolinguist]

You don't have to be a techie to use a mobile phone, because mobile phones are ubiquitous. Grandmas and kids have mobile phones now; people in Africa who never had landline telephone infrastructure have mobile phones. Having a mobile phone says nothing about what kind of person someone is, because mobile phones are cheap and everywhere to the point that not having one says a lot about you. So it's not a good comparison.

Lots of people don't have e-readers, though -- for reasons ranging from poverty to concerns about DRM and other publisher lock-downs (like not being allowed to lend books or the license to read the ones you bought expiring when you die) to waxing poetic about the superior qualities of a paper book. So there are still (admittedly increasingly tenuous) generalizations that can be made about the people who have them: they probably have smartphones or netbooks or digital cameras or mp3 players, yes they're not all techies, but I did also include "early adopter" in the list, which I think is a fair description of even the non-technical users so far.

And what I mean in that last quoted sentence is that I don't think Fahrenheit 451 would have been the book it was if it wasn't written by someone who espouses the views Bradbury does, which includes this animosity to e-books.

[patrick-vecchio.livejournal.com]

When I was half as old as I am now, I read as much Bradbury as I could get my hands on or borrow. Reading this piece made me think of his short story "There Will Come Soft Rains," from The Martian Chronicles, with its depiction of a fully automatic house. I wonder why somebody with that sort of prescience can't accept the idea of an e-reader. An e-reader is just another form of a book, when you get right down to it.

One of my students told me this semester about meeting Bradbury. He said R.B. was a real crank. He's entitled to be a crank or whatever he wants to be, but I think in this e-reader kerfuffel, he's simply being a Luddite.

[fabulist.livejournal.com]

Another kind of book that can be remotely or edited without warning or consent by a corporation isn't really another kind of book. It might be another mode of storytelling, but it's not quite the same as a book. Given his writing about censorship, I'd have been surprised if he just shrugged off e-books as a continuation of the same old thing.

[patrick-vecchio.livejournal.com]

Suppose a media corporation messed with Fahrenheit 451 in an e-reader version: Would doing so be worth the subsequent bad publicity?

[fabulist.livejournal.com]

When Amazon did it with 1984, the bad publicity would seem to have not done much harm, alas. Even irony won't help.

[patrick-vecchio.livejournal.com]

I didn't know Amazon had done wrong by 1984, which raises questions about how much control an author should have over her or his books—and I come down on the author's side 100 percent of the time. I read the Bradbury story as purely a story about technology and not about the integrity of the work. Maybe I was thrown off-track by Bradbury's rant about too many cell phones, etc.

Thank you for the insights.

[cosmolinguist]

Maybe I was thrown off-track by Bradbury's rant about too many cell phones, etc.

This is exactly what I think is so pernicious about this article; it's written as if only a crazy old crank could be wary of ebooks, like there's no good reason for being wary of them.

[patrick-vecchio.livejournal.com]

And I was too willing to buy into that point of view, given what my student had told me. Thank you for beginning this conversation with your post, Holly.

[patrick-vecchio.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention it, I recall the 1984 flap. I think I'm not truly tuned in to all of this because I prefer dead-tree editions of books. That's probably because of my age and longstanding habits.

Anyway, what this thread has done has made me more aware of this issue of an author's control over her or his works. I remember how much it would bother me if someone would change my copy back in my newspaper days (and usually those someones didn't have my writing chops, to be frank), so I can only imagine what it's like for major writers of well-known works. Thank you for your comments.

[cosmolinguist]

Yes, thank you; I had no access to LJ for a while, but this is precisely what I wanted to say (and expressed better than I would've done it)!

[rosalux.livejournal.com]

one of the things he's said about ereaders is that they "smell like burning fuel" - that is, using an ebook contributes to global warming. He also famously refuses to fly.

[patrick-vecchio.livejournal.com]

This has turned into a really informative thread. Look what happens when people stay civil instead of trying to one-up each other.

[rosalux.livejournal.com]

That's assuming all new books; the copy of Fahrenheit on my shelf went through many hands before me, and has been read by several other people while I've owned it.

And the "also use for other things" is a diffusion of effect issue. The multiplication of uses causes a multiplication of devices, even if you can't quantify the effect of each use on broadening the market for the device.

I'm not arguing against the existence of ebooks, just saying that I understand why an author who is so passionate on the subject could reasonably object.