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.