The People's Cube - Political Satire

I read his stories in a Russian translation while growing up in the USSR. Enough said.

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

From The Nine Billion Names of God.

This Bradbury must be some sort of Neo-Kulak:

2001 article from Salon found here: https://www.salon.com/2001/08/29/bradbury_2/

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Salon: In your short story “A Sound of Thunder,” the outcome of a close presidential election was altered when a time traveler squishes an insect in a prehistoric age. Do you think we were a squashed butterfly away from getting Al Gore?

Bradbury: That's right.

Salon: What do you think of President Bush?

Bradbury: He's wonderful. We needed him. Clinton is a shithead and we're glad to be rid of him. And I'm not talking about his sexual exploits. I think we have a chance to do something about education, very important. We should have done it years ago. It doesn't matter who does it — Democrats or Republicans — but it's long overdue. Our education system is a monstrosity. We need to go back and rebuild kindergarten and first grade and teach reading and writing to everybody, all colors, and then the whole structure of our education will change because people will know how to read and write.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

More recent Article from LA Times found here: https://herocomplex.latimes.com/2010/08 ... evolution/

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ray Bradbury hates big government: 'Our country is in need of a revolution'


Ray Bradbury is mad at President Obama, but it's not about the economy, the war or the plan to a construct a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City.

“He should be announcing that we should go back to the moon,” says the iconic author, whose 90th birthday on Aug. 22 will be marked in Los Angeles with more than week's worth of Bradbury film and TV screenings, tributes and other events. “We should never have left there. 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. Then when we do that, we will live forever."

The man who wrote "Fahrenheit 451," "Something Wicked This Way Comes," "The Martian Chronicles," "Dandelion Wine"and "The Illustrated Man" has been called one of America's great dreamers, but his imagination takes him to some dark places when it comes to contemporary politics. “I think our country is in need of a revolution."

“There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FORWARD!!!!

ROCK, I think that The Nine Billion Names of God was a short story by Arthur C. Clark. As I recall, a team was hired to install a large computer in a Tibetan monastery, which would fulfill their ancient charter: to write the Nine Billion Names of God. So many letters could be used; possibly two, not one, repetition of each letter. I knew no combinatorics then. The monks had been ringing the changes on the (unspoken) alphabet, and as the computer people were going down the mountain, after a successful installation and run, the stars were going out.

Of course even though Clarke invented the communications satellite and in Childhood's End understood E=mc^2, he didn't take into account that some of the starlight had been traveling for millions or billions of years.

But what a hell of a story.

Sister Massively Opiated wrote:An interesting pdf, In memoriam for Ray Bradbury who passed away June 5th... politically, a really interesting guy... like Heinlein... misunderstood, and Fharenheit 451º is a classic...

RayBradburyBio.pdf

To Bradbury. Thank you, Dear Sister, for that obit of Ray Bradbury.

It brings up memories of my reading his books in junior high or early high school, in Mom and Dad's house, or before that in the same house owned by my grandparents. They had a swamp (evaporative) cooler, which made fog banks in an effort to dispel the dry, West Texas heat. It melted one's books and could even rust the chrome-plated chassis of the Dynaco tube power amps that I built.

Then I was young enough to lie on the floor on my stomach, reading The Martian Chronicles--the desert was so evocative--or Golden Apples of the Sun, and don't embarrass me by telling me I got the names wrong if I did, while the goggle box was on in the other room and the adults were there. Possibly my grandparents were fighting like the animals in the veldt. My grandmother could have frightened off one of the hyenas.

The swamp cooler belched out fog banks of humidity, contending with the 10% to 15% normal we have.

The dull roar of the swamp cooler, masking the voices of early 70s television, while I was reading. "The Veldt" How can anyone forget that? Especially when one is reading it under the dull roar of the swamp cooler... The smell of water on excelsior, the faint humming of the water pump, the roar of the squirrel-cage fan as bellows and blasts of air came down from the roof into the hall.

I didn't identify with the children in "The Veldt"; the highpoint of the story was the anomie. He was way ahead of the isolation that we would find in 21st-century technology.

But the isolation of that story then, in a suffocatingly small town where everything was seen and known and remarked on, spoke to me. The media room, before there was such a thing. When a huge television was 25", and there were few of them. When there were two channels, both going off at midnight, both from 80 miles away, grappled down from a 35' antenna. That the wind would sometimes turn awry, and completely isolate us.

It gave such a sense of being somewhere else... I didn't have a driver's license then, and that's nearly fatal in West Texas, and only two miles in any direction would be limitless desert. No lions, but mountain lions and coyotes. Coyotes that will in drought eat a calf being born.

Veldt... Lying in the dim light, embraced by the cooler breezes, knowing that just outside the door was a pitiless sun and the desert. Toujours the desert. The desert, which measures time if at all in decades. The hot, hostile, arid desert. The desert that always wins. The desert I both fear and love. The desert with the sky that is almost yellow in the summer. The desert with the hundred-degree (38 C) winds of 50 mph (84 kph). Hot winds shaking the house, and as the barometric pressure changes the cooler slows, then speeds, then slows...

Bradbury's science was a vehicle for his settings, unlike Heinlein's science, if you measure Heinlein's science in terms of when he wrote it and before his final fantasy years (which oddly enough are starting to sound like quantum physics). But you cannot forget Bradbury's images and he didn't write science fiction as Heinlein or Clarke did, or even Asimov. He made images, worlds that you could live in. Heinlein made characters you cannot forget; Asimov, well, I've had no desire to reread him in 40 years.

The only other writer with Bradbury's sense of place, since Homer, is the team of Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard (a good one) who wrote the screenplay for one of my top few favorite movies: Brazil. An astute friend of mine remarked of that movie that you could imagine opening a door on the set and seeing more the same. If you haven't seen Brazil in a while, do so. It's really the ultimate totalitarian movie.

Back to Bradbury. Think of the Martians who as a hobby each studied an Earth language. Just before their demise, as I recall, one of them remarks that just now he knows what the meaning of "righteous" is. This is pre-PC; this is pre-hate-whitey. There was no ax to grind. There was no politics. This was just art before the left politicized even the molecules in the air.

My lord I wish I had the time to reread the Bradbury.

Or do I? Perhaps the memory is what I need the most.

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them." Ray Bradbury
He gave all of us many good reasons not to be criminals.

Father Prog Theocritus wrote:ROCK, I think that The Nine Billion Names of God was a short story by Arthur C. Clark.

See what I get for stepping unannounced into religious circles? You are, of course, quite right.

I denounce myself.

And reread Fahrenheit 451 :)

I was wrong too. It's Arthur C. Clarke.

I share the same birth date, month and day only, (to be perfectly clear and honest!) Thanks to Ray, my reality now includes the insidious "wall screen." It's flat, and most importantly, convincing! Thanks Ray! Fahrenheit 451 rules!

I share the same birthday MM/DD with Michael Savage.

The horror... the horror...

Michael Savage has the same birthday as well? OMG! HOW COOOOOOOL! That means we have the birthday, as well, whatever that means. Hey ROCK! You Da Bomb, Honey! X!

No no no - ummm, I mean, yeah, I da bomb and all, but Michael's birthday and mine is March 31.

:)

How did I get that wrong, my dear ROCK? Who cares! What counts is what we say, no matter how true or not! Right ROCK? Hmmm?

Dear Comrades, only here in camera would I confess this. I thought I shared a birthday with Leonardo, but alas, no. But I think I share a birthday with La Streisand and Shirley McClaine.

I'm going to draw a warm bath and take a bottle of wine, and loose my veins.

But perhaps not. There are peasants to flog, idiots to impale. And could I steal, impugn, bear false witness against, look down my nose at people if I were DEAD?

How awful. I'm a prog. I'm a nasty, vicious bastard and proggery is defined by viciousness.

Because I'm special. I haven't done a single thing that is noteworthy except tell people that I care.

I'm a prog.

Father Prog Theocritus wrote:

Sister Massively Opiated wrote:An interesting pdf, In memoriam for Ray Bradbury who passed away June 5th... politically, a really interesting guy... like Heinlein... misunderstood, and Fahrenheit 451º is a classic...

RayBradburyBio.pdf

To Bradbury. Thank you, Dear Sister, for that obit of Ray Bradbury.

Didn't realize this had become a thread since I sent that... Sorry... sick again... what else is new.

I remember the first time I read Fahrenheit 451º... I had the "dentifrice" ditty going through my head for days...

It's sort of depressing what qualifies as science fiction sometimes these days. Although there are a number of great writers, there just aren't iconoclasts like Bradbury, who wrote Fahrenheit 451º on a dime-per-half-hour typewriter at the library in nine days because that was all the change he had... or people like Heinlein... whose novella, Starship Troopers, which has been made into an plot-less, unwatchable movie, is actually an important lesson in civics and society... though I doubt many of today's entitled youth could possibly comprehend some of the notions of service and sacrifice in the story... The old guard are disappearing.

Tom Kratman and John Ringo are pretty Libertarian. They are't the caliber of the old masters, though.

I just reread Starship Troopers and yes, it's a tremendous civics lecture. And the movies are unwatchable as you said. No virtue; nothing but violence.

I also liked Larry Niven, who was quite libertarian. Still may be. Robert Silverberg also.

If you liked Niven, try his partner in writing, Jerry Pournelle. I highly recommend his "Falkenberg's Legion" novels.

Lucifer's Hammer / Anvil of Stars

Beowolf Schafer, I think it was, seemed to me back then in the 70s to be a bit of a rake. Definitely louche. But now I'm seeing, at least in retrospect, the libertarian.

I've a bit of a quarrel with Pournelle though; I'd just read a novel of his, which was good but there were a few logical problems. No matter; good sci-fi. Then I read an article by him in Byte in which he sneered at programmers. "Get it right the first time."

I'd just (this was 1982) licensed some software to a crook in OKC and had used an algorithm out of Aho, Hopcroft and Ullman, which was the gold standard. I had three or so of their books. It was wrong. It caused a bit of problem in sending out another disk, but I found him to be a pompous ass after that.

Edit your stuff, Jerry.