I Really Ought to Talk More About Books...

I'm currently reading Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man. Bradbury's writing always impresses the hell out of me. He does a lot of things that just shouldn't work (or, even if they worked when they were first written, shouldn't still work now that we know there are no canals on Mars or jungles on Venus), and yet he writes so lyrically and with such emotional conviction that you can't help but be sucked right in to the story on whatever terms it offers you. Well, at least, I can't. I have no idea how a writer can manage to create a feeling of nostalgia for something that hasn't happened yet and couldn't ever really happen anyway, but he does it. Consistently.

What I find really interesting, though, is that, for a writer who obviously cares a lot more about emotional tone than about scientific realism, some of Bradbury's stories really were amazingly prescient. "The Veldt," for instance -- the first story in The Illustrated Man -- has been described as possibly the first virtual reality story ever. Indeed, it anticipates Star Trek's holodeck almost exactly... by about forty years.

My favorite example of this, though, is the story "The Murderer" (from the collection The Golden Apples of the Sun). It's about a future where you can never get away from things, never get any peace and quiet, because everybody carries personal phones that constantly interrupt them everywhere and they're constantly bombarded by advertising and annoyingly happy music being broadcast at them in public places and machines constantly talk to them in cheerful instructions-for-idiots voices, and it never, ever stops, until the protagonist goes completely nuts and starts smashing Muzak machines and talking kitchen applicances. It was written in 1953. As far as I can tell, the only inaccuracy is that Bradbury has everyone wearing Dick Tracy-style communicators on their wrists instead of carrying cell phones. Well, that and I've never seen a talking oven. (Talking cars, of course, are another matter.) Frankly, it kind of creeps me out to think that I'm actually living, right now, in some 1950's SF writer's improbable future nightmare scenario. I am doing my part to fight it, though. I still don't own a cell phone.