Ray Bradbury's Vision of the Future (1 Viewer)

[jane]

Remember the Cold War? Stupid question.

But anyway, I was looking to see if the text of Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" was online, and it is, in a number of places. If you've not read it, it's absolutely stunning: http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/pdocs/bradbury_martian.pdf

BUT THEN, you absolutely must -- the penalty is lifelong regret -- watch this Uzbek animated adaptation of the story.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5725857229869560639&sourceid=docidfeed&hl=en

I'm sure there's a better quality video of it around somewhere, but it's still pretty chilling. It's nowhere near as chilling as the text, but few things are.

You really should read the story first. I guess that's sort of a way of suggesting that the animation isn't entirely up to scratch because really, you get a lot more out of it if you've read the story, and it's impossible to tell if the animation can stand on its own precisely because I already knew the story. So I guess, I dunno, suit yourself.

But whatever you do, watch/read/read/watch, just do.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

deadly story, read it many times, will watch the film in a while.

 

[rampz]

i predict that in the year 1987 we will all be driving around in flying cars and have robot maids.

 

[Diddles]

I did do a college essay on science fiction writers predicting the future. A short story by E.M. Forster called The Machine Stops is mad out. It was written in the 30's and describes people never leaving their houses and conducting all their affairs through blue monitors. They give lectures in real-time and talk to their family solely through computers. Then one day the central computer breaks down and everyone has a freaker. Uncanny.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

Ray gets this for his 90th birthday

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here he is watching it

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/mus...l-works-inspired-by-ray-bradbury-writing.html

10 musical works based on ray Bradbury's writing

 

[Deadmanposting]

I know he's weeks dead but my Economist just arrived yesterday

They broke from their normal obit format for him, which I liked

http://www.economist.com/node/21557294

Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury, science-fiction writer, died on June 5th, aged 91
Jun 23rd 2012 | from the print edition


IT WAS a dry, cold evening in November when the old man turned up at the television studio. He walked in, looked around, hung his jacket on a chair, and made himself at home.

His hair was white and soft, like a professor’s or a prophet’s. He was perhaps 70 years old, with fat gathering round his waist. Behind the large horn-rimmed glasses the eyes were kind, but challenging. Strangely, though the studio lights burned hot as Africa, he wore his shirt buttoned tight about his neck.

“Hot in here,” he remarked to a young man with a clipboard, as a camera slid by. “I should lose my tie.”

With his eyes shut, he unbuttoned his shirt, slowly.

The young man, and the camera, stopped.

Beneath the old man’s shirt was an illustration of a forest, something like a coloured tattoo. But the forest moved. The giant ferns and trees of prehistory crowded in on a silver path that hovered six inches above the ground. Men were walking along it, tourists on a Time safari, out to kill dinosaurs. A hunter called Eckels blundered off the path into deep moss, and later found a butterfly, glistening green and gold and black, embedded in the mud on his boot. Because of that dead butterfly history changed, in a whisper or a roar, all down the aeons of time. The tale was called “A Sound of Thunder”.

“Want to see more?” the old man asked.

The young man nodded.

On the old man’s pale, plump back was a painted library of books. A small boy, recognisably himself, ran in and filled his eager arms with Oz books and Tarzan stories. A pile of Buck Rogers comics lay on the floor. He seized them and began, carefully, to cut out the coloured strips. The small boy grew, the books changing round him, until he was in the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library in Los Angeles, 30 years old, banging on a rented typewriter. Beside him lay copies of magazines with his stories inside. But now the crammed shelves had begun to glow. A strange, acrid smell crept in the air. A fireman called Montag was spraying the room with kerosene, laughing grimly. Then with a flick of his igniter he lit a gorging fire that turned the evening sky red and yellow and black. Pigeon-winged books died on the ground, their pages lifting like feathers, until, at Fahrenheit 451, they burst into flame. In this world reading and thinking had been banned. Literature and philosophy survived only in men’s heads.

The young man, wide-eyed, asked whether this was a prediction. No, said the old man. It was a warning. His task as a science-fiction writer was to imagine problems, to prick thumbs. But it was also to offer hope. He had foreseen mobile telecoms, iPods, wall-to-wall TV, talking trains and pedestrians arrested for walking the streets at night, but none of it was meant to spread unhappiness. He loved that fragile, rare, extraordinary thing called life, and wanted man to keep blowing on the coals of the universal wilderness and mystery that surrounded him.

Silent, the young man nodded. But his eyes strayed to the old man’s neck, where Terrors lurked at the top of the stairs, and to his right shoulder, where huge green wings were growing, and to the ends of his white hair, in which a wind blew that keened with the voices of everyone it had killed.

“Here’s one that will really interest you,” said the old man.

His forearm showed a scene in Waukegan, Illinois, where he was born. White palings, apple trees, front porches, and a hill strewn with dandelions, his special flowers. When the Apollo 15 astronauts wanted to name their lunar landscape after him, they fixed on Dandelion Crater.

A boy of 12 was racing down the hill. He burst into a fairground tent and there, before him, was Mr Electrico in his chair, with a sparking sword. He froze. Mr Electrico tapped him on the brow and cried, “Live for ever!”

“But who can live for ever?” asked the old man.

He opened his palm.

Inside it was a fire lantern, glowing gently through its paper shell. On every Fourth of July he and the grown-ups would release these gossamer spirits, blue, white and red. Their beauty as they rose through the night sky made him cry about the end of things. Now another floated up, a blue sphere, and hovered over a landscape of delicate ruined cities and fossil seas. Silver rockets, discarded by American colonisers, twinkled on the distant hills.

This, the old man explained, was Mars, and the blue globes were the disembodied souls and intellects of Martians who had lived long ago. These gentle, musical beings, with their golden eyes, would never trouble the brash new arrivals who, in his “Martian Chronicles”, were bringing in rocket-loads of Oregon pine to build towns much like Waukegan. But they and their soft, sad voices would continue to haunt both Mars and Earth as long as men were there to imagine them—or become them.

The old man sighed. The Illustrations had tired him. So many characters running, weeping, staring, talking, all the years of his writing life. Five hundred stories.

He buttoned his shirt collar, shook hands with the young man, and left.

In the empty street, another blue sphere glimmered and rose…

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

Ray Bradbury's FBI file

Berkeley even compared the appeal of Communist-leaning science fiction writers to scientists who “hold that it is impossible to conceive of war without threatening the isolation of the Universe.” The informant also stated that science fiction writers “have created illusions with regard to the impossibility of continuing world affairs in an organized manner now or in the future through the medium of futuristic stories concerned with the potentialities of science

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobil...ile-_n_1837199.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003