2:26:35 PM David Miller: did you note that Arthur C. Clarke died?

2:26:42 PM BK Marcus: yes

2:26:45 PM BK Marcus: age 90

2:28:13 PM David Miller: yup, interesting that technology seems to have been so much more focused on earthspace than his books suggested.

2:28:50 PM David Miller: The iPod the Web... not manned flights to Jupiter

2:30:11 PM David Miller: I wonder if I'll ever be able to enjoy sci-fi that ignores economics again.

4:19:35 PM BK Marcus: An interesting note from my wife:

Nathalie Marcus

4:01

I find this interesting.  Rothbard is talking about  the Hansen stagnation thesis: "As for technological progress, that too is slowing down. After all, the railroads have already been built and the automobile industry has reached maturity. Whatever minor improvements there might be will probably be withheld by 'reactionary monopolists,' etc."

4:01

They didn't seem to have much imagination.

4:02

Should have read more science fiction...

4:35:16 PM David Miller: yes , it is an interesting note and compliment to my observation. Economist ought to read more Sci-fi and Sci-fi writers should read more econ.

The exchange reminded me of the opening of an old friend's movie review of Speed (1994):

The day began, as all days should, with Ray Bradbury. In Saturday's early afternoon, I had just climbed back into the cab of my frequent movie partner's truck to have him tell me that the voice on the radio came from that old man of SF. While I was mailing our bills, he had tuned in Writer's Corner on our local NPR station. It must have been fifteen to twenty minutes before we were able to date the interview. For all we knew, the conversation could have been live; Bradbury could have been dead for years. I find I am able to keep track of these things less and less without cues.

We drove, listening to 1978. Bradbury was talking about how neither Orwell nor Huxley presented us with a future that contained space travel. He said that along with others of the "intellectal elite", they had thought that space travel would never come. The works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were dismissed as being too fantastic. Of course, we know people can travel through outer space. It turns out Verne and Wells were right on the mark. Orwell and Huxley, through their snobbery, had "missed the boat".

The interviewer asked Bradbury if someone might be talking in twenty years about how Bradbury had missed the boat by failing to consider some technology that would change not just people's physical environment but the way they think, the way they look at the world. No, no, said the great man. That was not going to happen -- he had covered his bets. He had written extensively about interplanetary conlonization and space stations. Disney, who had asked him to consult on the creation of Disneyland's Future World, was asking for his aid in their development of EPCOT Center. If he was going to miss some major change in the world of tomorrow, it was going to come from some technology that had yet to be invented. At that point, the voices faded, replaced by station identification.

Well, John Henry was a steel drivin' man.

I turned to my partner and said "He missed the boat on the Information Age." And we talked about it. Like Orwell and Huxley, who had both the visions of Wells and Verne and actual rockets flying above them, Bradbury was not bested by technology that he needed to create from the ether. Questions of hubris aside, Bradbury's failure was in perception and not conception. People have been talking about information theory since the forties.

I wonder how Bradbury thought he could see the future. Did he think that it was a Questing Beast that needed to be tracked and dimly glimpsed through the brush? Did he think that one needed to divine it from the careful analysis of Chaos, say in the tossing of animal bones or in the arrangement of tea leaves? Seems to me the future is neither that distant nor that arcane. Seems to me you run into problems when you posit the future as a coherent space that you have yet to visit. In short, the whole experience is not that loud, man.

What we imagine is instantiated around us. The technologies of our fiction have already established themselves in daily life. The future may give you a warning call, but it rarely gives flight information. Rarely does the alarm go off. More often, we oversleep, wake up flustered, maybe have to call in sick in order to deal. The future is not just now; it was around yesterday asking for signatures.

That night -- Saturday night -- my frequent movie partner and I saw Speed not expecting much but hoping for more than boredom. The movie theater got $11.50 of our money. We got my most cyberpunk experience yet. …

And yes, I was the frequent movie partner with the big pickup truck.