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06-29-2016, 12:03 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-30-2016, 10:40 AM by Drunk Monk.)
Toffler was tremendously influential on my perception of the world back in high school and college. One of my all-time favorite talkdowns was with an Eskimo on acid at a jazz fest at SLA just before a dead show. He was well read on The Third Wave and we went off on it, while the rest of the rock med vols stared in wonder.
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I bought Toffler's Future Shock soon after it came out, but am embarrassed to say I never got around to reading it.
On several occasions I've contemplated putting together an anthology of my science fiction stories. Of course it would have to be titled, Future Shockley.
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(06-29-2016, 11:18 PM)cranefly Wrote: On several occasions I've contemplated putting together an anthology of my science fiction stories. Of course it would have to be titled, Future Shockley.
Well played, sir.
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Never read any of his work, but whenever he came up in articles I've read, it was only to point out how wrong he was. So that made me less likely to look into it.
So much for prediction. Robert Anton Wilson wrote a good short piece on the futility of prediction, but I don't know where to find it.
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I'm reminded of Arthur C Clarke's Profiles of the Future, a slim volume that goes down through history, pointing out how one great mind after another declared something to be impossible, only to have it later come true.
If I recall correctly, Von Braun said space travel was impossible; and Edison (or was it Ford?) said the aeroplane was just a passing fad. At the very end, Clarke went out on a limb to say that, to his mind, an invisibility cloak was impossible, but granted that he might very well be proven wrong just like so many before him.
I read the 1978(?) version. Clarke put out a revised version around 2000, updating his thoughts.
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Nice piece on Toffler and futurism in today's NY Times.
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