Remembrance of Things Past
The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.
This was Ray Bradbury, quoted in Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell, in observing that the “seashells” he had made up for people to listen pressed against their ear had actually been invented with the transistor radio (a very, very, very primitive iPod, for you youngsters). Ray’s point was that the seashells transported people into artificial environments that imperiled human interaction.
This quote appears on the back of my Ballentine Books 1962 paperback edition of Fahrenheit 451 (purchased when I was in sixth grade for the enormous sum of 50 cents). As you should know, the novel is an indictment of a media-obsessed dystopia that burns books so people aren’t exposed to disturbing ideas and can be kept “happy” with mindless entertainment. This was written in the early 1950s, and while Bradbury may not have had the details right (and that’s never been his interest), he certainly anticipated our Internet Age (which Ray has described as a “waste of time”).
While the transistor radio may have been the first step, the real giant leap in which we’ve beomce technological islands unto ourselves was the invention of the portable cassette player, the Sony Walkman, in 1979. With the transistor radio, you listened to what someone was playing for you, usually for the purpose of selling you something. With this clunky piece of machinery, you could choose what you wanted to listen to, wherever you wanted to listen to it. Not quite as passive as today’s MP3 player as you actually had to load into it a a cassette tape, the contents of which you may actually have put some effort into creating as your own personal playlist, without the assistance of a computerized “genius” that’s supposed to know your tastes for you.
The Walkman officially no longer roams the Earth. Sony has announced that production has shut down. Another era has passed. Alas, Bradbury’s vision of a witless America hasn’t.
Last week I was in Seattle and Portland, where I made pilgrimages to venues possible interest to readers here. One was Powell’s Books, which claims to be the largest independent bookstore of both used and new books in the nation. It’s an amazing place, with floors of books in a range of almost every conceivable category that would put any Barnes and Noble “superbookstore” to shame even in its heyday. Needless to say, the science fiction and fantasy aisle alone is something you could easily browse for an hour or two.
have been several attempts to do this sort of thing, most of which have had short life spans (anyone remember the 
If you don’t understand the headline, you’re probably too young to remember Max Headroom, originally a British television movie that became a short-lived series for American broadcast (1987-1988) featuring a computer generated talking head–that would be Max–who later became a music video host, a “spokesperson” for New Coke (and if you don’t know what New Coke was, you’re really too young to care about this), and later brought out of retirement in the United Kingdom to explain the switch from analog to digital TV (this, you might remember). Though, today, any 12 year old with a cheap laptop could probably program a character like Max, back in the 1980s this was beyond the technical reach and budget constraints of broadcast television; Max was played by Canadian actor Matt Frewer outfitted in a latex get-up to make him appear pixalated.
The unfortunately named Bull Spec (I’m assuming this is a reference to Bull Durham tobacco and/or the Kevin Costner movie that takes place in Durham, N.C. where the magazine is based and its intent to feature local writers of “speculative fiction”) has published its 