What do you think?
Rate this book
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
Radio Broadcast magazine announced a contest for the best answer to the question "Who is to pay for broadcasting and how?" . . . The winning entry sought a tax on vacuum tubes as an "index of broadcast consumption." . . . There were some suggestions that advertising might be the answer, but it was by far from a popular solution. It seemed a shame to despoil this new medium with sponsored messages.
Only thirty-two of the Top 100 companies today make things you can hold, from aerospace and motor vehicles to chemicals and food, metal bending and heavy industry. The other sixty-eight traffic mostly in ideas, not resource processing
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me
Science fiction is what writer Clive Thompson calls “the last bastion of philosophical writing.” It’s a sort of simulation, Thompson says, where we change some of the basic rules and then learn more about ourselves. “How would love change if we lived to be five hundred? If you could travel back in time to reverse decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?”