"The Murderer"
More than 50 years before the rise of social networking, ambient intimacy and round-the-clock digital interaction, Bradbury had an uncanny sense of how that world would feel.
"There sat all the tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, 'Now I'm at Forty-third, now I am at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first,'" Bradbury wrote in "The Murderer," a story of a man who goes on a rampage after one too many Siri-style admonitions. "The car radio cackling all day, Brock go there, Brock go there, Brock check in, Brock check out, okay Brock, hour lunch, Brock, lunch over, Brock, Brock, Brock.'"
Bradbury clearly sympathized with the story's gadget-smashing protagonist, but he was no technophobe: After all, he helped design the United States pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair and the Epcot Center's Spaceship Earth display.
Image: Justin Baeder/Flickr
