Four Things You Want Me To Know

I’m passing on some of the interesting links people have sent me in the last 24 hours —

(1) Janice Gelb discovered proof that Arthur C. Clarke predicted the Internet in 1974 [YouTube]. Really accurately, and on video!

In 1974 Arthur C. Clarke told the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] that every household in 2001 will have a computer and be connected all over the world.

(Was this really such a daring prediction? The ARPANET was declared operational in 1975 (I know several science fiction writers who got accounts so they could play the games online at MIT) and companies were already bringing to market the forerunners of the true PCs that appeared in the early 1980s.)

(2) Steven H Silver points to “Ferguson Wins Collecting Prize” at SF Site where he reports —

Andrew Ferguson has won the top prize in the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia’s 49th Book Collecting Contest. Ferguson’s collection focuses on the works of R. A. Lafferty.

(3) On April 1, James H. Burns announced the discovery of the treatment for a lost episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. guest-starring The Three Stooges.

(4) Bill Higgins has written a post for Tor.com about a 1956 NBC radio documentary devoted to SF. Lots of interesting voices: hear Asimov, Bradbury and John W. Campbell:

On the 4th of December that year, the NBC radio network broadcast “Ticket to the Moon,” an episode of the series Biography in Sound. Usually this series profiled a prominent person of recent decades — for example, Winston Churchill, Knute Rockne, or Grandma Moses — but on this occasion, the subject was science fiction.

You can access a recording of the show from Bill’s post.

4 thoughts on “Four Things You Want Me To Know

  1. @David: Don’t you hate it when the right answer is easily available and people don’t bother to look it up? Especially when you helped write the thing it’s available in? I’ll bet Harry Warner felt the same.

  2. Mike: Thanks very much to Bill Higgins for the link to Biography in Sound, which was well worth listening to. Forry Ackerman says “one member of my local club” was 96! So who was this venerable member of LASFS?

  3. Martin:

    I, too, am intrigued by Forry’s assertion, though I don’t have the answer. Someone who was 96 in 1956 must have been born about 1860.

    If we presume that this person was a member of LASFS for a long time, look for someone who was eightysomething in the early days of the club.

    Forry might, I imagine, be speaking about some distinguished citizen (author? actor?) who had been awarded an honorary membership in LASFS. Was the club in the habit of doing such a thing? Is there a list of honorary members someplace?

Comments are closed.