The Toynbee Convector

I remember seeing a Toynbee tile in the street in the Wicker Park / Logan Square area of Chicago sometime in the 2000s. I think it was on Milwaukee Ave. It was strange and weirdly interesting, only later did I find out it was connected to a larger phenomenon.

I counterpoint it to the video game/visual novel Danganronpa which is a literal battle between Hope and Despair in which these emotions are held to be contagious.

Another is the musical "The Music Man" in which the "Music Man" is a huckster who brings out the talent latent in the community.

Surely it can go both ways though; if everyone believes everything will naturally get better forever there's absolutely no reason to act now to bend the curve for the better.

Couldn't agree more, anything and everything by Liu Cixin. Although now that I think about it Three Body / Dark Forest / Deaths End are the only works of his Ive read where theres any serious amount of quasi time travel. But its just done so incredibly well.

Just have to give Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson a shoutout too, could definitely use some time travel though...

Sorry, spoiler alert?

Same, I love the mystery surrounding the tiles too.

that's exactly where my mind went.

well, with the addition of convection making me think it was a faster/better way of sticking the tiles to the road.

He has a lot of greatest hits (Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, Martian Chronicles) but if you're looking for something different, I really enjoyed his murder mystery trilogy (Death Is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics, Let's All Kill Constance). They are all kind of loosely based on (and playfully parodying) the noir detective style, and a lot of fun.

My personal favorite was "Something Wicked This Way Comes".

Something Wicked This Way Comes. Perhaps Dandelion Wine.

Dandelion Wine is one I bounced off of during my initial Bradbury infatuation around age 11 or 12, but in my 30s have found to be excellent. It is, in part, about experiencing the world as a child, but is probably not something most (to put it mildly) children can appreciate, if that makes sense.

I did have a fair bit of exposure to small midwestern town & country life as a kid, and a lot more second-hand via my parents, and I can't discern how much of my appreciation of the story is due to that. To someone with—for example—only urban, coastal experience, would it hit anywhere near as hard as it does for me? Will the next group of people turning 30, who've never seen a house in the US with actual you-have-to-go-work-a-pump-by-hand-to-get-water well water, with a wood burning stove in the kitchen that sees daily use, et c., be able to relate to it as I do, which relation may itself be far weaker than people who grew up like that full-time? I'm not sure.

His short stories are great. There were two thick hardback volumes published, each collecting 100(!) stories, that'll give you plenty to chew on. Widely available used, pretty cheap. Unless you dove really deep on Bradbury in high school, odds are much of it will be new to you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stories_of_Ray_Bradbury

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradbury_Stories:_100_of_His_M...

No repeats between the two volumes. 200 total stories. Does include most or all of The Martian Chronicles, which I prefer to read on its own, personally, though these might be useful for filling in gaps since IIRC they contain a couple stories that weren't in every printing of The Martian Chronicles.

Or perhaps the same idea was in the air in the same sense that Think Like a Dinosaur and The Prestige had the same plot twist?

> Never heard of this writer [...] before.

Oh my. Wow. That's... huge for you. How exciting!

He's famous enough that IIRC The Simpsons once made a joke about "The ABCs of Science Fiction" where the gag was that the really nerdy kid (I'm forgetting his name—not Millhouse, the other one who wasn't as prominent a character) subverted it by swapping the usual "Bradbury" for "Bester"—as in Alfred Bester, another very-well-regarded author who's not nearly as well-known outside of sci-fi as Bradbury is. Bradbury's one of those rare crossover authors who also gets claimed by the "literary" side of things. (the A is Asimov, and the C is Clarke, of course)

His most-referred-to work is the novel Fahrenheit 451, which has had a couple film versions made, and inspired a ton of other works—see, for a very direct example, the Christian Bale film Equilibrium. The contraband-burning "firemen" and full-wall TVs from F451 are often referenced, but it's got a lot going on. It's also one of those books with a very famous opening sentence.

[edit: a couple examples of references include the first in-game numeric code in some games—I think several that Looking Glass worked on, but also sequels to some of them by other studios—being "451". The Deus Ex series likes to do this, for instance. Then there's the unofficial but somewhat widely-implemented HTTP status code "451", which denotes unavailability for political—i.e. censorship—reasons]

Other major novels include Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine.

He wrote a fairly famous short story collection that functions something like a concept album—it's sometimes classed as a kind of structurally-unconventional novel, in fact—in that all stories are related by a setting (Mars), usually have a similar mood, and exist in some kind of rough shared universe, you might say, though they don't exactly form a single, solid narrative. It's titled The Martian Chronicles. Which stories it includes vary slightly with different editions, but any of them would be fine for a first read. It had a point-n-click adventure video game made, based on it (the game's not exactly an excellent example of the genre, and is probably not worth tracking down—and yes, I played it a lot back when it came out).

He wrote tons of other short stories, largely, but not exclusively, sci-fi. I've elsewhere on this page linked to a pair of anthology volumes which, between them, contain 200 distinct short stories, and those are not all the ones he wrote.

He's unusually literary for a sci-fi author, which you may or may not consider to be a good thing. There's not much action in The Martian Chronicles, for instance, and the emotional climax of one story comes when a character recites a Byron poem (text reproduced fully in the story). Much of what's so great about his work is what an outstanding crafter-of-sentences he was, and how well he communicated sensation through language. The mood-pallete he works with features emotions mostly in the longing and melancholy spectrum, which he uses with such facility that the sly bastard can make you feel homesickness for a future—that will never exist! His prose is, to say the least, uncommonly good for genre fiction, and especially for sci-fi from the time period his most well-known works come from.

> > Published in Playboy.

> Is this correct?

It's not unusual for well-regarded sci-fi stories—among other kinds of literature—from a certain time span to have been first published in Playboy. The "I read it for the articles!" joke had some truth to it because, for a long while, that could semi-plausibly be true. A quick check finds that, for example, the title story of the Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House was first published in Playboy. A little surprising that that was the case, for those who weren't aware of Playboy's role in fiction publishing, but actually not uncommon.

>Published in Playboy.

>Is this correct?

I can attest to the plausibility, at least. I own several science fiction short-story collection books published by Playboy and branded as such.

Playboy publishes tons of serious writing (the list of published authors includes Nabokov, Nadine Gordimer, John Updike, Vonnegut, John Cheever, James Baldwin, David Foster Wallace, Borges, Calvino — even Roald Dahl), including quite a lot of sci-fi (J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Ursula Le Guin) and non-fiction. I've never read it, and don't know what the quality is these days. But it used to be a joke that men claimed to read Playboy for the articles.

... in that a sweeping ostensibly prophetic message is a lie intended to manipulate?

Roko's Basilisk is not a thing. It's just a repackaging of the idea that God or Jesus or whatever is watching over you at all times, so you better please him or you will burn in hell for all eternity. But this time with AI instead of spirits because it originates from a community that considers themselves highly rational, and therefore rejects using religion as a foundation for decision making. But an all-powerful omniscient AI, now that's something they can get behind because that's not religion, that's technology!