To The Future!

A supposedly newly discovered video has been published of Ray Bradbury giving his view of the future - from twenty years ago. Incongruously* titled "Success in Cyberspace", the ten-minute piece has Ray in his office talking (apparently off-the-cuff) directly to camera with specific reference to his short story "The Toynbee Convector".

While much of what he says will already be familiar from countless interviews and speeches, this re-telling of "Toynbee" is relatively rare. Ray makes a specific point of using the time-traveller of the story as a metaphor for his own optimistic view of the future.

The background story of what this video was made for, and how it came into existence (and was subsequently "lost") is all told on this page from Information Age, which hosts the video in its entirety. It is claimed to be from an early use of high-definition video, but the quality of the clip itself looks decidedly sub-VHS to me.


*Why incongruous? This is the man who would later tell us we have "too many internets".