What about modern science fiction films, such as "The Matrix"?
I haven't seen that one yet, but I gather it's one of the better ones. Most films these days are too long. The screenplay is everything. Otherwise I think we're all just going to go look at the monsters, aren't we?
In your short story "A Sound of Thunder," the outcome of a close presidential election was altered when a time traveler squishes an insect in a prehistoric age. Do you think we were a squashed butterfly away from getting Al Gore?
That's right.
What do you think of President Bush?
He's wonderful. We needed him. Clinton is a shithead and we're glad to be rid of him. And I'm not talking about his sexual exploits. I think we have a chance to do something about education, very important. We should have done it years ago. It doesn't matter who does it -- Democrats or Republicans -- but it's long overdue. Our education system is a monstrosity. We need to go back and rebuild kindergarten and first grade and teach reading and writing to everybody, all colors, and then the whole structure of our education will change because people will know how to read and write.
There's so much competition for a young person's attention nowadays. For the record, why is reading still important?
Are you kidding? You can't have a civilization without that, can you? If you can't read and write you can't think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don't know how to read and write. You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.
Many years ago, I heard you speak and during the question period you chastised an audience member who asked about the decline of reading. You countered that books were more popular than ever. Do you still feel that way?
Well, there is no reading in some areas. Look at our students. What is our future going to be if you have all the people in school right now who don't learn to read and write? It's easy to teach reading and writing in kindergarten, so for chrissake do it. There are a lot of books selling today, but the number of people actually reading and digesting and thinking I gather would be quite small when compared to the population.
I was surprised you said in your Playboy interview that corporations were the only way to revitalize impoverished communities.
Well that's true. They've got the money; nobody else has it. People like myself know the secret of cities and how to build them. I give these ideas to corporations and they build them and they revitalize sections of cities -- like Century City [in Los Angeles]. But I've had to tell them numerous times over the past few years to build it in human terms. Hollywood Boulevard needs to be torn down and rebuilt completely in terms of human beings. Right now, it's completely dead.
What do you mean "in human terms"?
Places to eat. The secret of cities is eating. In Paris there are 20,000 restaurants. You go down Main Street, people are sitting out and people-watching -- that's what I'm talking about.
The House recently passed the Human Cloning Ban of 2001.
Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby? C'mon, it's stupid. Stalin and Mao had a great idea about cloning -- they killed 80 million people and what's left is your clones. If you don't like the way the world is put together you just kill everybody. What you got left is the master race. We have more important things to do than these silly ideas. Let's clone people in kindergarten and teach them how to teach reading and writing.
Is it better to have the future authenticate your predictions or would you have preferred society to have proven you wrong?
I would have loved to have been proven wrong, yes. I do not like what is going on in our society. Our education system, as I've said, is a total disaster.
Were you deliberately trying to prognosticate or simply tell a good story?
It's a combination. If you're living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important. As long as [social criticism is] part of the structure and muscle and blood of the book, it's OK. As long as you don't become too self-important, politically. The best advice I ever got was from Somerset Maugham's book "Summing Up," which I read in high school. His advice was: Don't look left or right, look straight ahead, get your work done, enjoy your work, do what you want to do, not what someone else wants you to do.
And that's been the story of my life. Not pleasing my friends, not pleasing any editor, just myself.
About the writer
James Hibberd is a staff writer at the Westword weekly in Denver.
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