{"id":2777,"date":"2015-03-09T07:22:12","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T05:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/?p=2777"},"modified":"2015-03-09T14:33:43","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T12:33:43","slug":"kornbluth-visionary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/?p=2777","title":{"rendered":"Kornbluth, visionary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 1951, Cyril Kornbluth wrote <a href=\"http:\/\/mysite.du.edu\/~treddell\/3780\/Kornbluth_The-Marching-Morons.pdf\">a short story<\/a> where a fellow ended up way in the future. A future populated by morons, because intelligent people breed less.\u00a0 A future with passenger cars<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Swept-back lines, deep-drawn compound\u00a0 curves, kilograms of chrome. He ran his hands over the door- or was it the door?-in a futile search for a handle, and asked respectfully, &#8220;How fast does it go?&#8221; The psychist gave him a keen look and said slowly, &#8220;Two hundred and fifty. You can tell by the speedometer.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Except that<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Barlow began to wonder if he knew what a kilometer was, exactly. They seemed to be traveling so slowly, if you ignored the roaring air past your ears and didn&#8217;t let the speedy lines of the dreamboats fool you. He would have sworn they were really crawling along at twenty-five, with occasional spurts up to thirty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/tech.slashdot.org\/story\/15\/01\/22\/1619252\/fake-engine-noise-is-the-auto-industrys-dirty-little-secret\">The future is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1951, Cyril Kornbluth wrote a short story where a fellow ended up way in the future. A future populated by morons, because intelligent people breed less.\u00a0 A future with passenger cars Swept-back lines, deep-drawn compound\u00a0 curves, kilograms of chrome. He ran his hands over the door- or was it the door?-in a futile search for a handle, and asked respectfully, &#8220;How fast does it go?&#8221; The psychist gave him a keen look and said slowly, &#8220;Two hundred and fifty. You can tell by the speedometer.&#8221; Except that Barlow began to wonder if he knew what a kilometer was, exactly.&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-farting-around"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2777"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2778,"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777\/revisions\/2778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.retro.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}