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Dr. Asimov, 65, is a severe critic of Star Wars. "I'm against it, not because I'm a science-fiction writer, and therefore have special knowledge, but because I like to think I'm a sane human being." He believes Star Wars is a dangerous waste of money. "They're talking about spending $33 billion on research related to Star Wars. We're going to withdraw money from needed aspects of developing knowledge in order to set up something that probably won't work and even if it does work, won't do us any good."

Part of the problem with Star Wars is that it will take years to develop. "If I were the Soviet Union, I would have spent all this time trying to work up methods to penetrate the shield," said Asimov, who was born in Russia but grew up in New York. "I have a strong suspicion it would be cheaper to penetrate the shield than to set it up. "And if we're in real danger of a nuclear war now, trying to set up something for the middle of the 21st century isn't going to do us any good. In fact, by filling us full of false confidence, we're not going to make a strong enough effort to prevent war now."

"There are science-fiction writers, notably myself and Arthur C. Clarke, who were anti-Vietnam and are anti-Star Wars," said Asimov. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, was born in England and lives in Sri Lanka. "Clarke was howled down once by someone saying as a non-American citizen he had no right to make comments about Star Wars. That's an extremely stupid remark. "If you have no right to decry the policy of a country unless you are a citizen of that country, why the hell is Reagan always yelling about the Soviet Union? Is he a Soviet citizen?"

The protagonists are essentially altruists whose ideals are sometimes only imperfectly applied to the dilemmas presented in the series. The conflicts and political dimensions of Star Trek form allegories for contemporary cultural realities; Star Trek: The Original Series addressed issues of the 1960s,[2] just as later spin-offs have reflected issues of their respective eras. Issues depicted in the various series include war and peace, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, human rights, sexism and feminism, and the role of technology.[3]

The Star Trek franchise is believed to have motivated the design of many current technologies, including the Tablet PC, the PDA, mobile phones and the MRI (based on Dr. McCoy's diagnostic table).[37] It has also brought to popular attention the concept of teleportation with its depiction of "matter-energy transport."

Shortly before his intuition about an atomic bomb, Leo Szilard had been reading The World Set Free by H. G. Wells--a novel about a German invasion of France and the use of atomic bombs in a global war, a novel written in 1913 but set in the 21st century. Wells called his radioactive element Carolinum: "once its degenerative process had been induced, [Carolinum] continued a furious radiation of energy, and nothing could arrest it." In 1913, Wells was already writing about radioactive decay, half-lives, burning cities, even about deforestation, diminishing supplies of coal and oil, and the rush toward bankruptcy. And he inspired Szilard. Wells wrote--and Szilard read--of the final achievement of a world government and the abolition of atomic weapons--the "world set free." "The catastrophe of atomic bombs shook men...," Wells wrote, "out of their old-established habits of thought." And it was H.G. Wells who gave us the phrase, "a war to end all war."

Wells depicts the Martians firing spacecraft to Earth from a giant space gun, a common representation of space travel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bearing similarity to the modern spacecraft propulsion concept of mass drivers.

Military theorists of that era had many speculations of building a "fighting-machine" or "land dreadnought" (as the Royal Navy called this hypothetical machine on which some experiments were made just before the First World War). Wells's concept of the Martian tripods, fast-moving and equipped with Heat-Rays and black smoke, represents an ultimate end to these speculations, although Wells also presents a less fantastical depiction of the armoured fighting vehicle in his short story "The Land Ironclads". [1] [2]

On a different field, the book explicitly suggests that the Martians' anatomy may reflect the far future development of mankind itself — i.e. that with the increasing development of machines, the body is largely discarded and what remains is essentially a brain that "wears" a different (mechanical) body for every need, just as humans wear the clothes appropriate to a particular weather or work.

It is a critique of what Bradbury saw as an increasingly dysfunctional American society, written in the early years of the Cold War.

Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which ultimately leads to ignorance of total facts.[3]

Anyone caught reading books is, at the minimum, confined in a mental hospital, while the books are taken away and burned; at the maximum, the penalty is a sentence to immediate death. The main books that are not allowed are those, of great and famous works of literature, by many famous writers, such as Dickenson, Poe, Twain, and others.

"The Veldt" — Two parents use an artificial "nursery" to keep their children happy. The children use the high-tech simulation nursery to create the predatorial environment of an African veldt. When the parents threaten to take it away, the children lock their parents inside where they are mauled and killed by the "harmless" machine-generated lions of the nursery.

"The Highway" — A community of simple-minded people living by a highway in rural Mexico go on living their normal, idyllic lives as the highway fills with people fleeing a nuclear war. The story ends with some travellers they help telling them about the nuclear war, and how the world is ending. After the travelers leave, the confused resident briefly wonders what "the world" is, and then continues with his life.