Dr. James Cooke Brown (July 21, 1921 – February 13, 2000) was a sociologist and science fiction author. He is notable for creating the artificial language Loglan and for designing the Parker Brothers board game Careers.
Brown's novel The Troika Incident (Doubleday, 1970) describes a worldwide free knowledge base similar to the Internet. The novel begins with the belief that the world is on the eve of self-destruction, but then it presents a world about a century from now which is a paradise of peace and prosperity, all based on ideas, movements, and knowledge presently available in the world. In its metafictional structure, the novel is a call for social change, not through revolution but through free education and the resilience of human ingenuity. Long out of print and relatively rare, an e-book version (Amazon Kindle) of the novel was released in 2012. The novel envisioned all books and periodicals being viewed on portable electronic devices called "readers" in the year 2070, when it is set. The author would doubtless appreciate the irony of "The Troika Incident" being viewed on almost exactly the "readers" he imagined.
Among his other achievements, Brown designed, and had built, a three-hulled sailboat, called a trimaran. He utilized this boat to sail to many parts of the world.
While on a South American cruise with his wife, Brown was admitted to a hospital in Argentina, where he died at the age of 78.
Famous quotes containing the words james, cooke and/or brown:
“The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)
“The more we learn of science, the more we see that its wonderful mysteries are all explained by a few simple laws so connected together and so dependent upon each other, that we see the same mind animating them all.”
—Olympia Brown (1835–1900)