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:
“She had an unequalled gift ... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“It used to be said that you had to know what was happening in America because it gave us a glimpse of our future. Today, the rest of America, and after that Europe, had better heed what happens in California, for it already reveals the type of civilisation that is in store for all of us.”
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“You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If someone drives it off a cliff, that’s it.”
—Rita Mae Brown (b. 1944)