One of Rick’s latest books is an anthology he has edited for Tachyon Publishing. The anthology gave Rick a chance to combine his two major writing and teaching interests: science fiction and the mass media.

The book collects classic works of fiction and non-fiction from Ray Bradbury to Marshall McLuhan. The fiction includes excerpts from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, and Cory Doctorow’s Makers novels, as well as classic media-predictive short fiction reprints from James Tiptree Jr., Gregory Benford, Kit Reed, James Patrick Kelly, Joe Haldeman, Kate Wilhelm, Pat Cadigan, Robert Sheckley, James Patrick Kelly, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena.

The essays and non-fiction reprints include McLuhan’s famous “The Medium is the Message” chapter from the book Understanding Media, as well as essays from Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Andrew Postman (writing about his father, Neil), Nicholas Carr, Judy Wacjman, Henry Jenkins, James Patrick Kelly and Cory Doctorow, as well as Vannevar Bush's famous “As We May Think” article for the July, 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. There is also a speech from Timothy Berners-Lee that was delivered to the U.S. House of Representatives on the future of the World Wide Web.

With an introduction by science-fiction writer and mass-media scholar Paul Levinson of Fordham University.