He wrote story after story about space travel, but he never got a driver’s license and didn’t drive a car. He lacked the money to go to college, but he possessed the will to get himself an education. As he later said, “I spent three days a week for ten years educating myself in the public library.” In his stories, he predicted the invention of technologies like video surveillance, widescreen televisions, automated houses, cellphones, and EarPods, yet he was also a severe critic of our dependence on machines. Near the end of his life, he said: “We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.” He loved books and, in his work, celebrated authors like Thomas Wolfe, Edgar Allen Poe, William Shakespeare, and Emily Dickinson, yet he also warned of a decline in reading and …