R.I.P Ray Bradbury

[Sal Paradise]

An American Treasure. You will be missed. (I posted the first page of the obit. Clink the link for the full three page article)

Ray Bradbury dies at 91; author lifted fantasy to literary heights
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituari...,5622415.story

Ray Bradbury's more than 27 novels and 600 short stories helped give stylistic heft to fantasy and science fiction. In 'The Martian Chronicles' and other works, the L.A.-based Bradbury mixed small-town familiarity with otherworldly settings.

Ray Bradbury, the writer whose expansive flights of fantasy and vividly rendered space-scapes have provided the world with one of the most enduring speculative blueprints for the future, has died.He was 91. Bradbury died Tuesday night, his daughter, Alexandra Bradbury, told the Associated Press. No other details were immediately available.

Author of more than 27 novels and story collections—most famously "The Martian Chronicles," "Fahrenheit 451," "Dandelion Wine" and "Something Wicked This Way Comes"—and more than 600 short stories, Bradbury has frequently been credited with elevating the often-maligned reputation of science fiction. Some say he singlehandedly helped to move the genre into the realm of literature.
"The only figure comparable to mention would be [Robert A.] Heinleinand then later [Arthur C.] Clarke," said Gregory Benford, a UC Irvine physics professor who is also a Nebula award-winning science fiction writer. "But Bradbury, in the '40s and '50s, became the name brand."

Much of Bradbury's accessibility and ultimate popularity had to do with his gift as a stylist—his ability to write lyrically and evocatively of lands an imagination away, worlds he anchored in the here and now with a sense of visual clarity and small-town familiarity.

The late Sam Moskowitz, the preeminent historian of science fiction, once offered this assessment: "In style, few match him. And the uniqueness of a story of Mars or Venus told in the contrasting literary rhythms of Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe is enough to fascinate any critic."

As influenced by George Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare as he was by Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Bradbury was an expert of the taut tale, the last-sentence twist. And he was more celebrated for short fiction than his longer works.

"It's telling that we read Bradbury for his short stories," said Benford. "They are glimpses. The most important thing about writers is how they exist in our memories. Having read Bradbury is like having seen a striking glimpse out of a car window and then being whisked away."

An example is from 1957's "Dandelion Wine":

"The sidewalks were haunted by dust ghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up, swung them about and gentled them down in a warm spice on the lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strollers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed a volcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes everywhere, crusting slumberless night watchman and irritable dogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spontaneous combustion at three in the morning."

Bradbury's poetically drawn and atmospheric fictions—horror, fantasy, shadowy American gothics—explored life's secret corners: what was hidden in the margins of the official family narrative, or the white noise whirring uncomfortably just below the placid surface. He offered a set of metaphors and life puzzles to ponder for the rocket age and beyond, and has influenced a wide swath of popular culture--from children's writer R.L. Stine and singer Elton John (who penned his hit "Rocket Man" as an homage), to architect Jon Jerde who enlisted Bradbury to consider and offer suggestions about reimagining public spaces.

Bradbury frequently attempted to shrug out of the narrow "sci-fi" designation, not because he was put off by it, but rather because he believed it was imprecise.

"I'm not a science fiction writer," he was frequently quoted as saying. "I've written only one book of science fiction ["Fahrenheit 451"]. All the others are fantasy. Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen."

It wasn't merely semantics. His stories were multi-layered and ambitious. Bradbury was far less concerned with mechanics—how many tanks of fuel it took to get to Mars and with what rocket—than what happened once the crew landed there, or what they would impose on their environment. "He had this flair for getting to really major issues," said Paul Alkon, emeritus professor of English and American literature at USC.

"He wasn't interested in current doctrines of political correctness or particular forms of society. Not what was wrong in '58 or 2001 but the kinds of issues that are with us every year."

Benford said Bradbury "emphasized rhetoric over reason and struck resonant notes with the bulk of the American readership—better than any other science fiction writer. Even [H.G.] Wells ... [Bradbury] anchored everything in relationships. Most science fiction doesn't."

[neon]

I just heard about it too. I remember where I was when I heard Frank Herbert died, all those years ago. This is another one of those times.

:(

[BrazenMuse]

RIP to a literary giant! I will never forget my intro to him...Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes...I was in junior high and I fell in love w him. Years later, of course...Fahrenheit 451...

[Daniel, Grand Duke of Stony Island]

RIP to a literary giant! I will never forget my intro to him...Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes...I was in junior high and I fell in love w him. Years later, of course...Fahrenheit 451...

The thing that stuck with me about Fahrenheit 451, even after all these years since first reading it, is how Guy Montag, took a leap into doom by cracking open his first book, just to find his comprehension couldn't handle the load. His inability to connect with the written and printed intent of authors. Him knowing something about the act was important, but failing to grasp why. Having no understanding of how. The horror I thought about a world where, even if folks could openly read books, no one would have been able to COMPREHEND. How folks who valued the written word were a rapidly dying breed. Montag could have lived in a library full of books, for 50 years, but left to himself, he would have been a starving man in a room of canned goods, but no can opener.

Reading my older brother's copy back when I was in 7th grade, I found that to be odd and disconcerting. By the time it was assigned to me in honors English my freshman year, my disconcert grew to horror. That Beatty was in full pursuit of him, yet he himself harbored his own collection and sophistication with books, made me hate him, even after closing the book. The idea of a fire captain as lord of ignorance, myself raised by firefighters, was just too much.

Then I read Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron' and started plotting how to leave Earth altogether.

[BrazenMuse]

The thing that stuck with me about Fahrenheit 451, even after all these years since first reading it, is how Guy Montag, took a leap into doom by cracking open his first book, just to find his comprehension couldn't handle the load. His inability to connect with the written and printed intent of authors. Him knowing something about the act was important, but failing to grasp why. Having no understanding of how. The horror I thought about a world where, even if folks could openly read books, no one would have been able to COMPREHEND. How folks who valued the written word were a rapidly dying breed. Montag could have lived in a library full of books, for 50 years, but left to himself, he would have been a starving man in a room of canned goods, but no can opener.

Reading my older brother's copy back when I was in 7th grade, I found that to be odd and disconcerting. By the time it was assigned to me in honors English my freshman year, my disconcert grew to horror. That Beatty was in full pursuit of him, yet he himself harbored his own collection and sophistication with books, made me hate him, even after closing the book. The idea of a fire captain as lord of ignorance, myself raised by firefighters, was just too much.

Then I read Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron' and started plotting how to leave Earth altogether.

Fahrenheit 451, Childhood's End, 1984, and The Left Hand of Darkness. 7th grade Science Fiction course for most of those...F451 came later...read Brian Stableford too...amazing short stories. Blew my mind. I think I am gonna read F451 as soon as school ends this year. What scares me sometimes is the degree to which written text is inaccessible to many of the young people I work with..."frustrating" barely touches tip of iceberg...

[LOKEE]

The thing that stuck with me about Fahrenheit 451, even after all these years since first reading it, is how Guy Montag, took a leap into doom by cracking open his first book, just to find his comprehension couldn't handle the load. His inability to connect with the written and printed intent of authors. Him knowing something about the act was important, but failing to grasp why. Having no understanding of how. The horror I thought about a world where, even if folks could openly read books, no one would have been able to COMPREHEND. How folks who valued the written word were a rapidly dying breed. Montag could have lived in a library full of books, for 50 years, but left to himself, he would have been a starving man in a room of canned goods, but no can opener.

Reading my older brother's copy back when I was in 7th grade, I found that to be odd and disconcerting. By the time it was assigned to me in honors English my freshman year, my disconcert grew to horror. That Beatty was in full pursuit of him, yet he himself harbored his own collection and sophistication with books, made me hate him, even after closing the book. The idea of a fire captain as lord of ignorance, myself raised by firefighters, was just too much.

Then I read Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron' and started plotting how to leave Earth altogether.

This is one tremendous unpacking, sir; you've inspired me to take a break from work and reread 451. Thanks for that!

horror I thought about a world where, even if folks could openly read books, no one would have been able to COMPREHEND.

Looking at this line, it dawned on me that Twilight Zone's "Time Enough at Last," which was released only six years after 451, offers an addendum to Bradbury's distopia. Henry Bemus' delight in finding that he is alone in a world full of books would seem, on its surface, to offer the antidote to the man-made ruptures of 451. And, yet, Bemus' joy doesn't last long. Soon after he sits down in preparation for a life given to the word (is there a biblical critique in here, too?), his glasses fall to the ground and break. In response, he cries, "That's not fair," as if even when man is alone, he can and will locate a target toward which all blame is directed away from himself. And so the irony emerges: in a populated world there would be a person capable of fixing his glasses, and rather than recognize this he continues to curse a force--that entity who renders his life unfair--outside of himself.

Both 451 and TZ, then, propose frightening dystopias; but when placed together, with each acting as the other's figurative temper, we see the real need for both the human touch and the human intellect. Neither is enough to sustain us. And so, yes, Bradbury teaches us that world without the ability to comprehend books is frightening; but TZ counters this and makes clear that a world in which only books exist, a world in which we abandon the voice for the word, is equally frightening.

Bradybury has claimed that 451 was written in protest of television, and its capacity to destroy reading cultures. I'd suggest that such a claim only makes the combination between the two all the more fruitful. It allows us to consider the ways in which the value of activities are too often thought to be intrinsic to the act; what Bradbury, for all of his genius, misses is that it is the way we engage texts, be they on the page or screen, that matters. In short, it is not what we engage but how and why we do so that matters. Both Bradbury and Bemus get us halfway there, but when they are placed together. . . watch out!

[LOKEE]

"Time Enough at Last"