Author Ray Bradbury has died in Los Angeles at the age of 91.
Bradbury is often referred to as a science fiction author, though he wrote much more broadly than that, including works of fantasy, mystery, and horror.
His titles include some of the best-known in the history of speculative fiction, including:
- The Martian Chronicles
- Fahrenheit 451
- Something Wicked This Way Comes
- Dandelion Wine
- I Sing the Body Electric
- The Illustrated Man
He worked in both short story and novel form. Many of his stories ended up in film or television form, including episodes of the Twilight Zone and his own Ray Bradbury Theater anthology series.
He is credited by some for having helped bring speculative fiction new literary respect due to his evocative, lyrical writing style that brings out the emotion of a situation rather than just focusing on technology or common fantasy tropes.
One of the things that stands out in Bradbury’s fiction is the way he juxtaposes the normal and the fantastastic. This happens across genres in his works.
I’ve lived in Los Angeles most of my life, and had opportunities to actually meet Ray Bradbury on a couple of occasions — never being able to is going to rank as one of my greatest disappointments.
There are three stories of his that have struck me to the core —
Fahrenheit 451 — quite possibly, one of the best science fiction novels of all time. From his sonorous, lyrical word paintings, even imbuing something as ugly as book burnng with a grim awe and power, to the multi-layered and nuanced message (Was it about reality TV before there was reality TV? Was it about political correctness run amok? Was it about our tendency to allow ourselves to be besotted with pleasure and thereby blind ourselves to greater, higher things?) to the powerful and hopeful, even in the face of apocalypse, ending, it is perfection.
‘The Beautiful Shave” — In a mere three pages, Bradbury masterfully tells a full and complete story, a micro-drama of a man pushed too far in the face of evil.
‘Bless Me Father, For I Have Sinned” — I don’t know if Bradbury was Catholic, but I have found few stories from a supposedly secular angle that encapsulate the mystery of the Sacrament of Reconcilliation as well as this one. The story begins lat at night on Christmas Eve, as a priest has a call from God to throw open the Confessional, and lo and behold, there is a penitent, waiting for him. What happens next? That would be a spoiler, but the tale is fundamentally heartwarming. I’d almost say that it ought to be optional reading for RCIA classes.
I read a lot of Bradbury’s short stories as an adolescent, starting when a cousin passed on a box or two of old books that had some Bradbury collections. That was my introduction to sf/fantasy; he was sort of a bridge between mainstream fiction and sf/f. I should go back and read more of his work, because I remember him as great and, unlike some books we loved as kids, I think his would hold up to revisiting.
One of my good Bradbury memories isn’t actually from Bradbury though. There was a Bradbury tribute book that contained a story by Orson Scott Card. The link to Bradbury was that one of Card’s two main characters was the grandson of the boy in Dandelion Wine. (The grandfather was in there briefly too, as he lived with his grandson.) The story not only contains the account of a very interesting homebrewed game (it had plays like “Soused Sow”), but was a rather lovely account of adultery rejected. Given the perfect opportunity for a secret liasion with an interesting and compatible woman, the man rejects it because, the moment he did that, he would “become the kind of man who breaks his promises”.