Ray Bradbury RIP

Science fiction/fantasy writer Ray Bradbury has died.

Best anecdote comes from Michael Ledeen:

The direct memory was of a speech he gave to a big crowd of American businessmen in LA, and he talked a lot about the power of imagination, and he urged them all to embrace their dreams, even the wildest ones, and to pursue them, because we’re in America and anything is possible.  After all, he’d spent years writing about Mars (both Mars as a metaphor and the “real” Mars), and then early one morning the first earth vessel was landing on Mars and he’d been invited to the Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena to watch the first pictures arrive.  He told us how excited he was, and how emotional everybody became when the first photos came in:  “they were wonderful pictures, and grown men were crying…”
And then a tv journalist shoved a mic into his face and said, “well, Bradbury, how does it feel?  All these years you’ve been dreaming about Mars and writing about Mars, and here are the first pictures from Mars, and there’s no sign of life anywhere.  So how does it feel?”
Bradbury yelled at us.  “I shouted at him.  I shouted “Fools!  Fools!  There IS life on Mars.  And it is US.”

in contrast to tale tellers (e.g. Heinlein and Asimov), Bradbury's prose is almost poetry:



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BrianSibley writes about a long correspondence and friendship with Bradbury, begun when Sibley was a young writer who wrote a fan letter, and actually got a personal answer.

I became a different person to the one I might have been because of Ray's gift for seeing the miraculous in the mundane and the tremendous possibilities in the trivial and his unerring talent for prising open the thoughts and emotions of an astonishing range of beings – humans, aliens, robots, puppets and dinosaurs – and giving us an empathetic understanding of their hopes and fears.

and he notes this bit of trivia: What book would Bradbury memorize (if all books were destroyed, as in Fahrenheit 451)? His answer: The Christmas Carol by Dickens...