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Ray Bradbury Has Died
dsinc was the first to note, but an anonymous reader writes "Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, the dystopian novel about the logical conclusion of many trends in modern society, and many other works that have inspired fans of speculative fiction for decades, has died at the age of 91 in Los Angeles, California, Tuesday night, June 5th, 2012. No details on how he died were released, but I suspect it may have had something to do with the Earth orbiting the sun over 90 times since he was born. I guess we'll have to wait to be sure."
...is found in that man's works. He is the reason my Mom understands the wonder of extraterrestrial life, the temptations and costs of technological solutions to social problems, and has any clue as to what her son is thinking.
I owe that man a great deal more than I've spent on his books.
And "R is for Rocket" I read 40-some years ago. They were collections of Bradbury short stories.
Rest in peace, but is it too late to Fuck me, Ray Bradbury?
Obviously this is all about the transition of Venus across the sun. Just like the comet took Mark Twain, Venus has claimed Bradbury!
I loved his book Celsius 233.
Trolling is a art,
Fahrenheit 451 wasn't about censorship. I know 100 people who know nothing else about the book except cliff notes or what they got off wikipedia are about to make that comment. So I'll save you the trouble. It was about TV and the mental wasteland that he thought it represented.
My wife never liked science fiction. One evening I chose "Something Wicked This Way Comes" to watch on DVD and she rolled her eyes at my choice.
After watching, she said to me "now I know why you read all that stuff. That was great!"
A true master of the art has passed.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
While a little overlooked (and dated, to be fair) now, The Martian Chronicles were one of the first sci-fi works I read as a kid and were a big part of making me a fan of the genre. Like all of his works, they were simultaneously beautiful and sad.
Farewell, good sir; you put humanity under the microscope with your writing and, whether we liked what we saw or not, we needed to see it.
What really bothers me about 451 is how just about everything but the book burning turned out true. If you remove that aspect from the book, you'd have a hard time separating it from the United States of today. I can't read it without being unnerved. Immersing ourselves in our electronic entertainment rather than our lives, advertisement everywhere, complete lack of empathy as a social standard, constant, ignored wars, distaste for pedestrians, rampant anti-intellectualism, near identical suburbs everywhere.
It was a brilliant extrapolation from 1953, and I wish it wasn't so close to reality.
And "R is for Rocket" I read 40-some years ago. They were collections of Bradbury short stories.
Indeed, I too cut my teeth on Ray Bradbury's works for fantasy and science fiction. Recently I discovered an edition of 100 of his collected short stories (chosen by the man himself) that appeared to include most if not all of my favorites. For anyone looking to discover/rediscover, this is an inexpensive and fairly comprehensive route to take. These stories are written for a younger mind but are still enjoyable to me.
It might have been because I had not dealt with death on a profound level yet but his short story "Kaleidoscope" from The Illustrated Man was permanently etched upon my mind. Now Bradbury is a shooting star providing wishes and dreams to the young minds who read his works. Personally I feel that hundreds of years from now, Bradbury will join the ranks of Hans Christian Anderson, Road Dahl, etc and his works will be seen as mandatory classics for readers. Like all modern writing, some of these stories aren't the most original in their nature but they are perfect to capture a mind and set someone on a course for endless reading. It's a sad day to see such a wonderful mind pass but I will do my part to immortalize him through recommendations.
My work here is dung.
It was the transit of Venus! It was jealous that Ray gave Mars all his love, and pulled some sneaky, underhanded gravitational alignment whatsis! Damn you, Venus! Damn yoooooou!
I'm from the generation that had schoolteachers who couldn't stop talking about how great the 60s were. So, Bradbury epitomized the 60s SF writers who thought that computer technology would "oppress" us, and women in the future were supposed to behave just as submissively as 1950s women. Thanks to that strain of thought, my generation was discouraged from pursuing computer careers.
What really bothers me about 451 is how just about everything but the book burning turned out true.
WHY DO YOU THINK IT'S CALLED A KINDLE MOTHERFUCKER?!!![*]
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
ran their first sci-fi issue this month.
Here's his piece "Inspiration for the Fire Balloons"
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/04/120604fa_fact_bradbury
While I remained earthbound, I would time-travel, listening to the grownups, who on warm nights gathered outside on the lawns and porches to talk and reminisce. At the end of the Fourth of July, after the uncles had their cigars and philosophical discussions, and the aunts, nephews, and cousins had their ice-cream cones or lemonade, and we’d exhausted all the fireworks, it was the special time, the sad time, the time of beauty. It was the time of the fire balloons.
I owe Mr. Bradbury and his golden age of science fiction brethern a great deal. It was his writing and that of Wells, Verne, Assimov and others which pulled me up from a path of near illiteracy to being an avid reader.
If there is an after life, I hope Bradbury, Verne, Clark and all the others have already started writing for the inhabitants. They'll be better off for it.
Never ascribe to malice or conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
I just looked at a few wikipedia pages and saw this thing that he wrote about a transistor radio in the 1950s. It is exactly the way you might describe someone talking on a cell phone if you walked outside your door right now:
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.
No, he didn't predict cell phones or anything like that, but he recognized one of the first victims of the epidemic that went on to swallow us all.
"I'm aware of his work."
Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Given the limits and frailties of the human memory, he could have written a follow-up about the mangled misremembered books:
A Tale of Two Cities - Christopher Dickins look at Minneapolis and st Paul.
Moby Dick - Herman Mullers classic tale of Captain Arabs search for the perfect tuna salad sandwich.
Macbeth - The story of the first girl to own an Apple Macintosh.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I happened to be touring a university campus (UCLA? Berkeley?) and saw a poster for a talk he was giving, and bought a ticket on a whim. He was a fascinating speaker, and it was intriguing to hear him re-engineer and expand on Fahrenheit 451. What a treat. Afterwards, he gladly stayed behind and autographed books for quite a while.
I also remember something about him being arrested in Paris, France for being 'drunk and in charge of a bicycle'. What's not to like?
RIP.
not gonna tan his hide and turn him into a helicopter then?
pity.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
As a fan of the hard stuff (Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke et. al. - I prefer SF that requires a working knowledge of vector calculus and differential equations to really appreciate) his stuff always seemd pretty fluffy fare. I always summed it up as the science fiction beloved by English teachers everywhere
Heh, you've got a point, and I too got tired of seeing him presented as pretty much the only science fiction author admitted into the literary canon. But SF from the 1970s on, which at its best combines "the hard stuff" with a humanistic approach to characterization, owes Bradbury equally along with Clarke et al. I've never understood the idea that scientific rigor should require the characters to be one-dimensional; both are important to telling a good story to which both the words "science" and "fiction" apply. (To be fair, Clarke did pretty well with this sometimes; I defy anyone to read The City and the Stars or The Fountains of Paradise and say he couldn't create interesting, complex characters! But he wasn't particularly consistent about it, and Heinlein and Anderson were even less so.)
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I feel like an old friend has died, and I've been near tears several times today. I grew up on his stories. I deeply identified with his characters - especially Douglas Spaulding. I read Dandelion Wine almost every year, and it's always new.
He influenced my writing style more than anyone else, as well as his encouragement to write something every day, whether I want to or not.
His stories were always about more than just the setting - science fiction was simply a vehicle for him to communicate deep truths.
I've been remembering all day a scene in Dandelion Wine in which Great Grandmother says goodbye to her family, and then settles into bed to try to find the dream that was interrupted when she was born. I hope you find your dream, Ray. Sleep well, old friend.
Apache guy, Open Source enthusiast, runner
The Ringworld Engineers - Larry Niven
Ray Bradberry wanted the title of this work to be the temperature that book paper catches fire. He searchd through the public libraries research section but couldn't find the answer to that question. He tried contacting several paper companies but they didn't have the answer. He finally called the local fire department and asked them what temperature paper catches fire at.... THEY KNEW!
RIP Ray Bradbury. In 1999 I waited for about 4 hours in a line that wound around the downtown Denver Barnes and Noble to meet him and have him autograph a book. At the beginning of the event the book store manager announced that he would only stay for 2 hours to autograph books. The 2 hours came and went and the line was still very long. He then announced that he would stay until every last person had his or her book signed. He stayed until long after the usual store closing and signed every book. One of America's greatest authors and a true gentleman.
Sig expected Real Soon Now.
Ray Bradbury wrote "All summer in a day", the story of prejudice on Venus where an earthling's Venus-born schoolmates no longer believe in the sun. In a reflection of the rare beauty of a total solar eclipse, or the rarer phenomena of a Venus the sun only appears once every 7 years on Bradbury's Venus. Mr. Bradbury might have appreciated that his last day on earth coincided with a rare alignment between Earth, the Sun and Venus where...
No one in the class could remember a time when there wasn't rain.
“Ready?"
"Ready."
"Now?"
"Soon."
"Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?"
"Look, look; see for yourself!"
The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.
It rained.
It had been raining for seven years; thousand upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.
"It's stopping, it's stopping!"
"Yes, yes!"
Fellow midwesterner Mark Twain famously wrote: "I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'"
Bradbury wasn't as sardonic as Twain. He preferred walking to driving, but this preference raised suspicions of cops in Waukegan Illinois. He turned his confrontations into Fahrenheit 451. As one of the most prolific writers in the world, he should be remembered for his love of language and life. Ray has inspired millions of writers and scientists with his prolific writing and love for language and life. And if you can read one of his first short stories, "The Lake" without shedding a tear over how short our time is on this planet... I don't know.
"In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating." -- Ray Bradbury (1920-2012 R.I.P.)
Ray Bradbury couldn't find a major publisher willing to take on "Fahrenheit 451". It was first published in serial form in Playboy in 1954. It was only afterwards that it became a noted novel.
People don't give Playboy any credit, but they were actually often quite edgy and on the forefront of a lot of new fiction and ideas throughout the 50, 60 and earlier 70s.