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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.