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Printheads: RIP Ray Bradbury

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    • CommentAuthorRenThing
    • CommentTimeJun 6th 2012
     (10705.1)
  2.  (10705.2)
    I had the unexpected surprise of riding in an elevator with him 18(?) years ago, followed by sitting across from him in VIP, at Archon. That was the Bradbury/Harryhausen GoH combo year. It may not have been as much as some of my friends had, but it was still very cool just to be able to be in that sort of proximity, and to listen to him talk. I count myself lucky.

    Godspeed, Mr. Bradbury.
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      CommentAuthorFoamhead
    • CommentTimeJun 6th 2012 edited
     (10705.3)
    Damn.

    The Martian Chronicles is one of the first things I read beyond what primary school teachers put in front of me.

    Not from that but still...
    “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
    It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
    Fahrenheit 451
  4.  (10705.4)
    I just picked up some old Bradbury pulp last week. Have some great memories watching Ray Bradbury Theatre when I was a kid.
    • CommentAuthorSteve Toase
    • CommentTimeJun 6th 2012 edited
     (10705.5)
    Three of my favourite short stories are by Ray Bradbury; All Summer In A Day, Fever Dream and The Sound Of Thunder. RIP Sir

    It's not understating it to say he was/is one of my main inspirations. Fever Dream was the spark that led to me writing my first short story The Faces. Such a sublime short story writer. All Summer In A Day is both horrifying and heartrending. The world is emptier for his passing, but a better place for his living.
  6.  (10705.6)
    “If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
    • CommentAuthor256
    • CommentTimeJun 6th 2012
     (10705.7)
    O my heart. What a terrible loss. One of those people who'd gone on so long that you'd almost, almost started to think they'd never go away.

    But what a legacy he left behind, to all of us. In all of us.

    Requiescat in pace, Ray.

    @Steve - Good to hear those titles again. Think I'm going to spend some time catching up with my favourites - West Of October probably at the top of that list.

    I wonder what everyone else's favourites are?
  8.  (10705.8)
    Oh damn, incredibly bummed out about this. In hindsight Bradbury is the biggest literary influence for me, bar none. I've never read his Mars books, but everything else blew my teenage mind and it's still a treat to return to the stories years later. My first game was heavily influenced by Bradbury's fiction.

    Damn. Well, he had a good, long run.
    •  
      CommentAuthorcelan
    • CommentTimeJun 6th 2012 edited
     (10705.9)
    There Will Come Soft Rains:
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      CommentAuthorAlan Tyson
    • CommentTimeJun 6th 2012
     (10705.10)
    Mars is Heaven.
  11.  (10705.11)
    I met him at one of his speaking engagements at a library in Southern California around 1990. He signed some books and we chatted a bit. He actually grew up on the same street as my grandfather when they were both kids. Always thought that was kinda cool. But, the actual story of that evening....

    It was before he was going to give the reading and have some Q&A. I was in the men's room - doing what we men do - and who sidles up beside me at the next stall but the man himself. No, I didn't introduce myself or jut out a hand for him to shake. We both followed strict men's room etiquette, and neither mentioned this run-in when we later chatted. True story.
    •  
      CommentAuthorFrowardd
    • CommentTimeJun 6th 2012 edited
     (10705.12)
    I was in the men's room - doing what we men do


    Fuck me, Ray Bradbury.
  13.  (10705.13)
    • CommentAuthorStefanJ
    • CommentTimeJun 6th 2012
     (10705.14)
    @Brian: Yeah, I took a leak alongside Jack Vance once. Silent brotherhood of the urinal row.
  15.  (10705.15)
    Who here would take a ride on the carousel in Something Wicked?

    I really think I would.
    •  
      CommentAuthorMorac
    • CommentTimeJun 6th 2012
     (10705.16)
    Ray Bradbury had a huge impact on my life. I doubt I'd be the same person without his influence.

    The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, and may others are all amazing books. Golden Apples of the Sun still stands as one of my favorite books of all time. I have an incredibly beaten up copy of it that was originally my fathers. I remember him excitedly talking about the Sound Of Thunder, and then going and digging this copy out of a box in the basement. "Here," he said, handing it to me, "read this." My father encouraged reading, but usually let me discover books on my own. Only truly special books would he directly bring to my attention, and boy was this book special.

    Every story in that book did something amazing. The Sound of Thunder is one of the definitive time travel stories, but also manages to explore the way we are shaped by our environment. The Murderer, which depicted a man who murdered his house, humourously imagined a world of ubiquitous and omnipresent technology and a society ruled by it's obsession with these devices - an uncannily familiar image these days, and yet originally written in 1953! From dystopian, to obsessive, to baseball, to the heights of the human pioneering spirit, Ray did it all. And in under 200 pages! Never before, and only rarely since, have I had my mind blow, my perception altered, my thinking changed, with such frequency and such skill.

    Here's to you, Ray.

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