Ray Bradbury Turns 88 194
Lawrence Person writes "Legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury turned 88 years old on August 22. Happy Birthday Ray! 'The Illustrated Man' was one of the first science fiction books I ever read, and I've been hooked ever since. I'm sure that's true of a lot of science fiction writers and readers, be it that, or 'The Martian Chronicles,' or 'Fahrenheit 451.' There are also several videos of Ray on that page, including one where he doesn't endorse Sunsweet Prunes." I remember when another student on the bus loaned me "Fahrenheit 451," and my middle-school English teacher Mrs. Young was smart enough to include "All Summer in a Day" in her curriculum.
The Pedestrian (Score:5, Interesting)
I liked the short-story The Pedestrian. From what I hear, it was the basis for Fahrenheit 451, however, I think that one can get some different meanings out of each.
What's interesting about Fahrenheit 451 are some of the parallels that could be drawn to today's society. Guy Montag's wife has a seashell like device that she puts in her ears so she can listen to the radio, much like today we have iPods, where people can seem to be in their own little worlds.
The fascination she has too with the telescreens, and wanting to be involved in one of the, for lack of a better word, "soaps," could tell of our society's own inordinate fascination with the personal lives of the "rich and famous."
Finally, that overwhelming desire for more, another telescreen, even though the last one was put in within a year prior, could speak to our society's want for material goods.
Whether or not Mr. Bradbury believes our society could degenerate to a point where we burn books, I would argue that our society already contains elements of his fictional society.
The Pedestrian is similar in that the everyday man is fascinated with what takes place on his television screen, and cannot be bothered to calmly walk down the street and think.
One connection I believe can be found between the short story and the novel is that in The Pedestrian, the main character is arrested for walking down the street (as nobody does that anymore, he must be suspicious), and in Fahrenheit 451 the girl who talks to Guy Montag mentions that her uncle got arrested once for walking down the street.
But he has a tombstone (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Slow News Day" tag? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"Slow News Day" tag? (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember when Ray Bradbury defended Bob Packwood (Score:5, Interesting)
Ray Bradbury was a good friend of senator Packwood, and when the senator's political career began to unravel amidst allegations of sexual abuse and harassment from his female staffers, Bradbury tried to defend him on an episode of politically incorrect. Among other things, he said something to the effect of "who hasn't slapped a girl on the butt?" and "I sexually harassed my wife until she married me."
A class act, that guy is.
Re:Has anyone actually read Farenheit 452? (Score:3, Interesting)
Really, the fact that no part really stands out for me probably says something about the book. Reading it was kind of jarring, but I put it off at the 'disturbingness' of the plot/theme/idea. The only thing I remember is how close his wife behaved to stereotyped dumb blonds, NASCAR fans, and
Re:Meh (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Pedestrian (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The Pedestrian (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember reading an account by Bradbury regarding Farenheit 451, in which he described walking down the street, passing a woman who was listening to a Walkman while walking several dogs, completely oblivious to her surroundings. He then states, "This is not a work of fiction."
It's been a while since I read the book, so while I remember that I enjoyed it, some of the details and even a portion of the main theme escape me. Along the lines of what you mentioned, my favorite passages from the book include the minimum speed limit of 60 mph in Montag's nightmare, and the part where he asks his wife what the play is about and she responds by naming the characters, as the play had absolutely no redeeming content.
So yes, it's a great tale of how we become lost in the more superficial aspects of our lives, but it's not a point that I necessarily agree with. For instance, I don't think that walking your dogs while listening to an audio player, digital or analog, constitutes losing touch with society.
Now that I reread your description of the Pedestrian, I'm fairly certain I have read it (probably in the back of a publication of Jonas and the Giver, back in middle school). Yes, it fits perfectly. What stands out the most is how their techno-skewed culture not only rejects nonconformity - it doesn't even comprehend it.
Of course, Farenheit 451 is also a great story about oppression by government. Not quite as biting and frightening as 1984, but it's up there. You can't control books the way you can televisions. You can't retroactively erase their content to suit your current propaganda or to eliminate inspiring ideas. Of course, more useful then the books themselves was the knowledge of who was harboring books, so you would know who rejected society's mandates and thus who must be destroyed.
Then again, Bradbury wrote a non-canonical passage in which Guy Montag was shocked by his firechief's personal library. The chief responded that it was only reading that was a crime, not possession.
Sigh. It's been a while. I wish I had the time and patience for reading, but since I'm no longer in high school and thus required to read, I just can't find the time, what with.. all these... modern distractions..
Dear God, this is indeed not a work of fiction.
Greatest SciFi Writer of Our Age. Period. (Score:4, Interesting)
I contend that Bradbury is the single greatest science fiction writer of our age. Period. What he did - his vision - and when he did it was truly remarkable.
I still remember reading the Martian Chronicles and the Illustrated Man. For a kid that didn't like to read for fun it says a lot about books that kept me up 3 nights straight to find out how things ended.
Re:But he has a tombstone (Score:5, Interesting)
The Cemetery and Funeral businesses call these Pre-need sales and use them to maintain sales numbers.
As you kiddies will find out, when life gets near its end, the idea of selecting the services and memorials you want is very attractive. Pre-need is much less expensive than At Need. The "Death Industry" loves At Need sales. The families are easy marks for higher prices, and expensive, but unneeded services.
For a good book on the subject, try Jessica Mitford's "American Way of Death, revisited" circa 2000.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Interesting)
"Your Heinlein paperbacks are sticky, aren't they?"
While Heinlein does tend to be "Ayn Rand in Spaaaaaace!" at least it actually feels like space! Stranger in a Strange Land had flying cars and bounce tubes and stuff. The Martian Chronicles took place on Mars for no other reason than because the author says so.
Jules Verne figured out that Floridian latitudes were convenient, and yet "Rocket Summer" took place in Ohio? And for how many centuries did we know that the surface of Earth was mostly water, and yet he consistently describes Earth as a green dot in the Martian sky? These are things that anybody living after 1750 or so with a globe on their desk could deduce (and they often did), but Bradbury couldn't be bothered to exercise his supposedly vast imagination even that much? Even if it helped immerse the reader just a little bit? No, such things would get in the way of The Point. Instead of creating an imaginative world that was "the same, but different" where he could explore ideas, he created a world that was "the same, only they say they're on Mars."
Agree or disagree with Heinlein, the man could write a good story. Agree or disagree with Ellison, the man could write a good story. Ray Bradbury cannot write.
It's perhaps not so science-fictiony... (Score:4, Interesting)
... but "Something Wicked This Way Comes" is one of my favorite, most enjoyed influences in terms of writing style and pure entertainment. I've read many of his other stories (and I agree with some that "Fahrenheit 451" isn't one of his better works, though it's undeniably important), and enjoyed them all.
However---and perhaps it's the time in my life that I read it---for pure *joy* at the written word and how he wields them, "SWTWC" is probably in the top five works which has most affected me (and this post is no, nor is it meant to be, reflection of Ray's abilities).
Re:"Slow News Day" tag? (Score:4, Interesting)
Those are not geeks.
Because they don't read sci-fi? I never did as a child, yet consider myself a geek. I've always read a lot, but never found any sci-fi books that really dragged me in.
What got me into tech were the movies depicting tech. Star Wars (IV), Tron, Wargames and Back to the Future (I). Playing with Lego and Mechano while watching them blew me away.
All the while I read a huge amount. Mostly fantasy, crime and horror. When I wasn't reading, I was probably either watching sci-fi movies, or playing games or creating text adventures on my Speccy.
As anyone who reads this is probably aware, shit changes - espically in the world of tech. Where we once read, we now may watch or listen instead. In another time slashdot may have been a newspaper with comments fueled by readers snail-mail. But it ain't.
If you don't think viewing sci-fi in other media makes you geeky enough, then start telegramming in your punch-card comments.
Golden age of science fiction (Score:4, Interesting)
What makes these guys cool is that they could have probably just gotten away with writing crap, like so many authors do today, or they could have tried to prove they were smarter than everyone else by writing 'literature'. But they didn't. They wrote stuff that socially relevant and accessible to the people. As a result we have a good history or the social views of technology and cultural issues of the time. As they die we are losing first hand history from people who made living by objectively observing it and then writing it down in entertaining form.
So all these kids that think this is not relevant, well that because we know watch tv instead of read. No one becomes a scientist because of pulp fiction. Now everyone watches TV. Which is no so good because the bandwidth of TV is nowhere near as wide as the bandwidth of pulp fiction, so the vision and opinions tend to be limited and sanitized to what will attract sufficient viewers to pay the 200K it would take to develop a script, instead of the 20K it would take to buy a story. Of course, everyone now wants to be a millionaire overnight, so likely would think it was too much to develop a story and only get 20K.
The legacy of books that these guys left us is awesome. It is techy writing, unabashedly, unapologetically, and willingly. I will take this time to thank bradbury for the writing, be it science fiction, fantasy, or just fiction.
Re:"Slow News Day" tag? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, there's somehting special about books. There's just very little actual content in movies and games. A movie has what, a 100 page script? And less than that for games.
In the room with me as I type this are about 40,000 pages of imaginative fiction, and that's the fraction of what I've read that I liked enough to keep through many moves. If your only exposure to other worlds is a few dozen skiffy movies, you've hardly left your head! Heck, you probably think skiffy is SF.
And I don't even consider myself a hardcore fan - I've never gotten drunk with Niven, or punched in the face by Ellison, or watched Asimov put his moves on a young female fan, I just read a bit in my spare time, just a book or two a week.
Re:Meh (Score:2, Interesting)
"a superior power invading what was though the premier power with nightmarish force saying 'Mars, bitches!', and a man venturing to different lands where there happens to be a society that resembles what his is like at the extremes in 'teh future!'."
But the key here is that Wells actually worked on the metaphor. Good science fiction tends to be stories of "Let's take contemporary society (or some other meme), but dial up Aspect X a few orders of magnitude and explore what happens." Most of Bradbury's work starts with "Let's take contemporary society," and that's as far as he ever gets.
One of the more damning criticisms of science fiction as a genre, all the more damning because it's often true, is that many science fiction authors write science fiction because the standards are so much lower than for other forms of fiction or literature. For every genuinely good book in the genre, there are fifty that wouldn't even get shelf space in the trashy romance section.
Other than the very end, where Earth is destroyed in a fashion that more resembles Alderaan than Hiroshima, Martian Chronicles could just as easily have been written about a previously undiscovered island in the South Pacific somewhere, followed by its subsequent colonization and subjugation of its peoples (you know, what Bradbury was trying so God damned hard to write about). But "Polynesian Chronicles," named and written as such, sitting in some other part of the bookstore, wouldn't have sold enough to merit a second printing. Put "Mars" on the cover, and there's a chance that preteen boys of the day will buy your (supposedly) Mars-themed book rather than a Mars-themed trading cards, Mars-themed comic book, or Mars-themed horror movie ticket that week.
The government wants to keep you stupid, people never change, and atoms are bad, mmmkay?
Re:"Slow News Day" tag? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ray Bradbury Loves Bush.... (Score:4, Interesting)
POLITICS:
[George W. Bush is] wonderful. We needed him. Clinton is a s***head and we're glad to be rid of him. And I'm not talking about his sexual exploits. I think we have a chance to do something about education.... It doesn't matter who does it -- Democrats or Republicans -- but it's long overdue. (Salon.com, August 29, 2001)
The great thing is our counter-revolution that occurred in the polls a few weeks ago. I think it's great. All the Democrats are out and the Republicans are going to have a chance in a couple of years. It doesn't make a difference what party you belong to--it's a chance for a fresh start. It's very exciting. (Speaking about the "Republican Revolution" of 1994)
Oh yeah, and he says that Fahrenheit 451 isn't really about censorship or oppressive governments:
http://www.laweekly.com/2007-05-31/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/2 [laweekly.com]
Re:The Pedestrian (Score:3, Interesting)
Fahrenheit 451 and Orwell's 1984 should be required reading in our schools.
Unfortunately, I suspect too many students associate Bradbury's work with Michael Moore's film.
I remember reading a number of short stories or excerpt from Bradbury. One that still brings goosebumps is "There Will Come Soft Rains" [jerrywbrown.com] about an automated house that carries on, not knowing that the owners have all been killed by a nuclear blast:
"The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down."
And some are there just to give you chills, such as The Veldt [multikulti.ru] and inspired my own writing aspirations. We had a wonderful high school sophomore English teacher who introduced us to this and many other works. Bradbury is a hacker of the written word.
Re:"Slow News Day" tag? (Score:1, Interesting)
The 22nd was also the extremely talented and lovely Miho Kanno [ken-on.co.jp]'s birthday, you insensitive clod!