Ray Bradbury Has Died 315
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."
The most human side of scifi... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
Re:The most human side of scifi... (Score:5, Insightful)
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:His most famous work (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Bradbury it wasn't about censorship. According to everybody else and their mother it WAS about censorship. So clearly the takeaway is that Bradbury sucks at getting his point across.
What really scares me. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Dinosaurs pass on (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:His most famous work (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, that's because people are stupid and will make the simplest possible connections they can. Book burning, historically, was about specific books. Nazis would burn books with Jewish authors, Christians would burn "satanic" books.
In Bradbury's novel, they burned ALL books, and never once because anyone disagreed with anything the books said. They burned them because of rampant anti-intellectualism, which was clearly recurring throughout the book. People burn because because they know they're supposed to, and don't care to look into the matter any further. Beatty, Montag's superior, even suggested it was common for firemen to be interested, but they'd grow out of it.
You only get "censorship" from 451 if you didn't really read it.
Re:The most human side of scifi... (Score:4, Insightful)
He was the only author that was required reading in school (in several grades no less) that I still enjoyed on my own time as well. Not even English teachers can screw up Bradbury's works.
Re:His most famous work (Score:5, Insightful)
Books tend to have three meanings:
1) What the author meant
2) What the reader takes away from the story
3) What English teacher say the author meant and what they (the teachers) think readers should take away from the story
1 and 2 are often, but not always, the same. Neither 1 nor 2 are ever the same as 3.
Re:What really scares me. (Score:4, Insightful)
The book burning is pointless. The anti-intellectualism is there. The apathy towards real knowledge with supporting context is gone. Censorship only matters to people who care about deep understanding of things. There aren't many of those.
Re:His most famous work (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is that in the real world no one burns books except as an attempt at censorship, and Bradbury never really established why they burned books in Fahrenheit 451, so people made the obvious jump.
Once that jump is made the whole book looks like a commentary on how censorship makes people stupid (or rather ignorant).
If Bradbury really wanted it to be about how TV made people ignorant because they ignore books, he really should not have made burning the books such a big deal.
Re:His most famous work (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still censorship. It's just censorship taken to an extreme.
It's an overkill approach to suppressing anything that might shake people out of their stupor. The government didn't want anyone to start thinking. Of course the populace were pretty indifferent.
It wasn't "the will of the people", it was a heavy handed means of asserting control and suppressing ideas.
Suppressing ideas, even if done very crudely, is what censorship is. The fact that there's a lot of collateral damage doesn't really matter.
Harlequins were destroyed to make sure that copies of On Walden Pond burned with it.
The great irony is the fact that the tech he was objecting too ultimately will ensure that such a future cannot happen. I have more books in my transistor radio/phone than any character in Fahrenheit 451.
Re:The most human side of scifi... (Score:3, Insightful)
FIXED LINK: http://www.seedpeer.me/details/2909203/Ray-Bradbury-Audio-Book-Collection.html [seedpeer.me]
I'm for copyright but only for one generation (20 years). The purpose of art is to enrich culture by becoming past of the shared public property. Example: The movie As The Clouds Rolled By is now public domain and free to view..... would we be better off, if it was copyrighted and locked in some MGM vault somewhere? No. Culture is meant to be shared.
Re:His most famous work (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it's not like the author is given a main character and plot and then forced to somehow bring the two together. He invents the main character, and the plot. If he didn't want book burning to be the focus, maybe he shouldn't have made that the main character's job and then named the book after it.
Re:The most human side of scifi... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:His most famous work (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the things I like about books is that they are a collaboration. If you watch a movie or TV show then you get what you are given, room can sometimes be left for some personal interpretation, but generally by being intentionally vague and leaving holes in the mosaic.
With a good book the author can lay down his vision, as rich and full as he can make it and ripe with intent both conscious and otherwise. But when you partake of his creation, the words act not as a finished product, but as a seed. They take root in your mind and grow, blossoming into a world that extends far beyond what was captured on the page, full of a detail and subtlety undreamt of in cinema, a living world which is not constrained by the covers that house it, but only slips out of focus where it extends beyond them. A deeply personal expanse born of both the author's mind and your own.
I think that's one of the reasons that, for all their convenience, I'm not overfond of books-on-tape. Every pause, every inflection, every subtle choice of pronunciation inserts a tiny sliver of a third mind into the communion. Not enough to make a substantial contribution, but enough to twist and stunt the growth of the world.
Perhaps too there is a power in the written word itself. The word is an abstraction of the concept, and the written word a further abstraction of that. Perhaps the very act of reading, of translating symbols into words, and words into concepts imparts a psychological momentum that launches them deep into your mind where they can find fertile ground and grow beyond concept into imagery and substance, acquiring depth and breadth until a scattering of concepts becomes a world.