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."
Collected Short Stories (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [amazon.com] (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.
Re:The most human side of scifi... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:His most famous work (Score:5, Interesting)
as bricks and mortar burn (Score:5, Interesting)
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?!!![*] [pcworld.com]
The New Yorker (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [newyorker.com]
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.
Prescient (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The most human side of scifi... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, very well put. Fahrenheit 451 was so far ahead of the times it is frightening.
Far ahead when it was written, perhaps. As he himself put it, "I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it."
Re:The most human side of scifi... (Score:2, Interesting)
Take a day and spend some time reading (or listening) to Bradbury's many short fiction works. That's what I will be doing:
Ray Bradbury - complete Free Download
http://www.torrentz.eu/36aa4f06780dc60cf4d5da0cb67232dfda52547e [torrentz.eu]
Ray Bradbury Audio Book Collection http://www.seedpeer.me/details/2909203/Ray-Bradbury-Audio-Book-Collection [seedpeer.me]...
Re:The most human side of scifi... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+beggar+on+Dublin+bridge.-a03579795 [thefreelibrary.com]
"A fool,' I said. "That's what I am.'
"Why?' asked my wife. "What for?'
I brooded by our third-floor hotel window. On the Dublin street below a man passed, his face to the lamplight. "Him,' I muttered. "Two days ago----'
Two days ago as I was walking along, someone had "hissed' me from the hotel alley. "Sir, it's important! Sir!'
I turned into the shadow. This little man in the direct tones said, "I've a job in Belfast if I just had a pound for the train fare!'
I hesitated.
"A most important job!' he went on swiftly. "Pays well! I'll--I'll mail you back the loan! Just give me your name and hotel----'
He knew me for a tourist. But it was too late; his promise to pay had moved me. The pound note crackled in my hand, being worked free from several others.
The man's eye skimmed like a shadowing hawk. "If I had two pounds, I could eat on the way----'
I uncrumpled two bills.
"And three pounds would bring the wife----'
I unleafed a third.
"Ah, hell!' cried the man. "Five, just five poor pounds, would find us a hotel in that brutal city and let me get to the job, for sure!'
What a dancing fighter he was, light on his toes, weaving, tapping with his hands, flicking with his eyes, smiling with his mouth, jabbing with his tongue.
"Lord thank you, bless you, sir!'
He ran, my five pounds with him. I was half in the hotel before I realized that, for all his vows, he had not recoreded my name. "Gah!' I cried then.
"Gah!' I cried now at the window. For there, passing below, was the very fellow who should have been in Belfast two nights ago.
"Oh, I know him,' said my wife. "He stopped me this noon. Wanted train fare to Galway.'
"Did you give it to him?'
"No,' said my wife simply.
Then the worst thing happened. The demon glanced up, saw us and darned if he didn't wave!
I had to stop myself from waving back. A sickly grin played on my lips. "It's got so I hate to leave the hotel,' I said.
"It's cold out, all right.'
"No,' I said. "Not the cold. Them.'
And we looked again from the window. There was the cobbled Dublin street with the night wind blowing in a fine soot along one way to Trinity College, another to St. Stephen's Green. Across by the sweet shop two men stood mummified in the shadows. Farther up in a doorway was a bundle of old newspapers that would stir like a pack of mice and wish you the time of evening if you walked by. Below, by the hotel entrance, stood a feverish hothouse rose of a woman with a bundle.
"Oh, the beggars,' said my wife.
"No, not just "oh, the beggars,'' I said. "But, oh, the people in the streets, who somehow became beggars.'
My wife peered at me. "You're not afraid of them?'
"Yes, no. Hell. It's that woman with the bundle who's worst. She's a force of nature, she is. Assaults you with her poverty. As for the others-- well, it's a big chess game for me now. We've been in Dublin--what?--eight weeks? Eight weeks I've sat up here with my typewriter, and studied their off hours and on. When they take a coffee break, I take one, run for the sweet shop, the bookstore, the Olympia Theatre. If I time it right, there's no handout, no my wanting to trot them into the barbershop or the kitchen.'
"Lord,' said my wife, "you sound driven.'
"I am. But most of all by that beggar on O'Connell Bridge!'
"Which one?'
"Which one, indeed! He's a wonder, a terror. I hate him, I love him. To see is to disbelieve him. Come on.'
On the way down in the elevator my wife said, "If you held your face right, the beggars wouldn't bother you.'
"My face,' I explained patiently, "is my face. It's from Apple Dumpling, Wisconsin, Sarsaparilla, Maine. KIND TO DOGS is writ on my brow for all to read. Let the street be empty-- then let me step out and there's a strikers' march of freeloader
Re:The most human side of scifi... (Score:4, Interesting)
Art Popp commented::
...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.
No, no, NO. Ray Bradbury was a great, poetic writer, but he was NOT a science fiction writer. Period. He, himself, always characterized his work as fantasy, and I couldn't more enthusiastically agree.
I've been reading science fiction since I was six years old, and I never considered Bradbury as an sf writer, even when I was a child. Mainly, that's because there's NO science in his fiction. Poetry, yes. Horror? Plenty of that. Magic? It's ubiquitous in Bradbury. But science? Uh, uh.
Take "The Veldt", for instance, where a 3-D immersive wall display somehow turns into a portal into an actual African veldt, complete with a pride of hungry lions. Horripilating fiction, yes - but not SCIENCE fiction. It -like pretty much all of Bradbury's work - is fantasy dressed up in science fiction clothes.
I always resented the goddamned media portraying Ray Bradbury as a science fiction author, all the while ignoring his contemporaries (Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Anderson, etc.) who actually WERE science fiction authors. Back in the 60's, whenever there was some major science-y news story, they'd trot poor old Ray out, and present him to the unwashed masses as "science fiction author Ray Bradbury". And Bradbury, of course, would have noting of value to say about the science aspect of the story, because HE WASN'T A SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR. In fact, one of my absolute fondest memories was the extended conversation between Walter Cronkhite, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur Clarke during the wee hours of the morning on July 21, 1969, while the Apollo 11 astronauts spent 6 hours sleeping prior to that first, historic step onto the Moon. One of the things that I most appreciated about that redeye special was the fact that RAY BRADBURY WASN'T PART OF IT. It increased my already considerable respect for Uncle Walter by a non-trivial margin, let me tell you.
Don't get me wrong, here. I enjoyed Ray Bradbury's work. He was an engaging writer, whose prose style often read like blank verse. I just never considered him to be a science fiction writer - AND NEITHER DID HE.
And, btw, if you want to read the work of a master of the human side of science fiction, try the late, great Theodore Sturgeon. HE was an amazing science fiction writer, whose work often reads like poetry, but, unlike Bradbury's, it was ACTUAL science fiction, not fantasy dressed up in scifi clothes ...
Farenheit 451 (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Bradbury book signing (Score:4, Interesting)