A Rambling Raconteur

I was prodigiously saddened yesterday to learn of the passing of Ray Bradbury. To me, he was the science fiction writer. The greatest of the genre, especially of those still living. He is a big part of why I write science fiction, and certainly why I read it. I was first introduced to Mr. Bradbury's work in junior high school. I read Fahrenheit 451. This was before I had read Lord of the Rings. Before Hitchhiker's Guide. The only fantastical or science fictional things I was readily familiar with were the original Star Wars movies and X-Men cartoons. But then I read Fahrenheit 451. It was a game changer. Science fiction wasn't all Star Trek or Wookies. There were other options. Sci-fi could be meaningful and intellectual. It could teach as well as entertain. It didn't have to be about aliens and spaceships. It didn't have to praise the wonders of technology. It quite often warned against dependency thereon. After 451, I bought The Illustrated Man. And then a huge collection of short stories. In these days I also began to explore other "genre" works. I read the Lord of the Rings. I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And so many others. Somewhere in all of this I had decided that I was a writer. Then I decided to write science fiction and fantasy. It seemed like it was what I was born to do. These were the stories that mattered to me.

 Don't get me wrong. I love The Great Gatsby and To Kill A Mockingbird just as much as the next English Major, but to me, they weren't the Great American Novel. For me it was Fahrenheit 451. Or maybe it wasn't even a novel. Maybe it was The Martian Chronicles or The Illustrated Man. Maybe it was a collection of short stories instead of one larger piece. Maybe it was, and is, that Bradbury is the Great American Writer. He's kinda like Captain America, really.

In light of the recent superhero movies, this comparison sprang to mind fairly quickly as I was researching the characters that make up the "Avengers," the superhero group from the Marvel Comic Universe. I was looking at the biography for the character of Steve Rogers (who becomes Captain America) and I realized something interesting: he was born only a month and a half before Ray Bradbury was. Cap was born July 4, 1920. Bradbury was born August 22 of the same year. Captain America was frozen after WWII--and the unfrozen when we needed him to fight the bad guys. In the most recent movies, he has been asleep/frozen since 1945. Much is made of the fact that he is a "man out of time." But Bradbury is the same age. And even though he was never frozen for decades at a time, he still ended up being a man out of time. And space.

Bradbury was known to love and be interested by space travel and rocket ships, but his most well-known work serves as a warning against dependency on technology. He set a standard in science-fiction--and fiction in general--that a writer did not have to write about the way things had been, or were, or would be. A writer wrote about what should be. What should not be. A writer could entertain and warn. Educate and enlighten. In his writing, Ray Bradbury embraced the best of humanity and told us to be wary of the rest. He sent us traveling to Mars, building rockets in the yard, longing for space travel, fleeing our own prejudices, learning from past mistakes, watching the world collapse, watching the world rebuild...and so much more. He was a man from a time that may never be, and a space that might only exist in our dreams.

Thanks for the memories and the futures.

Rest in peace.      Ray Bradbury - 1920-2012