RIP Ray Bradbury: From Fiction to Reality

As many news agents broadcasted, one of the greatest science fiction author, Ray Bradbury, died last night at age 91.  Bradbury anticipated iPods, interactive television, electronic surveillance and live, sensational media events, including televised police pursuits - and not necessarily as good things. The science fiction-fantasy master spent his life conjuring such visions from his childhood dreams and Cold War fears, spinning tales of telepathic Martians, lovesick sea monsters and, in uncanny detail, the high-tech, book-burning future of "Fahrenheit 451."  His prolific nature was slowed in recent years by a stroke that meant he had to use a wheelchair. But he remained active over the years, turning out new novels, plays, screenplays and a volume of poetry. Just this week he wrote in The New Yorker about discovering science fiction when he was 7 or 8 years old. - The Associated Press. Read his Variety obit too.

Wise, wicked and wonderful — that's how author Ray Bradbury began an early chapter of The Martian Chronicles, his work of space-age paranoia and lyrical wonder that made science fiction respectable in the 1950s.

Bradbury, whose death at 91 was disclosed by his daughter in Los Angeles, was an American original in the storytelling tradition of Hawthorne, Hemingway and Edgar Allan Poe.

Both quiet poet and reluctant prophet, Bradbury had a writing style that was a cascade of imagery and simple truths: Government was the enemy of creativity (Fahrenheit 451), the dark was always to be feared (The October Country), robots were not our friends (I Sing the Body Electric!), and clowns, carnivals and sideshows were the scariest things of all (Something Wicked This Way Comes).

In 1956, famed director John Huston asked Bradbury to adapt Moby-Dick for film. When the young and untested Bradbury asked, "Why me? After all, I mainly write for pulp magazines," Huston replied, "It was that story of yours about the dinosaur and the lighthouse. I thought I smelled the ghost of Melville."

Wary of technology — he famously refused to drive a car or fly — Bradbury nonetheless had a "cockeyed optimism" about the future, even if Martians were secretly trying to subvert landings there, or his fascist firemen in Fahrenheit 451 were nervously burning all books and the fanciful characters within.

"I didn't write Fahrenheit 451 to predict the future," Bradbury once said. "I wrote it to prevent the future."

(extracted from hamptonroad.com, telegraph.co.uk and USA Today)