What I found in a Ray Bradbury book was a sense of wonder,
where science fiction and dark fantasy intersected with the realm of literature.
He was one of the few authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction –the 1940s
and 50s- who transcended the genre and was able to make it accessible to all
readers, not those who just loved science fiction. As the Los Angeles Times
noted, Bradbury had the ability to "to write lyrically and evocatively of
lands an imagination away, worlds he anchored in the here and now with a sense
of visual clarity and small-town familiarity.”
Bradbury passed away here in Los Angles yesterday at the age
of 91. Born in Waukegan , a the northern suburb of Chicago that hugged Lake
Michigan, his family eventually settled
in Los Angeles in 1934, but the mystery of small town life never left him, as a
lot of his novels and short stories where set in Green Town Illinois, his
mirror world of Waukegan.
But for Bradbury, he never considered himself a science
fiction writer. “First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done
one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit
451, based on reality. It was named so to represent the temperature at
which paper ignites. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction
of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles
is not science fiction, its fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the
reason it's going to be around a long time—because it's a Greek myth, and myths
have staying power.”
And for me, it was those dark fantasies, those myths he
created, like Something Wicked This Way
Comes that inspired me not to write –though I’ve often wanted to- but to
read even more. Lifelong readers are becoming a rarity these days (“There are
worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”, and today’s
science fiction and fantasy have de-evolved into paint-by-number tales designed
for kids and adults who think even Stephen King is too complex.
But reading was important to him, as well as it is to me. He
said at one time “Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and
universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any
money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we
had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a
week for 10 years.”
He also reflected on the year he was born as being an
influence on how he wrote, that being born in 1920 helped him create those fantasies
worlds in our present world because “the auto was only 20 years old. Radio
didn't exist. TV didn't exist. I was born at just the right time to write about
all of these things.”
And there are an untold number of novelists today who have
been greatly influenced by his “lyrical” style. I would say authors like
Stephen King, Peter Straub and Neil Gaiman and many others owe a great deal of
their fantasy imagination and their take on small town life to what Bradbury
was able to access. Even hardcore science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov and
Arthur C. Clarke were able to transcend their technical prose and present them
in with a literary style and with an accessible clarity.
Much of his short stories were adapted for TV, like Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Over a
period of 50 years, more than 35 features, shorts, and TV movies were based on
Bradbury's stories or screenplays. Bradbury also helped legendary director John
Houston adapt Moby Dick in 1956, while
his short story I Sing the Body Electric
was adapted for the 100th episode of The
Twilight Zone in 1962. In 1966, Oskar Werner and Julie Christie starred in Fahrenheit 451, directed by François
Truffaut, while in 1969, Rod Steiger starred as The Illustrated Man. In 1980, NBC adapted The Martian Chronicles into a three-part TV miniseries starring
Rock Hudson. Bradbury said he found it "just boring."
In 1983, Disney adapted my favorite Bradbury novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, which
starred Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce. While there is a good film in there,
it failed to live up to the novel’s dark and atmospheric nature. Part of the
problem was while Bradbury’s original screenplay was more faithful to his
novel, director Jack Clayton and Disney wanted a more family friendly version,
something that was accessible to all. They brought in John Mortimer to do an
uncredited rewrite, and the film suffered due to these two, very different styles
of writing. The film was a financial failure for Disney, who at the time,
ironically, was trying to break-out of their animated and family film style
that was painting them in a corner during the late 1970s and early 80s.
To me, this is one novel –beyond The Martian Chronicles- that deserves a more faithful remake.
Despite the numerous (and often prescient) technological
predictions of his novels, he expressed skepticism about the value of the
Internet to society, stating that it has reduced people's ability to
communicate and hold conversations with each other. He also exhibited skepticism
with regard to modern technology by resisting the conversion of his work into
e-books and stating that "We have too many cellphones. We've got too many
internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines
now.”
“And if he should forget, the dandelion wine stood in the
cellar, numbered huge for each and every day. He would go there often, stare
straight into the sun until he could stare no more, then close his eyes and
consider the burned spots, the fleeting scars left dancing on his warm eyelids;
arranging, rearranging each fire and reflection until the pattern was clear…”
Rest in Peace, Ray Bradbury. You’ll never be gone, because
all I have to do is look at my bookshelf. That brings a smile to face on this
sad day.
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