I never thought of these stories as science fiction. His short stories were spread like pearls throughout countless dense anthologies. By the time I was a kid, the used bookstore that I hit up with my dad every weekend was full of Bradbury's dog-eared masterpieces. Wilson, author of Robopocalypseīradbury honed his craft for a long time. To this day, I cannot think about certain subjects without using Bradbury as a reference point – subjects like Halloween and circuses and sea monsters and the word 'wonder' in both noun and verb form.īradbury's The Martian Chronicles is beloved by sci-fi fans.

Here it is, more simply: I didn't know, until Bradbury, that a book could make you feel so much. His dreadful merry-go-rounds spun to the vertiginous shriek of the Wurlitzer his trees whispered bleak secrets in the brisk October breezes his rockets scaled the skies in a chorus of grinding roars his children ran through libraries, refusing to be shushed.

Bradbury provided a vast library of melodies, shouts and sound effects to jolt my timid 11-year-old imagination into full wakefulness and attention. Everything I read before that was a silent movie. That kind of describes the shock I felt when I first discovered the stories of Ray Bradbury. Think about what a shock it must've been the first time moviegoers saw a picture with sound the first time those giants on the screen opened their mouths and sang. Joe Hill, author of 20th Century Ghosts (and recipient of a Ray Bradbury fellowship) His was a courageous heart and a generous soul. And then with Fahrenheit 451 he gave us the rarest thing of all: a genuine, inescapable Myth for Our Time. He took risks in his writing that could send him over into incoherence and sentimentality or take him straight to beauty, which is always new and always rare. SF is so often a control freak's genre, and Ray Bradbury was never under control – his own or anybody else's.

It was newer than new, because there'd never been anything quite like it, nor has there been since. My mother and I read and loved The Martian Chronicles in the early '50s, when it was new. Remembering Ray Bradbury: A Roundup of Tributes and Memorable Clips Ursula K.Ray Bradbury on Sci-Fi, God and Robots: The Late Author's Biggest Ideas.

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