Blues for a Red Planet's Visionary

It is a black day for literature today as we mourn the passing of this unparalleled visionary. His works were life-changing and awe-inspiring. I re-read Martian Chronicles last year and was as blown away at 42 as I was when I was a kid reading it for the first time at 13. He will be greatly missed. Today in honor of Mr. Bradbury go and do something - anything - creative even if it's sitting in a chair to daydream about some far away place or distant future. Oh, and buy one of his books and give it to a kid. Let's inspire the future.

To the stars Ray

Thanks, Ray.

Where some dare to wonder, you dared to share it. I may not possess photographic recall of all of those sharings. I'd be lucky to recite a single line, in fact. But it doesn't matter. I know its there. And life is that much richer for having it.

Here's a couple quotes some of you might enjoy:

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“No person ever died that had a family.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

A personal hero and someone who enriched my life immeasurably. So long, Ray, and thanks for sharing your dreams with us.

Martian Chronicles was the first bit of science fiction I read that made me stand up and say "this can be something different." Science fiction can still be magic, can still be utterly human. I reached the conclusion that science-fiction is a limited frame of reference, that the true works of art paint on all four walls. That old tag science-fiction just happens to be hanging on one of them.

His stories seem intertwined with my own and another's. I remember a time, ages ago, when my dearest old friend, upon discovering we both had read, devoured, re-read (digested) October Country, loaned me a copy of Something Wicked (a tattered old copy of her mother's, no less, with a smell of autumn leaves) and how I (shamefully) lost it just before reading the final pages. Even more shamefully, in the intervening decade I never quite got around to revisiting it. Somehow it is still comforting to know that at any time I can hop on that reverse-go-round and know (certainly) that I will be transported back to a time when things were simple and certain.

But it was two nights ago I was sitting outside under the not-quite-full moon reading the final pages of Fahrenheit 451 (another shame that it took me so long, but not quite.) Now I wonder which of his words I may or may not have been reading when he passed. How many people that night stopped what they were doing, if for only a moment, and gazed at the moon with October thoughts. If only for a moment.