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Blues for a Red Planet’s Visionary

By red pill junkieon

Acclaimed Science-Fiction legend Ray Bradbury has departed our world. The writer of classics like The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 & Something Wicked This Way Comes passed away last night at the age of 91.

Forever a Luddite, it seems the Red Planet’s visionary opted for Venus as a much suitable transport than an airplane for his next destination.

 

 "In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury has inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create," the statement said. "A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time."   

Feel free to share your admiration for his work, and how it influenced your life’s journey.

Rest in Peace.

red pill junkie
Agnostic gnostic, walking conundrum & metaphysical oxymoron (with emphasis in the 'moron' part), the mysterious RPJ leaves a double life: By day he serves as Grand Master of the International Sacred Order of Lucha Libre, but at night he pursues his life-long study of everything considered mysterious and/or 'paranormal' --a term he personally detests... When he's not exploring the web looking for his daily fix of Forteana, he can be found blogging, doodling, fooling around and offering his services as news administrator and writer at The Daily Grail. He also regularly participates in other websites and podcasts like Radio Misterioso and Where Did the Road Go? He impatiently awaits for the return of the mothership in Mexico City. absurdbydesign.com
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10 Comments

  1. Bradbury was an Iconoclastic Genius
    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.

      1. Thanks, RPJ. That one word
        Thanks, RPJ. That one word just made my entire day!
        I so loved your title for this “Blues for a Red Planet Visionary”
        THAT, sir, was brilliant!

  3. Thanks, 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

  5. Sentimental ramblings
    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.

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