Writer who saw the future dies
Bradbury popularised science fiction
RAY Bradbury imagined the future, and didn’t always like what he saw. In his books, the science fiction master conjured a dark, depressing future where the government used fire departments to burn books in order to hold its people in ignorance and where racial hatred was so pervasive that some people left Earth for other planets.
At the same time, his work, just like the author himself, could also be joyful, whimsical and nostalgic, as when he was describing the magic of a Midwestern summer or the innocence and fearlessness of a boy who befriends a houseful of ghosts.
Bradbury, who died on Tuesday aged 91, said often that all of his stories, no matter how fantastic or frightening they might be, were metaphors for everyday life and everything it entailed. And they all came from his childhood.
Born Ray Douglas Bradbury on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, the author once described himself as “that special freak, the man with the child inside who remembers all”. He claimed to have total recall of his life, even his final weeks in his mother’s womb.
“The great thing about my life is that everything I’ve done is a result of what I was when I was 12 or 13,” he said in 1982.
For more than 70 years, Bradbury spun tales that appeared in books and magazines, in the cinema and on the television screen, firing the imaginations of generations of children, college kids and grown-ups across the world. Years later, the sheer volume and quality of his work would surprise even him.
“I sometimes get up at night when I can’t sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say: ‘My God, did I write that? Did I write that?’ Because it’s still a surprise,” he said in 2000.
In many ways, he was always that 12-year-old boy who was inspired to become a writer after a chance meeting with a carnival magician called Mr Electrico who, to Bradbury’s delight, tapped him with his sword and said: “Live forever!”
“I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard,” Bradbury said later. “I started writing every day. I never stopped.”
He rose to literary fame in 1950 with The Martian Chronicles, a series of intertwined stories that satirised capitalism, racism and superpower tensions as it portrayed Earth colonisers destroying an idyllic Martian civilisation.
Many of his stories were fuelled by the nightmares he suffered as a child growing up poor in the Midwest during the Great Depression. At the same time, though, they were tempered by the joy he found upon arriving with his family in glitzy Los Angeles in 1934.
Tributes from actors, directors and other celebrities poured in upon news of his death.
“He was my muse for the better part of my sci-fi career,” director Steven Spielberg said in a statement. “He lives on through his legion of fans. In the world of science fiction and fantasy and imagination, he is immortal.”
Although he was slowed by a stroke in 1999 that forced him to use a wheelchair, Bradbury kept up socially and professionally.
As he had done for decades, he continued to write every day, trying to produce at least 1 000 words in the basement of his home in the Cheviot Hills section of Los Angeles and to make frequent visits to book fairs, libraries and schools.
His writings ranged from horror and mystery to humour and sympathetic stories about the Irish, blacks and Mexican-Americans. – Sapa-AP