Fond remembrances of Ray Bradbury
“Science fiction” was too narrow, too dismissive a name for what Ray did, and he didn’t like the label either. His skills transcended the genre, leaped across many genres, comic and tragic, plays, TV, poetry, epigrams, novels, novellas, a stupefying output. And his vigor was legendary. I remember being gobsmacked when, six years ago, at age 85, Ray told me he was working on an opera.
He never drove, never had a license, was all for public transit. The only part of L.A. life he never did experience was the odd Joan Didion exaltation of steering a car in swoops and arcs along the loops of the freeways, but he certainly didn’t miss it. Maybe that accounted for his serenity of mien, that contemplative time, the “philosophical retreat,” as he wrote of his train travel, that the rest of us, belted behind the wheel, did not get.
Each year he sent out a Christmas newsletter, always stamped with a lovely Christmas-themed painting, like the Sassoferrato Madonna hanging in Hearst Castle. After I heard he had died, I scrambled around and found one of them. For Christmas 2010, his annual poem began: “I am God’s greatest basking hound, I’ve found the sun and kept it in my blood, I sleep it in my brooding veins, Take pains to sunflower its flight, Burn night away by lifting head to follow, Then swallow up swift drifts of light.”
You read it aloud and it is rich and nourishing, like all the others, like everything he wrote, like Ray himself, supremely humane and irresistibly human. —Patt Morrison
on Opinion L.A.
News outlets around the world announced the death Tuesday of “science fiction author” Ray Bradbury at age 91. But it’s a description the writer of “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” found nettlesome.
“I’m not a science fiction writer,” Bradbury was frequently quoted as saying. “I’ve written only one book of science fiction. All the others are fantasy.”
That lone exception was “Fahrenheit,” the dystopian 1953 novel about a future America where books are outlawed. To Bradbury’s
discerning eye, the narratives he wrote were too implausible to be contained within the more logicdriven realm of sci-fi.
“Fantasies are things that can’t happen,” Bradbury said, “and science fiction is about things that can happen.”
Science fiction and fantasy fans live for discussion and debate, and the border between their lands is forever in dispute.
Much of Bradbury’s work twinned a nostalgic look at childhood with a magical sensibility, including “Dandelion Wine,” a collection of short stories set in a fictional Midwestern town in the 1920s, and “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” his 1962 novel about a pair of 13-year-old boys and a mysterious traveling carnival with a menacing, tattoo-covered Mr. Dark. Sci-fi purists were just as reluctant to claim Bradbury, both because of his mainstream audience and his vocal skepticism of new technologies. Bradbury’s opinion was that, in fetishizing rockets and robots, humans were letting go of something deeper— their hearts.
“We’ve got to dumb America up again,” he once said. —Rebecca Keegan on Hero Complex
Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451” was an instant hit and has remained in print since its publication in 1953. Though the book may be the most lasting way that Bradbury has been remembered, the circumstances of its creation are less well known.
In Los Angeles in the early 1950s, Ray Bradbury went in search of a peaceful place to work. “I had a large family at home,” he said five decades later. They must have been a particularly lively bunch, because at the time it was just Ray, his wife, Marguerite, and two young children.
The writing refuge Bradbury found was in the basement of the Lawrence Clark Powell Library at UCLA — and in fact, it wasn’t all that quiet. “I heard this typing,” he explained. “I went down in the basement of the UCLA library and by God there was a room with 12 typewriters in it that you could rent for 10 cents a half-hour. And there were eight or nine students in there working away like crazy.”
So he went to the bank and returned with a bag of dimes. He plugged a dime into the machine, typed fast for 30 minutes, and then dropped another. Nine days—and $9.80 in dimes later—he’d written “Fahrenheit 451.” Almost.
What he’d finished there was “The Fireman,” a short story published in Galaxy magazine in 1951. Later, he expanded the story into “Fahrenheit 451,” which was published in paperback by Ballantine. When “Fahrenheit 451” was selected as one of the books for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read project, Bradbury said, “My God, what a place to write that book!” —Carolyn Kellogg
on Jacket Copy