Sci Fi Icons #9--Ray Bradbury

I really should have posted this one earlier. Ray Bradbury passed away nearly a month ago at the age of 91. His contributions to science fiction--he helped establish the concept--sorely deserved mention then. Better late than never to eulogize.

In his childhood, Bradbury was a voracious reader of the pioneers of science fiction and fantasy jules Verne, H. G. Wells, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, among others. His interest in the genres lead him to begin a lifelong friendship with Forrest J. Ackerman after his family moved to Los Angeles in the min-’30’s. Ackerman inducted Bradbury into the Science Fiction League, a group of up and coming authors that included Robert A. Heinlein, Fedric Brown, and jack Wilkinson. Future speial effects wizard Ray Harrausen was also a member.

Bradbury made his first professional sale to pulp magazine Super science stories in 1941. The sale launhed a career in short stories, novels, teleplays, and screenplays that did not end until 2006 with the publication of Bradbury’s final novel, Farewell summer, in 2006. Among Bradbury’s most famous written works are Something Wicked this way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, and the iconic anti-censorship Fahrenheit 451. four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit being the temperature at which paper--specifically books here--burns.

Bradbury himself disputed the label ’science fiction writer.” He believed himself to be a fantasist who wrote only one science fiction novel--the aforementioned Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury believed all science fiction should be based in reality. Anything that could not possibly happen is fantasy. This famous declaration regarding Fahrenheit 451 as his only science fiction and his definition of such, is his warning It could Happen here.

In spite of Bradbury’s assertion he was not a science fiction writer, his contributions to the genre are legion. I recently mention of the most famous famous, the Butterfly Effect, in a recent Stargate SG-1 review. The Butterfly Effect is when a seemingly insignifant change made in the past drastically alters the future. Very few science fiction franchises have not touch on the concept.

I was a late comer to Bradbury. I had watched some of The Martian chronicles miniseries in the early ’80’s when my Star Wars crazed mind sought out any and all science fiction. I was too young to appreciate it and Bradbury’s writing until high school age when my fondness for Harlan Ellison prompted me to seek him out. I am certainly glad I did.