Something wicked(ly brilliant) that way has gone

This is not safe for work. Very not safe for work. Very, very, VERY not safe for work.  But wonderful. Every great writer should get such a tribute. And live to see it. Bradbury did and he loved it.

Ray Bradbury. August 22, 1920 - June 6, 2012.

Comments

[muddy]

I recently re-read Fahrenheit 451 because I was recommending it to a young person and wanted to be sure it was as good as I remembered it to be. It was better.

The wall to wall screens with “stories” going on them all the time, and everyone supposed to be talking about what the people in the stories are doing, makes me think of reality shows on big screen tv. When I read the book first in HS I never thought that portion would be prescient.

I shudder. Well, at least we still have books, that was the part I worried about when I first read it.

[Hank]

That's just as awesome as Molly Lewis singing about (and in the clip, to) Stephen Fry.

[democommie]

Ray Bradbury was a good sci-fi writer when he was in his prime. I've read a number of his books and enjoyed them. His first three novels and a couple of his anthologies are still in boxes in my crawl space.

I think he went off the rails sometime in the 70's and became pretty much a reactionary republican. Not 'zackly what I look for in my authors influences.

It's sort of funny in a way that Bradbury became so conservative. In the early days of Scifi it was really the only way a lot of writers could address touch political subjects without raising the hackles of the red baiters in the U.S.

[Carl Reed]

Just wanted to share this remembrance of Bradbury by Roanoke VA blogger and arts writer Mike Allen. I came across the Rachel Bloom video on his blog some time ago. Rachel's got other interesting videos on youTube. That Stephen Fry tribute was also wonderful.

http://blogs.roanoke.com/arts/2012/06/a-farewell-to-ray-bradbury/

Heck, i'll just insert the meaty part of the post:

"I became aware of Bradbury when I was a kid though the 1979 NBC miniseries that adapted his collection of related tales called “The Martian Chronicles.” I later became a huge fan of his eerie short stories, such as “The Crowd,” “The Coffin” and “The Scythe,” and his haunting novel “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

In 2001 I learned what a class act Bradbury could be as a person. I was working on a profile of Roanoke author Nelson Bond, who wrote hundreds of short stories, radio plays and even television shows in the early 20th century. (Nelson died in 2006 at age 97.) I’d seen books Bradbury had inscribed to Nelson on the shelves in Nelson’s bookshop and knew he was a fan of Nelson’s work. I had no handy means to reach him directly, so I wrote him a letter and hoped.

He called me at home. My wife Anita had the memorable experience of needing to tell a friend she had to hang up because Ray Bradbury was on the other line. Bradbury and I had a short but delightful conversation. In his deep, rich voice, he kept insisting he didn’t think he could say much that would help me, all the while very quotably praising Nelson’s sense of humor. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to tell him how much I admired his work. He responded by graciously thanking me."

[subnumine]

Ironically, I'm trying to take Lance's request to read the rest of the blog, not just the political posts.

But all I can reply to is democommie's comment: it's more than the repressions which Pohl and Kornbluth evaded; as Bujold said at Denvention four years ago, most of the stories in the field are relentlessly political. This includes the politics of the fiction - which decadent noble winds up with the crown - as well as the politics of the author, which ranges from moderately reformist through idealistic to batshit insane. (The task of filling in the blanks I'd rather leave to you.)