The acclaimed author Ray Bradbury died Tuesday at age 91. Almost any superlative that one could lob toward Bradbury fails to capture the full contours of his influence and talent. He defined a genre of literature predicated on fantastical future technologies.
Yet, he was something of a luddite, eschewing computers and wholesale rebuking the Internet. In searching for an appropriate starting place to circumscribe his work, the term “prolific” is a good place. In all, Bradbury published almost three dozen books, 600 short stories as well as innumerable poems, essays, and plays. His short stories have appeared in more than 1,000 school “recommended reading” anthologies.
Bradbury wrote in a variety of genres — horror, mystery, humor — and extended himself into writing for television and films. “What I have always been is a hybrid author … I am completely in love with movies … and I am completely in love with libraries,” Bradbury said in a 2009 interview.
Unlike many artists whose greatness is not appreciated during their lifetime, Bradbury’s contributions were well-celebrated. His work has been included in four Best American Short Story collections. He was awarded the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, the PEN Center USA West Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the National Medal for the Arts.
While the accolades and ribbons reflect a certain recognition, the wider impact of his writing can be seen in the legion of fans he inspired and the technological innovations it presaged. In 1953, Bradbury released his most famous and according to him, “only true science-fiction work,” Fahrenheit 451. In this futurist morality play about the perils of censorship, Bradbury predicted electronic books, iPods, interactive television and many other technologies that are in use today.
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Despite his own predilection for technologically uncluttered living, in a 1976 interview with Writer’s Digest, Bradbury again made a prescient observation: “I’m not afraid of machines. I don’t think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don’t take the toys out of their hands, we’re fools.”
Bradbury’s friend and biographer, Sam Weller, recorded a series of conversations with the author and published them under the title, Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews. In this book, Weller recounts the moment when Bradbury first got the literal “spark” of inspiration to be a writer. At age 12, Bradbury visited a nearby carnival. His conversation with a sideshow character billed as “Mr. Electrico” proved transformative. As Bradbury told Weller, “He was a performer sitting in an electric chair and a stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end. I sat below, in the front row, and he reached down with a flaming sword full of electricity and he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose and he cried, ‘Live, forever!’ And I thought, ‘God, that’s wonderful. How do you do that?’”
Thus was launched one of literature’s most fertile inquisitors of the phrase “what if.”
On his 80th birthday in August 2000, Bradbury said, “The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me. The feeling I have every day is very much the same as it was when I was 12. In any event, here I am, 80 years old, feeling no different, full of a great sense of joy, and glad for the long life that has been allowed me. I have good plans for the next 10 or 20 years, and I hope you’ll come along.”
The great fun for us has been in reading the results.