Ray Bradbury
“You are my children,” Ray Bradbury told a Tulsa audience in 1994.
He meant that most people first came upon Bradbury’s work as a result of a reading assignment in school.
But in a sense, everyone who reads something Ray Bradbury wrote becomes a child all over again, regardless of chronological age. That’s because Bradbury himself never lost that sense of wonder a child has – marveling at the way the world around him is, and marveling even more at the things he could imagine from looking at the world and the people who inhabit it.
Bradbury, America’s master fabulist, died Wednesday morning at the age of 91.
His publisher once billed him as “The World’s Greatest Living Science Fiction Writer,” but science was never Bradbury’s concern.
“I have fun with ideas; I play with them,” he once told the New York Times. “I’m not a serious person, and I don’t like serious people. I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring. My goal is to entertain myself and others.”
In other words, he was a writer of imagination – and his unique imagination was equally at home conjuring up a Martian world populated by golden-eyed creatures, or recalling to life his own boyhood in small-town Illinois.
That novel, “Dandelion Wine,” would later be adapted into musical, which Bradbury wrote with Oklahoma native Jimmy Webb, and which premiered at the University of Tulsa in 1989.
Bradbury wrote in just about every genre and form – novels, plays, short stories, screenplays, librettos for operas. His stories could be dark and troubling, light and amusing, sometimes stickily sentimental, other times profoundly unnerving.
But all were written in prose filled with a plainspoken poetry, and an infectious sense of whimsy.
Who else but Bradbury could follow (in “Something Wicked This Way Comes”) a long chapter of intense, suspenseful action in which his main character makes a hair’s-breadth escape from a dangerous adversary, with a single-sentence chapter that states, “Nothing much happened, all the rest of that night.”
At that 1994 talk, Bradbury said that he learned what was to be the key to his existence when he was writing a science fiction operetta for the actor
Charles Laughton.
“You are a poet,” Laughton told him, and advised him to learn “the gift of words, the gift of tongue. Never forget that you have this gift of metaphor. ... Let your ideas fly, give the people a moment of truth.”
“I've lived by that,” Bradbury said, “to jump off the cliff and
build wings on the way down.”
And through the hundreds of stories Ray Bradbury wrote, he’s taken us along on that journey.
