RIP Ray Bradbury

[seryan]

News of Bradbury's death is, of course, all over the Internet. (Somewhat ironically, IMO, given how much the man hated the Internet.) I had been taking a break from posting Real World stuff on here, but this is - well, this is Ray Bradbury. I used to watch Ray Bradbury Theatre religiously and I can still visualize the opening credits. I read and reread Fahrenheit 451 over and over and over again during the absolute worst period of my life because the dystopia it presented at least gave me one place I could connect with where things were so much worse. The Martian Chronicles - a battered old paperback copy from the sixties - may well be the first science fiction I ever read and it made me want more. Bradbury's stories - with their flawed, imperfect, relatable humans and their prose not bogged down with impenetrable (to a child) technical details - showed a future where we may travel in space, and colonize other worlds but where we still remain human.

I don't think I've ever cried over a celebrity's death before, but I did over this one.