A science fiction giant…
…is gone:
[Bradbury] attributed his success as a writer to never having gone to college–instead, he read and wrote voraciously. “When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week,” he said in an interview with The Paris Review. “I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.”
His book Fahrenheit 451 makes even more sense knowing that, doesn’t it?
RIP, Ray Brandbury.
Beat me too it.
Bradbury was ok… i kind of got tired of his constant recycling of the idea of the wonderment of childhood and its magic. (evident in dandelion wine, and something wicked this way comes)
🙁
I loved Ray Bradbury. I’ve been thinking all day about which of his books to use to introduce him to my 11-year old son. Possibly Farenheit 451, because he loves to read so much. He’s also a raving conservative, and the idea of the government prohibiting people from owning books should make a big impact.
Casually thumbing a copy twenty years after he had written it [Fahrenheit 451], Bradbury noticed editors had been dumbing down the text and that schoolbook anthologists had been bowdlerizing the prose — under the principle that the tale should not offend anyone. Bradbury took legal action to restore the original words to future printings.
At least the bowdlerizers hadn’t yet become Beattys, commanding “burn it”.
Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451 saw political correctness before anyone else, I think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPfRwh1tVaY
Oh Artfldgr, I’m truly sorry you feel that way. To my thinking, Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes were his finest work. I can’t think of another author who captured the essence of childhood so perfectly.
Bradbury had a unique vision and a unique voice. Up until his last years he was often willing to come to our local library (he lived in my town) and speak, and donated all proceeds to the library foundation.
My teen son lists Fahrenheit 451 among his top three most favorite books. As an English teacher I can’t think of a better argument for the value of literature than that novel.
He recognized the paradox of knowledge precluding the attainment of knowledge. The closed mind or preconceived perceptions phenomenon. It’s a challenge, but it can be overcome. Teachers should be careful to not practice indoctrination of their students.
The superiority, or at the very least equality, of autodidactic knowledge over that acquired in institutions is a fact recognized intuitively by all and vehemently denied nonetheless by either those who make money running such institutions or those who have paid a hefty sum to the former.
“I discovered that the library is the real school.”
You have to love & admire that statement.
451 will remain a sci-fi classic forever. RIP RB.
The man had an inestimable impact on my youth. It’s as if I just heard a giant fall to the earth. I can’t believe how sad this makes me.
RT: I’m kind of with AD on Bradbury — I just never got into him, but to each their own. I think the movie adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes was one of the better Horror/SF crossover movies ever done, but that’s the only thing he’s associated with that I’ve ever liked. Most other stuff I couldn’t get into at all.
I put him in the Frederick Pohl camp. Lots of people like them both, but they do nothing for me. Anytime I’ve read anything by them (and I grant it’s not a lot but does include well-received efforts by both) the reaction I come away with is pretty much “Meh!”
Give me Heinlein, Niven, or Stirling any day.
Thinking further, I think F451 is an easy example of my “Meh” response. It’s an interesting idea, but I’ve just never been able to buy the basic MacGuffin of it — while there will always be efforts to suppress ideas, there will never be any success at it. It’s not in the nature of humans to accept suppression of ideas. It’s one of the great powers of the Internet, and the Internet is hardly the initial thrust of the idea, it’s only an almost pure, ultimate ideal of it. The idea of rejecting the suppression of memes is deeply rooted in the Human psyche, and, while there will always be those who attempt to do it, none will ever succeed for long.
As with monopoly, the urge to cheat in Those Who Would Control is just too great, and the rewards for TWWC to cheat are far, far too great.
So, while it might flourish for a brief time, there will be somewhere else where it does not flourish, and that place will so utterly outpace and outperform the censor-group that their socio-historical significance will quickly wane.
Good comments. Oddly, I can agree with most of them although they are at variance.
I was surprised to find how libertarian-leaning conservative Bradbury was in some respects. Also, from watching the special feature on a movie DVD how instinctual a writer, and deliberately so, he self-professedly was.
As Geo. Pal already seems to know, for Bradbury (or Truffaut) fans with five bucks to spend and time to sort through a Walmart remainder bin, another look at Fahrenheit 451 might be worth their while.
Especially, given the extensive feature commentary and special features the DVD offers – two of which have Bradbury commenting at some length on his authorship and style.
The 451 book of course is a very different animal in texture and focus from the movie treatment. The movie stylistically interesting, structurally flawed, but significant. The book stylistically rough to my way of thinking, but inspired.
In fact, I went out and bought the book fairly recently, not remembering having read it. I must have. Because the old impression of having trouble following his prose jumps came to me again. The jerkiness may have been intentional, and meant to make you work a bit. I don’t know.
Some things are cleared up. In the book, all written materials are not banned, just morally significant ones. Thus, solving the question of how the movie Montage even knows how to read at all.
And I was taken by the book Clarissa’s remarks that several of her school friends had died of gunshot, and that she feared kids. Odd that Bradbury should have prophesied a violent youthful nihilism as a consequence of what we would call P.C.
Or maybe he just saw the younger generation as following what was the adult’s real suit …
That would be Montag, without the “e”.
I thought “451” was wonderful when I read it as a teenager. I lived in a very small town in East Texas, where books were hard to acquire, and ideas harder still to keep. As best I can remember, “Job” was Montag’s favorite book, and, twenty years later, in a different life from my adolescent one, it became very, very important to me, too.
RIP, Ray Bradbury
RandomThoughts,
i agree.. i am sorry i feel that way too… but maybe it had more to do with reading everything he wrote, and maybe the wrong order? i don’t know… maybe it was that i had a great childhood (at least what i care to focus on that counts), but it wasn’t magical in the phantasmagorical sense to change the ordinary to the extraordinary…
i also think the problem was that i was in that age (young lad) when i read them, and not in a later age that would appreciate that perspective or enjoy it as much.
this is a problem you cant really get around if your reading ability outstrips your age. your bound to read things and misinterpret them not having the right frames of reference. ie. most authors that wrote that kind of stuff at that time knew their audience was not going to be a young boy but an older man (with an understanding that there would be a wide range of actual readers).
turns out that there are some books i am saving to read, as once i read them. that it. i will have to read farewell summer soon though, given recent violence.
to tell you the truth, i was a much bigger fan of Heinlein prior to his change. (same with Billy Joel. ie before the bike accident)
I got turned on to Tolkien by the family of the Bronx borough president (or would be) when i went upstate with them for a stay over…
I liked Jerry Pournelle, and Larry Niven.piers anthony, and kathrine kurtz, tanith lee, stephen R donaldson, asimov, bradley, heinlein, andre norton, terry brooks, micheal moorco*k, julien may, and a whole whole lot more… (but before i was allowed to read those, i had to have read through all the classics. james fennimore cooper, mark twain, shakespeare, dumas, etc)
So i guess what i am saying is dont think that i dont like him, i do… but look at the great selection i have had over the years and consider me jaded. 🙂
Agree that Bradbury didn’t do much for me, except that some of his scenes were interesting as scenes. F451 had been done already, see Russia, Nazis, China, etc.
For the fans: Is there a part where in one of his books, when a certain group is headed off to Mars, that a kid yells to his erstwhile tormentors, “What you gon’ do, nights? What you gon’ do?”
Like Heinlein up to Starship Troopers, after which he was a dirty old man induging himself, Norton before Witchwording got to her, Drake.
Bradbury didn’t like his stories to be called science fiction. He wrote them as fantasy, except F451 which he said was his only Sci Fi book as it could actually happen.
I never read 451, and never read much science fiction, but The Martian Chronicles really made an impression on me. He made fantasy plausible, and then tripped up fantasy with the quotidian. Sure, we’ll travel to Mars, but the first astronaut might get shot by a jealous Martian husband. Or locked up in an insane asylum by telepathic Martians quite used to seeing the hallucinations of others. It was outlandish and plausible and quietly hilarious all at the same time, and very human.
…a glass darkly into our own mortality, is it not, when the giants who formed us exit the stage?
RIP beloved old friend.