More Ray Bradbury links.
Ray Bradbury’s words are not a cardboard container for his ideas. His words have weight and rhythm and pace and form; they are a scaffold of filigree for his ideas to weave themselves in and around, taking form through them. Bradbury’s people did not exist for the sake of exposition or simply to have things happen to them: He sketched them in what they said (or didn’t say), and how they said them or not. Words gave rise to character, economically but fully revealing a spaceman disgusted with his people, two strangers from different times meeting on a road, a man who learns he’s okay being alone, a father teaching his children about who the Martians truly are.
NPR:
Bradbury may have resisted modern technology, but he influenced plenty of innovation. The crew of Apollo 15 was so inspired by Bradbury's novelDandelion Wine, they named a lunar crater after the book. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin said Bradbury's impact was universal.
Ray Bradbury wrote three great novels and three hundred great stories. One of the latter was called 'A Sound of Thunder.' The sound I hear today is the thunder of a giant's footsteps fading away. But the novels and stories remain, in all their resonance and strange beauty.
Bradbury's message was that of Buckaroo Banzai: Where ever you go, there you are. His characters were not Heinlein's steely-eyed adventurers and enlightened beings, or Asimov's two-dimensional mouthpieces. He wrote about real people in far away places and times, and with him it was always easiest to see how these strange books with rockets on the covers weren't really about anything but us, all of us, staring at our reflections in very strange places.
Ray Bradbury at the New Yorker:
I memorized all of “John Carter” and “Tarzan,” and sat on my grandparents’ front lawn repeating the stories to anyone who would sit and listen. I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, “Take me home!” I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities.
Letters from Ray Bradbury, including a couple of links to Letters of Note.
A Guardian roundup of Tweets about Ray Bradbury.
A roundup of author responses (including Ursula K. Le Guin) at Wired.
And, best of all, Ray Bradbury himself:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBtZjbTDTDk]
(photo by Ralph Nelson, via Wired)