Ray Bradbury

Writer -- via the L.A. Times.

To call Ray Bradbury a writer is insufficient. He was an imaginative river. He composed more than 30 books and 600 short stories. He wrote for the page, the stage, for radio and television and film – his screen adaptation of “Moby Dick” for John Huston is masterful.

He began in the age of the pulps, when sci-fi and fantasy was still despised kid stuff, and he has passed on now, in our Flash-Gordonish present times, many of his visions fulfilled. For better and for worse, he was my number one creative influence. Period.

I ran across him for the first time during one of my first trips to my elementary-school library. Like the little egotist I was (and am), I saw my name imbedded within his, and grabbed “S is for Space” for that reason. I can still see the cover – an inverted, harlequinade space-helmeted figure plummeting into a whirling galaxy beneath it. Every story in it: “Chrysalis,” “Pillar of Fire,” “The Pedestrian” – horrified me, captivated me, gave me nightmares, took me out of myself, inspired me. No writing had ever done that to me before.

I devoured his work, plowing through it all, pushed to fantastic realms through the power of his imagination. Every creature and work he referenced, I read up on, discovering the hair-raising pleasures of Frankenstein, Dracula, the Phantom of the Opera, Poe, Lovecraft, Welles, Verne, Burroughs, the Chaneys, Karloff, Lugosi . . . He wrote for radio? I started finding and listening to old-time radio. I sought his TV and film work, and began to explore around, under and past him to other sci-fi and fantasy writers, and from there to the larger world of literature, poetry, film, theater and all the rest. Ray Bradbury made me a writer.

Of course, I have had my imaginary falling-outs with him over time. A chronic overwriter, at times his prolixity was stupefying, his flights of rhetoric ridiculous. He would wax poetic at the drop of an eyelash. But time and again I would return to him, reading of Guy Montag, of Cooger and Dark’s Carnival, of the delicate, abandoned glassine palaces of Mars.

For me, his greatest achievements will always be the three early novels “The Martian Chronicles,” “Fahrenheit 451,” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” They spoke directly to me, building their universes within me. There is something wonderful in his ability to delineate the movements of history, the significant moments of human lives, the relation of society to the individual, and his architectural ability to construct a story, a musical sense of proportion and pace that is unrivalled.

(The virtues of his short stories are, at times, even stronger -- among the dozens of unforgettable ones are "There Will Come Soft Rains," and the the classic "Mars is Heaven," when it turns out that, for the first astronaut visitors, all their loved ones are on Mars . . . just waiting for them to go to sleep in their childhood homes so they can change back into monsters and eat them all up!)

I hope that enough of my worshipful study of him has rubbed off on my own work, rendering it readable. It’s good to know that he insisted on producing his 1,000 words a day, good or bad, for 70-some years. It’s an excellent goal for which to aim.

And, in the meantime and despite that, he has my profound thanks. In a largely isolated and unlovely childhood, Bradbury was my friend, one who could tell me the most amazing stories, one who gave me visions that told me of an entire world beyond the mundane. He inspired me to go and do likewise, to know that a life spent in the world of the imagination was a worthwhile ambition.

I will start re-reading my stack of battered paperbacks of his, the ones bearing the grandiose slogan “The World’s Greatest Living Science Fiction Writer” on many of them, all over again. He is so much more than that hopelessly hyperbolic title. He means the world to me.