Master of science fiction genre wrote to entertain himself
Gerald Jonas -June 8, 2012
Raymond Douglas Bradbury - Authior - 22-8-1920 - 05-06-2012
RAY Bradbury, a master of science fiction whose lyrical evocations of the future reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of postwar America, has died in Los Angeles, aged 91.
For many, Bradbury was the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream - his name appearing near the top of any list of major science-fiction writers of the 20th century, along with Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and the Polish author Stanislaw Lem.
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More than 8 million copies of his books were sold in 36 languages. They included the short-story collections The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man and The Golden Apples of the Sun, and the novels Fahrenheit 451 - his best known - and Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Bradbury sold his first story to Super Science Stories magazine before his 21st birthday, and by the time he was 30 he had made his reputation with The Martian Chronicles, a collection of thematically linked stories published in 1950.
The book celebrated the romance of space travel while condemning the social abuses that modern technology had made possible.
Its impact was immediate and lasting, including influencing Elton John and songwriter Bernie Taupin to pen their hit Rocket Man.
Bradbury was hardly the first writer to represent science and technology as a mixed bag of blessings and abominations. The advent of the atomic bomb in 1945 left many Americans deeply ambivalent towards science, and science-fiction writers had trenchant things to say about the threat of nuclear Armageddon.
But the audience for science fiction, which was published mostly in pulp magazines, was small and insignificant. Bradbury looked to a larger audience: the readers of mass-circulation magazines such as Mademoiselle and The Saturday Evening Post. He eliminated the jargon of science-fiction pulps and packaged his troubling speculations about the future in an appealing blend of cozy colloquialisms and poetic metaphors.
Bradbury held formal education in disdain, and went so far as to attribute his success as a writer to his never having attended college.
Instead he read everything he could get his hands on, by authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway. He paid homage to them in 1971 in the autobiographical essay How Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated From Libraries.
Bradbury referred to himself as an ''idea writer'', by which he meant something quite different from erudite or scholarly. ''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.'' He added, ''My goal is to entertain myself and others.''
He described his method of composition as ''word association,'' often triggered by a favourite line of poetry.
Bradbury's passion for books found expression in his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. But he drew his primary inspiration from his childhood. He boasted that he had total recall of his earliest years, including the moment of his birth. Readers had no reason to doubt him. In his best stories and in his autobiographical novel, Dandelion Wine , he gave voice to both the joys and fears of childhood.
As for the protagonists of his stories, no matter how far they journeyed from home, they learnt they could never escape the past. Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, a small city whose Norman Rockwell-esque charms he later reprised in his depiction of the fictional Green Town in Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and in the fatally alluring fantasies of the astronauts in The Martian Chronicles.
His father, a telephone linesman, numbered among his ancestors Mary Bradbury, convicted and sentenced to death (but not executed) at the Salem witchcraft trials.
An unathletic child who suffered from bad dreams, Bradbury relished the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the Oz stories of L. Frank Baum, which his mother read to him. An aunt, Neva Bradbury, took him to his first stage plays, dressed him in monster costumes for Halloween and introduced him to Poe's stories. He discovered the science-fiction pulps and began collecting the comic-strip adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. A conversation with a carnival magician named Mr Electrico that touched on immortality gave the 12-year-old Bradbury the impetus to become a writer.
In 1934, the family moved to Los Angeles, where he became a movie buff, sneaking into theatres as often as nine times a week. Encouraged by a high school English teacher and the professional writers he met at the Science Fiction League, he began a lifelong routine of turning out at least 1000 words a day on his typewriter (he never used a computer).
His first big success came in 1947 with the short story Homecoming, narrated by a boy who feels like an outsider at a family reunion of witches, vampires and werewolves because he lacks supernatural powers. The story was plucked from the pile of unsolicited manuscripts at Mademoiselle by a young editor named Truman Capote; it earned Bradbury, aged 27, an O. Henry Award as one of the best American stories of the year.
With 26 other stories in a similar vein, Homecoming appeared in Bradbury's first book, Dark Carnival, published by a small publisher in 1947. That year he married Marguerite McClure, whom he had met in a Los Angeles bookstore.
In a burst of creativity from 1946 to 1950, he produced most of the stories later collected in The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man and the novella that formed the basis of Fahrenheit 451. Novelist Christopher Isherwood greeted Bradbury as ''a very great and unusual talent'', while one of Bradbury's heroes, Aldous Huxley, hailed him as a poet. In 1954, the US National Institute of Arts and Letters honoured Bradbury for ''his contributions to American literature'', in particular the novel Fahrenheit 451.
The Martian Chronicles was pieced together from 26 stories, only a few of which were written with the book in mind. The patchwork narrative spans the years 1999 to 2026, depicting a series of expeditions to Mars and their aftermath.
The native Martians, who can read minds, resist the early arrivals from Earth, but are finally no match for them and their advanced technology as the humans proceed to destroy the remains of an ancient civilisation.
Parallels to the fate of American Indian cultures are pushed to the point of parody; the Martians are finally wiped out as the result of an epidemic of chicken pox.
When nuclear war destroys Earth, the descendants of the human colonists realise that they have become the Martians, with a second chance to create a just society.
Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury's indictment of book-burning in a near-future America (the title refers to the temperature at which paper ignites), is perhaps his most successful book-length narrative. It was made into a well-received movie by Francois Truffaut in 1966.
The cautionary tale of a so-called fireman, whose job is to start fires, Fahrenheit 451 has been favourably compared with George Orwell's 1984.
As Bradbury's reputation grew, he found new outlets for his talents. He wrote the screenplay for John Huston's 1956 film version of Moby Dick, scripts for the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and collections of poetry and plays.
In 2004, then president George W. Bush presented Bradbury with the National Medal of Arts.
While Bradbury championed the space program as an adventure that humanity dared not shirk, he was content to restrict his own adventures to the realm of imagination.
He lived in the same house in Los Angeles for more than 50 years. For many years he refused to travel by aircraft, preferring trains, and he never learned to drive.
His wife, Marguerite, died in 2003. He is survived by his four daughters and eight grandchildren.
The best thing about my life is being Lisa's Pet Babydoll
