RIP Bradbury. Martian Chronicles is indirectly one of the most influential books in my life, due to an interesting twist...
In high school, we had a literature class where there was a list of a couple hundred books we could choose from to read each month. At the end of the month, the teacher had a canned test she had purchased somewhere for each book, that we would take to prove our comprehension. For those of you who haven't read Martian Chronicles, it's a series of around 30 stories with mostly independent characters and story lines.
The test I was given was a "match the character to their description" test. Not only am I normally bad with names, but with 30 stories featuring unique charters, I had no idea on a majority of the names.
So, I flipped over the multiple choice test, and wrote an essay about how I read, comprehended, and loved the book,but this was an outrageous assessment, and a poor way to judge my aptitude.
Although I scored less than 30/100 on the multiple choice, the teacher gave me an A on the test.
I learned to think outside the box, and the power of reasoning and discussion. All the credit in the world to my teacher for having an open mind.
...Anyways, totally off topic, but it's something that will always stick with me. Bradbury was a great author who will be sorely missed.
The very fact that the teacher allowed students to choose what they wanted to read, rather than the books that the teacher him/herself liked (which was the unfortunate case for me), is wonderful. Had I been afforded such a situation, it probably wouldn't have taken me 10 years (after High School) to finally enjoy reading for myself.
And the fact that the teacher saw the flaw with the test and appreciated what you wrote. A teacher/professor who is unwilling to be wrong is the most dangerous kind there is. This teacher clearly was not one of those.
On the other hand you're not doing your students any favours if you let them only read the stuff they're interested in; or rather, the stuff they think they're interested in at the age of twelve. Gotta force them to broaden their horizons and read something else once in a while or they'll become... well, the kind of adults who only read science fiction.
Given that every great science fiction novel I've read is an essay on either how good the human race could be (often with some instructions) or how bad the human race could be (often with steps from here to there outlined), I think there are far worse things than being an adult who reads only SciFi.
Similar arguments hold for most forms of fiction, which is why I'm always unimpressed with people who don't read fiction because they "only want to read things that will help them grow". The fiction I've read has provided more avenues for personal growth than almost all non-fiction I've read.
The horror indeed, for what should we do when we see these dastardly creatures? Should we wave pitchforks, or just ring the church bells to warn others, while we cower inside and pray?
My favorite Ray Bradbury memory is the time he came to my school to talk about his books and ended up yelling at my English teach for trying to find hidden meaning that wasn't there just for the sake of busywork. RIP Mr. Bradbury.
Obviously doing things for busywork is pointless, but there is plenty of good to come of trying to find hidden meanings in books. Not all meaning was put there by the author and if you find something that helps you get deeper into a book or get more out of it for yourself, good for you. A book only has meaning when filtered through your brain so if your brain finds something, it's there.
Note that this is not my idea and many, many wars of words have been fought over it so you don't have to believe it.
Or you could just be seeing patterns in the static. The Human brain is a fantastic pattern recognition machine, but sometimes the gain gets turned up a little too high in literary analysis classes and our "meaning" radar ends up thinking moisture in the air on a sunny day is an impending class-5 hurricane.
This thread feels incomplete without this Mark Twain quote:
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."
I was expecting someone to mention his stance against modern tech and ebooks. But I like it better this way, this is a good memorial and nostalgia thread, fit for an author whose writing style was very nostalgic.
I tried to buy a book of his on my Kindle yesterday. It wasn't there. So I guess I'll be going to the library instead. I think that's what he would have preferred anyhow.
"My favorite Ray Bradbury memory is the time he came to my school to talk about his books and ended up yelling at my English teach for trying to find hidden meaning that wasn't there just for the sake of busywork."
I assume that the "hidden meaning" was supposed to be a moral for the edification of the children (Think of the children! <sob>).
The idea that all stories must have a moral in order to be legitimate is modern. Conventional wisdom gets in a self-righteous huff over how the different Inquisitions censored books. It would surprise modern people to see what books those old-time moral guardians did not censor.
Daphnis and Chloë, by Longus, has a frank scene where a married woman teaches a teenaged boy how to have sex. It was first translated into a modern vernacular by a Catholic bishop and was considered a perfectly good book for teenaged girls.
The Metamorphoses of Apuleius—better known as The Golden Ass—is the oldest extant novel. It contains explicit scenes of adultery and pagan worship. St. Augustine of Hippo, the greatest of the Western Fathers of the Church, cited that novel as a partial inspiration for his own work, The City of God. None of his contemporaries faulted him for this.
I'm going by memory, so I don't have citations for some of the above claims. I have a few ideas about the origin of the modern mentality of "every story must have a moral." Those ideas center around the rise of Calvinism on the Protestant side and the rise of Jansenism on the Catholic side of Europe.
When someone says "hidden meaning," I don't think "moral." I think of symbolism; "The jacket the protagonist wore symbolizes this, them getting in the car symbolizes that, their mother symbolizes..." It's quite possible for stories to have morals without any symbolism.
That happened to me as well, and after a particularly extended dive into Robert Frost over a week, I went off to the library information system (this was pre-internet, so lots of swapping disks) and hunted down some interviews with Frost near the end of his life where he stated with some frustration his dislike of the practice of finding hidden symbols or political statements in his poetry. The Mending Wall, for example, is often used in classrooms as a symbolic reference of the Berlin wall, this was not Frost's intentions at all, but was something imagined up when he happened to have read it during a visit to Moscow during the Cold War. Proof in point, modern takes on the same poem no longer conjure up images of an impending Cold War nuclear doom.
The Golden Ass very clearly have a moral or educational purpose. It also have plenty of hidden meaning in the sense that it is an allegory. But morals have changed over time, and being a pagan work, the moral is very different than in christian or modern works.
I hope that this thread doesn't get derailed into nit-picking. The Tale of Genji was written in the eleventh century. The Golden Ass is a prose work which Apuleius wrote in the second century. Different authorities will have different definitions of the word "novel," so let's just agree to disagree.
I forget which year, but my high school had a class on science fiction. Which the teacher did not understand too well. I ended up having to publicly correct her on the interpretation of the end of 2001 (the book -- not that it matters given how closely it parallels the screen play).
To her credit, she thought about it and publicly acknowledged my correction in a subsequent class.
Also to her credit (and/or the school's): They offered a class on science fiction!
An old classmate of mine had an English professor in college who, upon questions of why there was no Science Fiction on the reading list for the year, derisively called it irrelevant trash prose or some such while making pew pew sounds.
He managed to overcome this by gifting the teacher a dog eared copy of Dune stating "it's an allegory".
The book went unread for some time, but a year later the professor looked him up to let him know that he had read Dune, found it intriguing in how many subjects it touched, from social issues to ecology to economics and called it profound. He asked for some more recommendations upon which he rapidly became a fan of Clark, Heinlein (who he had read before, but now again with new eyes) and a few others.
I was with my classmate one day years later at a grocery store and this professor saw him and walked up to say hi. A short conversation later and the professor mentioned how he had turned into quite a fan of the genre and regrets he had spent so long ignoring it. Some of the works, he said were "silly" but a few were some of the most profound descriptions of the human condition and where we're going as a species, coupled with some of the only explorations of the changes to the ethical landscape as technology transforms the world in literature...etc. etc. Before he left he said he had recently started reading some of the old Cyberpunk works and found himself sitting up at night with the realization that many of the things described in the books were coming true now, decades later.
It was really interesting to see a man, who must have been in his 70s by this point, catch the sci-fi religion like that.
I was just talking about this with my girlfriend, and while we both loved Bradbury deeply, what's odd is that our first thought wasn't of this being a tragic loss. The man lived to 91 - which is three times as long as we've lived so far. Ray Bradbury saw so many amazing things come to pass in his lifetime, and thinking about the things we'll see in our next sixty years is kind of inspiring and lends one a sense of awe. I kind of think that's what Ray Bradbury himself might have preferred - that his life and death inspire in us a sense of wonder. What a fantastic soul he was, in the true sense.
He had a short piece in last week's New Yorker on how "The Fire Balloons" was inspired by the fire balloons he, as a small boy, lit with his grandfather. It was a beautiful testament to his craft and his inspiration.
Lots of his stories are inspired by his family, hometown, and they all show up here and there in his stories. I always saw him as writing humanist sci-fi.
"We were put here as witnesses to the miracle of life. We see the stars, and we want them. We are beholden to give back to the universe.... If we make landfall on another star system, we become immortal." -- Ray Bradbury, Speech to National School Board Association, 1995
"People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better." -- Ray Bradbury, "Beyond 1984: The People Machines", 1982
"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things." - Ray Bradbury 1920-2012.
He was the last of the giants, along with Heinlein, Clark and Asimov. As a kid in the 70s, I devoured their novels and stories from the 50s and 60s. Bradbury was probably the most sophisticated writer of the four, though I preferred Asimov's straightforward, techie prose more back then. But we did get to read Bradbury in school, while none of the others was deemed lofty enough for the curriculum (except Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, and that wasn't until college).
My experience exactly. I read a lot of Asimov and Clark in the 70s, but I read some Bradbury too. I need to get some of his books that I missed and read them now. I suspect I'll appreciate them as literature more now than I would have when I was younger.
There are new giants! Greg Egan, William Gibson, Charles Stross, Vernon Vinge - to name a few. Also, don't forget Larry Niven and Joe Haldeman, they are still around!
Sadly, I found over time his newer books became steadily worse. It's odd to me that someone like Jim Butcher can get steadily better where other authors 'give up', start believing their own hype, use ghost writers, or something.
Of the more recent generations, I've particularly enjoyed Vinge and Brin, although Brin varies somewhat.
There are probably a few others I could mention, but they have a nasty habit of not coming to mind when I make a conscious effort.
For Vinge, I would recommend particularly A Deepness in the Sky and (prequel) A Fire Upon the Deep.
For Brin, the second and third books of his Uplift Trilogy, adding also the first for context. The second and third are Startide Rising and The Uplift War. Also, his book Earth, which stands alone.
P.S. Gibson and Stephenson. Gibson's Neuromancer and the two subsequent; after that, I couldn't continue (so, another "Card-esque" experience?). Also Gibson's collected short stories, Burning Chrome.
I've quite enjoyed several Stephenson novels -- I guess they might tend to be his "older" ones. I tried The Baroque Cycle and could not stay with it.
my favourite recent author is unquestionably lois bujold (unless you want to count pratchett as recent). also, don't forget charles stross and stephen baxter.
Case in point: Frederick Pohl's Gateway series. The first book was amazing, the second was pretty solid, and then the series dropped off a cliff.
I wonder how much the economics of publishing and personal financial need figures into declining quality of (some) authors, musicians and other artists.
Completely agreed. I don't mind skimming through OSC's books now but they are just fun reads (plus I'm always looking for some of his more vile opinions to seep through, though that never really happens).
I love Ender's Game but my opinion of it has dropped over the years. His A Planet called Treason however affected me pretty deeply, and I still read it from time to time.
I was going to point out that Sanderson doesn't really do science fiction, but on reflection his books tend to revolve around magic systems that obey very scientific rules. One could probably argue that's more science fiction than fantasy.
“If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
Ray was a huge proponent of libraries. If you want to honor the man, go visit your local library today. Check out a book. Shame on you if you don't have a library card, but it's not too late to get one. If you have some money or some books you can donate, help the library out while you're there.
Every year, I take on the order of two boxes of books to the library nearest me that has an annual book sale. Profits from this book sale help that library.
I replied to wglb, but I meant it as a call to everyone. I could have been more clear.
Bradbury gave a talk and did a book signing at my local library in Fullerton, CA. It was crazy inspirational. I loved how passionate he was about books and about public libraries in particular. I loved how he described his writing process, and his general storytelling ability. My father and I discussed that visit this past weekend when I was visiting from Vegas, and it was interesting to hear the details stuck stuck with him, especially since I've started writing novels of my own just recently. I was very sad to read of Bradbury's passing today.
I heard him speak at the LA Times Festival of books, and even in his eighties, he was vibrant, sparkling, and extraordinary. He told of his optimism and his humble beginnings (renting typewriters in the basement of the LA public library). He signed books tirelessly, including mine, and was a marvel. That man exuded more life at 80-something than most people do in their twenties.
For some reason I thought he would never actually die. And now that he has, I can't help but feel that the world is lessened by his loss, and that we all have a responsibility to try to live as fully and inspirationally as he did.
Ray Bradbury was one of my favorite authors as a child. The depth and complexity of his stories truly enlightened me about good Sci-Fi.
Most students in the US probably read Fahrenheit 451 in high school, but I enrolled in a literature course at the Naval Academy that focused on science fiction. The Martian Chronicles was a main text for the class. IIRC, the professor had a very special connection to Bradbury, but rather than get it completely wrong, I'll just state that I think the professor (who was a USAF officer) was the curator of a collection of his works.
I might try and re-read 451. I think his words will be even more powerful and prescient now.
I found Ray Bradbury a difficult read in high school. Not for lack of understand or the style of his writing, but I was reading for a 'surface story', for lack of a better term. I wanted something very future-tech-Sci-Fi, and it didn't fit.
It only took a few years, a few real world experiences and one re-read of one story for me to see the depth in his writing, the metaphors about today's and yesterday's societies, and his open questions about the future. It led to many re-reads and a lot of appreciation of his work.
Dandelion Wine was the story that taught me that sci-fi didn't need space ships or robots to deliver its essential explorations of humans and their relationships with technology. I must have read it 15 years ago, but I still remember the wistful dialogs about the smell of grass clippings in the summer and the roar of lawnmowers, gone forever in a world whose only sci-fi tech was grass that never needed mowing.
There are a couple of enjoyable radio dramatizations of his some of his stories from the 50s available for download at the Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/XMinus1_A
One of my favorite Bradbury stories: "The Rocket", in The Illustrated Man. A junkyard owner tries to save money to send his family to space, but can't afford it, so he builds a replica rocket with some kind of 3D windshield display to convince his kids that they are flying through space.
I read and enjoyed Bradbury's short stories as a teenager, but his novels made no connection with me. I found them boring.
A few years ago, I started reading science fiction again and reread The Martian Chronicles. The degree to which it's themes about family and community connected was stunning.
I loved The Martian Chronicles, though I found it difficult to enjoy much of the rest of his writing. But his skill was undeniable, his influence is still huge, and you can find touches of his style in many other authors' work.
"There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down on hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Years balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight--Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck--tonight you could almost touch Time." (Illustrated Man)
"And we lived in a world that [...] was like a great black ship pulling away from the shore of sanity and civilization, roaring its black horn in the night, taking 2 billion people with it, whether they wanted to go or not [...] to fall over the edge of the earth..." (Don't recall the story this is from...)
I was introduced to Ray Bradbury through The Ray Bradbury Theater tv series, in 7th grade. A fellow classmate, Eric Johnson, was in an episode and so we watched it in class. I enjoyed it - enough that I wanted to see more. I only saw a few more episodes, but from that I took out 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' movie from the Library. I enjoyed that, and ended up diving into some of his written stuff as well. While I didn't read everything the man ever wrote - his work is certainly credited for helping me find literature outside of the normal stuff we're given in school - or what everyone else was reading at the time (David Eddings).
Sidenote: Eric Johnson went on to play the young Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall, and Lana Langs boyfriend in the first season of Smallville. I hated him in junior high - he was exceptionally rude to everyone. What's weird, is I was still happy for the guy, whenever I saw him in something new.
RIP, one of my favourite authors. Martian Chronicles and Illustrated Man were story collections on par with the likes of Hemingway IMO. The last collection I bought, One for the Road, wasn't more than ten years ago. I think he had a few more since then too.
The Martian Chronicles is my favorite book of all time. I saw him speak at UCLA in 2007 or 2008 and I'll never forget his emphasis on love and being creative. Sad day. Science fiction and literature has lost one of it's greats.
I thought that was a wonderful idea, but how did you do it?
The next day, being driven home by my father, fresh from the funeral, I looked down at those carnival tents and thought to myself, "The answer is there. He said 'Live forever,' and I must go find out how to do that." I told my father to stop the car. He didn't want to, but I insisted. He stopped the car and let me out, furious with me for not returning home to partake in the wake being held for my uncle. With the car gone, and my father in a rage, I ran down the hill. What was I doing? I was running away from death, running toward life. ..." ~ http://www.raybradbury.com/inhiswords02.html
Great author, I am a fan of his Martian Chronicles the most, there are so many short stories of his that I have come across that picking favorites is not fair.
Today CATO released an interesting story about Ray and the form of censoring he faced which is one many here would never consider. That being authors being coerced to include or exclude groups based on influence they exert within society. We even see that today with big name authors, most common is when their works are brought to screen and characters take on new traits; physical or otherwise; to fit politically correct norms.
Severely underrated author. Fahrenheit 451 to this day still is my go to novel that I've read so many times I've lost count. One of the best books I've ever read, the guys was a genius and he will be missed.
Awesome storyteller. My personal favorite was the short story "The Fog Horn". Don't know why. Maybe the bleak, lonely atmosphere of the story appealed to my then-young sense of angst. Who knows.
My favorite quote of his, from "Zen in the Art of Writing":
"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all."
Fahreneheit 451 is a book that I consider one of the most influential I've ever read (along with Nineteen Eighty Four), and I also enjoyed Something Wicked This Way Comes, and all the other Bradbury works I've read. There are still quite a few of his works that I haven't read, so maybe I'll pick up something else of his and read it soon as a tribute.
One of my favorite memories of growing up was listening to Ray Bradbury Theater audio cassettes on the drive to and from camping trips. I loved The Veld, The Screaming Woman, Sound of Thunder, and well pretty much all of them. When I got older and started to read his books they became very dear to me.
Is a weird thing with authors, that even though you never knew them other than through marks on paper, when they die it can actually feel like the death of a friend.
In high school, we had a literature class where there was a list of a couple hundred books we could choose from to read each month. At the end of the month, the teacher had a canned test she had purchased somewhere for each book, that we would take to prove our comprehension. For those of you who haven't read Martian Chronicles, it's a series of around 30 stories with mostly independent characters and story lines.
The test I was given was a "match the character to their description" test. Not only am I normally bad with names, but with 30 stories featuring unique charters, I had no idea on a majority of the names.
So, I flipped over the multiple choice test, and wrote an essay about how I read, comprehended, and loved the book,but this was an outrageous assessment, and a poor way to judge my aptitude.
Although I scored less than 30/100 on the multiple choice, the teacher gave me an A on the test.
I learned to think outside the box, and the power of reasoning and discussion. All the credit in the world to my teacher for having an open mind.
...Anyways, totally off topic, but it's something that will always stick with me. Bradbury was a great author who will be sorely missed.