ACHB

Ray Bradbury passed away this past week, which is really sad but also sort of really isn't. It's sad because, well, now we live in a world without Ray Bradbury and he will never write anything else for us to read, ever.

But it's not, because Ray Bradbury will never die. As long as there's someone who's read his work still kicking he's quite alive, because his words were alive.

The first Bradbury story I ever read was "All Summer in a Day." For some reason I want to remember having read it in a late-elementary school literature textbook (those terrible ones that collect short stories and awful abridged versions of great novels and slap terrible illustrations in, under the impression that children cannot read without pictures), but that seems an improbable place to find such a story. Regardless, the story has never really faded from my mind: I was overwhelmed by how despite it's quiet tone and despite all the play in the story it was impossibly dark.

Mr. Bradbury saw and unflinchingly painted the senseless cruelty of children.

Maybe a year or two later I came across a somewhat tattered copy of The Illustrated Man. I began reading and did not set the book down until I had finished it. The stories were delightfully, unrelentingly dark. I had already discovered science fiction and was just beginning to explore horror and these stories did something incredible: they combined conventional science fiction's starry-eyed hope and optimism with a gritty look at human's self-destructive nature. These weren't stories about how technology and exploration would save humanity; they were about how technology and exploration would provide so many ways to continue our path of self-destruction as a society and as individuals. He showed me that science fiction could be full of hope and wonder towards the future, or full of wary caution, or sometimes even a bit of both.

I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction and, if asked to name who invented science fiction, who dug up the clay and lovingly sculpted it and watered it and breathed life into it, I would answer thusly: Verne and Wells made the clay and it lay dormant before being discovered by Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein, who shaped it and made it come alive, and it was Bradbury who set it free, who sent it galloping out under the power of it's own free will to inspect and explore both the shining pinnacles and  gritty caves of our world.