Ray Bradbury passed away yesterday at the age of 91, during the transit of Venus. I’m too stunned to feel right now, but I know I’m going to miss him.
Some articles and remembrances (you can find a far more exhaustive list at Charles Tan’s blog here):
- New York Times obituary
- Obama’s tribute
- Caitlín Kiernan (one of my favorite stories of hers is “Bradbury Weather” – it’s an sf tale set on Mars, of course): “He showed me how to rub two words together and make a spark that could become a glorious and terrible inferno.”
- Neil Gaiman in The Guardian: “Ray Bradbury was the kind of person who would give half a day to a kid who wanted to be a writer when he grew up.”
- Neil Gaiman’s introduction to The Machineries of Joy
- Lev Grossman in Time: “Bradbury was a fearless explorer of both outer space and inner— they were really the same thing to him. He loved innocence, but somehow that never impaired his understanding of evil.”
- Bruce Sterling in the NY Times:“He used to speak of a mystical experience: instead of attending a family funeral, he ran off to a carnival. He found a sideshow huckster named “Mr. Electrico,” who told him that he was not a 12-year-old but a reincarnated spirit. He hit him on the head with an electrical wand and told him to aspire to immortality.
If it sounds like a half-hour fantasy TV episode, it’s probably because Bradbury wrote so many of those, years later. But more important, it’s a metaphor for sci-fi as a way of life: departing a funereal mainstream culture to play techno-tricks with the tattooed sideshow weirdos.”
– E