Stuff Your Eyes With Wonder: Ray Bradbury Remembered

I am not one to get worked up over celebrity deaths. Seeing all the knee-jerk “R.I.P.s” on Facebook after a celebrity death, no matter whether banal or shocking, tends to make me smirk derisively. The R.I.P. reads much more like, “I heard about it first.” Or “I care suddenly about this person in a way that is not at all fake, really.”

So I was caught off guard today when I read about the death of Ray Bradbury and found myself with a lump in my throat. It’s not as if I knew the man personally. But what I felt was genuine sadness at his passing. You’ve probably noticed that even this blog, which I’ve been keeping for over 5 years, is named after a quote from Bradbury’s seminal work, Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury’s writing has been more influential on me as a reader and as a writer than any other single author. And since I self-identify as a reader and writer above anything else, I feel this loss strongly.

I want to quote something from the introduction of my copy of The Martian Chronicles. Written by Clifton Fadiman 8 years after the book’s first publication in 1950, this intro was included with the 19^th printing of the book in 1967. 

“[The Martian Chronicles] is not exactly a classic, but it is a book that has lifted itself out of the ruck of its competitors. It sounds a truly individual note: nobody writes like Ray Bradbury.”

I couldn't agree more. I don’t think Bradbury is the best writer, but he is one of my favorites, and that’s what matters. Nobody writes like Ray Bradbury. I feel strong nostalgia for his writing because it was some of the first fiction I read as an adolescent that actually stuck with me, and I find that it has held up into my own adulthood. But I also feel another kind of nostalgia when I read Bradbury, a type of nostalgia that is essentially American—a longing for something simpler in the face of complications like war and technology. Bradbury came up in the dusk of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, and he personifies a nostalgia for a time when the gap between science fiction and science fact was so much wider.

Further in, Fadiman nails the essence of the writer, who was at that time not yet 30 years old and would go on to write hundreds of short stories and ten more novels, including Fahrenheit 451—one of my top 3 novels of all time: 

“Mr. Bradbury has caught hold of a simple, obvious but overwhelmingly important moral idea, and, quite properly, he will not let it go. That idea—highlighted as every passing month produces a new terrifying lunacy: sputniks, super-sputniks, projected assaults on the moon, projected manned satellites—is that we are in the grip of a psychosis, a technology-mania, the final consequence of which can only be universal murder and quite conceivably the destruction of our planet.”

Oh, what the last six decades must have been like for Mr. Bradbury. “There are too many internets,” he said. “There are too many machines.”

In December 2011 (coincidentally the same month I published my first novel), Bradbury conceded to allow Fahrenheit 451 to be published as an e-book, despite his disdain for the medium (and the obvious irony given 451’s subject matter), provided that Simon & Schuster allow the e-book to be digitally downloaded by any library patron. Given the recent hubbub around the Big Six and e-lending, that is kind of a big deal.

What’s missing from much modern science fiction is not the imagination—I believe that part is alive and well. What’s missing is the morality. This was where Bradbury shined: rather than being an observer and a documentarian with a cold impartial eye to our “terrifying lunacy,” he chose a side. But he did it with beauty and grace and imagination, and that is why his work will last forever.  

Truly: rest in peace, Ray Bradbury. I hope with all the fibers of my writerly, readerly being that you passed away in a state of hope rather than defeat. May you now be in a place of wonder, light, and beauty that is worthy of your own brightest imaginings. 

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” 

–Ray Bradbury