Ray Bradbury dead at 91. The author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, he took this small town kid to the edge of the universe.
“A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know.”
? Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Rick
The last of what I always thought of as the "trio"... Isaac Asimov, Aurthur C. Clark, and Ray Bradbury.
I always favored Isaac Asimov the most, but all three were very influential on me as a kid. Without them, I never would have gone to Caltech as a Physics major. I really wanted to study under Richard Feynman (who I never would have known about, except for these sci-fi authors), but as fate would have it, I accepted an early admission to Caltech in December 1987, and Feynman died of cancer in February 1988. Life likes to throw curve balls...
a master of the genre.
Farenheit 451 is an American classic along with the stories of The Illustrated Man.
Something Wicked Comes This Way was my favorite. You can see how it influenced Steven King and others.
Asimov is another story altogether. His books on mathematics shpould be cherished by young and old alike .
I still pull his books out and read them again.
He was one of the authors the freaked out hippies would sit around and discuss as they sank further and further into their own psychodelic fantasies. The kind of guys who couldn't defend themselves against a sick kindergartener, but, could spend hours ranting about the corrupt war machine that was going to doom the world to nuclear annihilation within a matter of months. The same ones who marched for free love and Zero Population Growth. Oxymorons. The only reason they were in college was because their uptight conservative parents where so ashamed of them they would gladly pay them to stay hundreds or thousands of miles from home until they, HOPELY, came to their senses someday.
It's truly a shame that such a brilliant thinker was most respected by those with too few brain cells left to get a job. His millions came from their parents and other enablers.
He also mentored the next generation of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Joe Haldeman..
"He was one of the authors the freaked out hippies would sit around and discuss as they sank further and further into their own psychodelic fantasies. The kind of guys who couldn't defend themselves against a sick kindergartener, but, could spend hours ranting about the corrupt war machine that was going to doom the world to nuclear annihilation within a matter of months. The same ones who marched for free love and Zero Population Growth. Oxymorons. The only reason they were in college was because their uptight conservative parents where so ashamed of them they would gladly pay them to stay hundreds or thousands of miles from home until they, HOPELY, came to their senses someday."
??????
Is this some kind of a rant, or are you permanently this way?
Both. I had no use for the freaked out hippies.
Are you sure your talking about Ray Bradbury?
> Are you sure your talking about Ray Bradbury?
I was thinking the same thing, not many "freaked out hippies" reading the books of a dis-utopian moralist.
Ray Bradbury on Russell Kirk, the godfather of American postwar conservative movement
"For too many years Russell Kirk, almost like the title of this book, remained half seen in the American Literary scene. It is time his critics and readers brought him out into full light. He deserves to be considered a fine writer and an amazing thinker in literature and politics."
It is amazing how many hours of entertainment Ray Bradbury and other sci-fi writers of that time frame provided me. When I was a youngster, I would often read two or three sci-fi books each week (more during the summer).
I may just dig out a couple of his books that are in the bookshelf and read them again as a memorial.
Holy Cow!!!
Must be some sort of rant. Or maybe a secret plot to create some sort of "virtual warfare", where sane people go insane by reading the internet...?
Hey... Sounds like a Ray Bradbury plot... 😉
:good:
