A few writers helped drag science fiction and fantasy out of the literary dungeon of the lurid ’30s and ’40s pulp magazines and paperbacks by their polished style, interesting characters and complex plots. Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Pohl Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Fredric Brown, A.E. Van Vogt, et al, were among that group of artists, as was Ray Bradbury. The well-written stories of Bradbury didn’t just entertain, they did that which the greatest literature is supposed to do: they made you think. He once wrote: “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.” RIP, Ray Bradbury, you’ll always be there with us. Here’s an obit from Yahoo News with links to other info.
Ray Bradbury, beloved science fiction author, dies
The Lookout
Yahoo.com
Wed, 6th Jun 2012 02:41 PMRay Bradbury, author of “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles” and other iconic science fiction novels, died Tuesday night at the age of 91, according to The Associated Press.
“His legacy lives on in his monumental body of books, film, television and theater, but more importantly, in the minds and hearts of anyone who read him, because to read him was to know him. He was the biggest kid I know,” his grandson told the i09 science fiction blog.
Bradbury sold 8 million copies of his books in 36 languages, according to The New York Times’ obit.
He attributed his success as a writer to never having gone to college—instead, he read and wrote voraciously. “When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week,” he said in an interview with The Paris Review. “I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.”
“The universe is a little emptier right now,” Texas A&M University-Commerce English professor Robin Anne Reid told Yahoo News. She wrote a book about Bradbury’s works and sits on the board of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies. “There’s less of that sense of joy and exultation that he was writing in his works all the way to the end.”
Reid said Bradbury was the first writer to jump from pulp magazines to mainstream literary magazines, thus bringing science fiction writing into the mainstream. Bradbury also wrote fantasy and horror.
Read the rest here.