Ray Bradbury has died. His best hand was the short story, of which he was an unsurpassed master in any genre. I used to run into him on the UCLA campus when I was a graduate student. He never hurried me away when I hailed him and chatted, and his valediction was always the same, a heartfelt, “God bless you, young man.”
He always seemed to be the most spiritually healthy of the great science fiction writers. I remember him best for his short story collections; I’ve still got beat-up copies of “The Illustrated Man” and “The Martian Chronicles” in my apartment waiting to be reread. From his novels “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and “Dandelion Wine” what struck me was less the story than his ability to make us remember the wonder and excitement of childhood. One of the things I’ve relished about Bradbury’s stories is that he sets so many of them in my home state of Illinois.
I was disappointed with “Fahrenheit 451″ when I first read it, but seeing the movie a couple years ago as a more mature person has made me think that I might have missed a lot the first time through. At least in the movie, the objection to censorship is not any of the liberal ones–the dangers of unaccountable government, the supposed “right” to unfettered expression–but that it could be used to cut us off from our spiritual heritage. That’s a kind of censorship that we reactionaries would certainly agree is bad.