Ray Bradbury was the guy who lit the spark. Marvel Comics
taught me to read, but Ray Bradbury taught me to love it. Sure, Robert Heinlein
and Alex Key and Sheila Moon and Madeline L’Engle did, too, but it was
Bradbury who formed the core.
I can’t remember the first time I read one of his stories. I
think it was somewhere around 1967. I used to spend my afternoons in the Ft.
Rucker library while Mom went to the Commissary, and I would check out about
10-15 books when she came to get me. One of his was in that pile, probably The
Martian Chronicles, dunno, but, by the summer of 1968, he was absolutely my favorite
author and I had read…everything. R is for Rocket was his best anthology, neck-and-neck
with The October Country and S is for Space. My favorite novel was Something
Wicked This Way Comes, which was made into not-a-half-bad movie with Jason
Robards (although, overall, RB didn’t translate well into film. Remember the
Rock Hudson Martian Chronicles? Ugh).
There was something about his style, sentences
careened across theme and event and crashed back into themselves, evoking an
incredible sense of place and atmosphere. It felt like RB got it, that he knew
the essence of growing up and the ephemeral moments of play and sunset and the
smells of newly mown grass and how…fleeting…it is. All Summer in a Day, wow. I read Dandelion Wine back then, too, and didn’t
really get the stories but the sense of it, the passing of things that make up memory, I got that.
I stopped reading him sometime in the late 70’s. Was into Tolkien
and Herbert and Hesse then. A few years ago, I picked up some stuff he had written recently but stopped about
halfway through the first story because something was missing.
I think it was me.
Anyways, salud, mazeltov, mud in your eye, RB. You
were the best. The Man’s out there. Go find Him.
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