Ray Bradbury
The world lost one of the good ones yesterday. Ray Bradbury died in Los Angeles at the age of 91.
I got to meet him once, back when I lived in LA. I went to a book signing just so I could shake his hand and tell him thanks. He signed my copy of The Martian Chronicles and a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes for a friend who couldn’t make it. He couldn’t believe I was such a fan of work he’d written over 50 years prior. But The Martian Chronicles continues to be one of my all-time favorite books.
There wasn’t another sci-fi author out there with so much heart. Really, I’m not sure there was another any kind of writer that got people like Bradbury did. You might say I was a bit of a fan.
This is him, in his home. According to the Google News link where I found it, he said that he never threw anything away.
From everything I know about him, he was about as good a guy as they get. And Los Angeles always felt a little bit nicer knowing he was out there in it, still madly in love with Hollywood after all those years. I’m sorry to see him go. He planted magic into the hearts and minds of millions.
In the afterword of the short story collection “Driving Blind,” Bradbury writes of a dream wherein he was taken in a student driver car (he never did learn to drive) by a blindfolded Greek muse, who “whispered notions, concepts, ideas, immense truths, and fabulous lies” as she drove him along a country road. She told him that it was okay not to know the way, and to just reach out.
I don’t know where you’re headed now, Ray, but I like to think of you reaching out, and I hope that it’s wonderful.