Ray Bradbury... another old master... lost.
He's a favorite of mine, too. Whenever I think of how this world seems to be getting further away from the written word and into flashier gadgets, texting and reality TV, I think maybe Fahrenheit 451 is closer to reality than I'd care to like... except we seem to be tossing away the literary ourselves... and here's this giant standing against this tide, still banging away on a typewriter.... you have to admire the man, just for that alone.
Bradbury's science fiction both shaped the golden age and was it. He was an artist in the truest sense of the word. He helped change our perceptions of things and ideas. He deftly went from novels to short stories and television and everything in between. He could be unabashedly sentimental and downright terrifying in his tales (mixed nicely in Something Wicked This Way Comes), managing to both coldly dissect the cruelty of humanity (one story of kids locking their classmate in a closet so he missed the one day in millennia where sunlight would break through the clouds of rainy Venus haunted me for years... and still speaks of the toll of bullying) while embracing its potential for greatness and kindness in a warm bear hug.
I tend to gravitate to dark and unsettling Bradbury.... (The Illustrated Man is another classic collection), and short stories The Black Ferris, The October Game (one of the singularly most disturbing stories I've read... worthy of Robert Bloch) and The Veldt are just a mere handful of the countless ones he did write out..
And you know, his eyes never lost that youthful gleam. Even at 91, before he passed, Bradbury still looked like he viewed the world like a five year old would, with an undying sense of wonder.
I doubt most of us would be able to claim that...
Rest in peace, Mr. Bradbury. You will live on as long as your works do.