Ray Bradbury has died. He called himself a writer of Fantasy fiction, but I think of Bradbury the same way as I do Vonnegut, as a writer of “soft” Science Fiction, and he helped to redefine in my mind what the genre was, and could be. “Hard” Sci-Fi is old school, with an emphasis on getting the science right, or at least making it somewhat plausible. Bradbury’s plots include space ships and time travel, but these are merely the trappings of his stories. In contrast to the strength of Bradbury’s ideas, his prose has a delicacy that isn’t found in the work of Asimov or Heinlein.
Denro had these comments:
I recalled that everyone I knew read “Martian Chronicles” in Jr. High… not because we had too, but because we wanted to. That was my intro to Bradbury and still my favorite, I guess. Plenty of comic stories came out of there! Along with a comic book store name.
Being a collection of related short stories, The Martian Chronicles is a particularly accessible book for young readers. Not since reading Rusty’s Space Ship by Evelyn Sibley Lampman in the third grade had I been affected as much by a book as I was by The Martian Chronicles. Later, I was pleased to learn that in the 1950’s some of Bradbury’s stories had been adapted in comic books and in radio shows like X Minus 1.
[audio:http://archive.org/download/XMinus1_A/xminusone_550508_MarsIsHeaven.mp3|titles=X Minus One: Mars is Heaven by Ray Bradbury]The Million Year Picnic is a comic book store in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. It was named by its founder Jerry Weist after the last story in The Martian Chronicles, and having opened in 1974 it was one of the first shops dedicated to selling comics.