Happy Birthday Ray Bradbury

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Author Ray Bradbury’s birthday wish: a reader on Mars in the next century
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — Science fiction author Ray Bradbury celebrated his 83rd birthday with this wish:
One night, 100 years from now, a youngster will stay up late reading The Martian Chronicles with a flashlight under his blanket — on the Red Planet.
“That’s the dream I have and that’s the reason I’m here,” the author of the 1950 classic said during a birthday party organized Saturday by the Planetary Society.
The space exploration advocacy group presented Bradbury with a mammoth birthday card printed with messages from 4,000 well wishers.
Actress Angie Dickinson gave him a kiss. Director Peter Hyams, whose movie version of Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder is due in April, called him a “national treasure.” Sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson asked for an autograph.
Actress Nichelle Nichols pinned a Star Trek badge on his lapel.
“It makes you an honorary member of the Starship Enterprise, which you actually have been from day one,” said Nichols, who played Lieut. Uhura on the original Star Trek TV series.
Bradbury said he developed his love for Mars as a high school student, when he read the nearly dozen Mars-themed books by an author now better known for creating Tarzan.
“Edgar Rice Burroughs taught me to go out on the lawns of summer and hold my hands out and say ‘Mars, take me home.’ And I have never been back,” Bradbury said.

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Monday, 25 August 2003 16:48 (twenty-two years ago)

Bradbury is indeed the KING! Asimov's his bitch.

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Monday, 25 August 2003 16:56 (twenty-two years ago)

Nowt wrong with being part of the alien clique, but how will Bradbury possibly top this, next year?

― Nichole Graham (Nichole Graham), Monday, 25 August 2003 17:24 (twenty-two years ago)

Happy birthday Ray!

I shall read some of yr short stories in yr honour!

― jel -- (jel), Monday, 25 August 2003 17:57 (twenty-two years ago)

Happy Birthday to Ray! Let's all sit outside under a willow tree and read from Danedlion Wine in the glow of evening in his honor!

― Prude (Prude), Monday, 25 August 2003 18:35 (twenty-two years ago)

Happy indeed -- he's related indirectly to a good friend of Donut Bitch's and mine, and I've actually heard a negative story or two along the way about him, but hell, we all have flaws. He's sui generis in science fiction and beyond, and more power to him.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 25 August 2003 19:45 (twenty-two years ago)

Nobody lives to 83 without earning a few negative stories.

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Monday, 25 August 2003 19:47 (twenty-two years ago)

Overrated and I suspect rather right-wing in some ways. I'm not a fan.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Monday, 25 August 2003 20:06 (twenty-two years ago)

He certainly can create a fetishistic vision of Middle America as a conservative smalltown paradise but often uses it in surprising fashions -- I'm thinking of his use of that specific trope in The Martian Chronicles where that turns out to be a front aimed at disarming and death.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 25 August 2003 21:07 (twenty-two years ago)

I'd be interested to hear Martin expand on the 'right-wing' thing, I haven't read Bradbury in years but I used to like him lots. Always thought it was cool he and Ray Harryhausen were childhood friends.

RB could never be half as overrated as Robert bloody Heinlein.

― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 11:07 (twenty-two years ago)

Bradbury is certainly a far better writer than Heinlein, who was terrible, and whose politics were pretty fucking dodgy too. I remember Bradbury praising the Walt Disney vision of the perfect small town, back in the days when it was whites only. I've continued to hold this against him. I don't think he was a terribly right wing person, but an old fashioned small-town conservative.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 16:29 (twenty-two years ago)

well, some of the messages in Farenheit 451 could probably be taken as either con or lib.
I haven't read anything by him in about 10 years, but when I was real young, like 12/13, he was the man. Or one of the men. That is, I got wild kicks from his stories, esp. the Halloween Tree? Is that what it was called?

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 16:31 (twenty-two years ago)

sixteen years pass...

*bump*

― Isinglass Ponys (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 22 August 2020 20:23 (five years ago)

"old fashioned small town conservative" might be the best that can be said about this (the blog post author is not so generous, as the url indicates):

https://theweeklyansible.tumblr.com/post/44074849211/ray-bradbury-being-a-racist-sexist-ass-about

― neith moon (ledge), Saturday, 22 August 2020 20:36 (five years ago)

still, i have fond memories of "something wicked this way comes".

― neith moon (ledge), Saturday, 22 August 2020 21:22 (five years ago)

the fbi kept a file on him and noted that "science fiction may be a lucrative field for the introduction of communist ideologies":

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/aug/24/ray-bradbury-fbi-file/

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Saturday, 22 August 2020 23:17 (five years ago)

I was always grossed out by how Bradbury depicted people of colour. His short story “The Jar” is an especially egregious example (although Tim Burton’s adaptation for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents revival in 1986 tries to skirt this by making the cast all white)

― beamish13, Sunday, 23 August 2020 01:04 (five years ago)

I used to frequent the L.A. public library branch that is now named after him. My partner and her family lived just a few blocks away from him in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood (which is where asshole former California governor Pete Wilson also currently resides)

― beamish13, Sunday, 23 August 2020 01:06 (five years ago)

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