![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Everyone knows that Ray Bradbury is gone.
And of course I have to post something about it – partly because I started catching up with him last year via The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, and partly because Fahrenheit 451 was one of the few books on my high school reading list that (1) I enjoyed and (2) was very influential on my eventual worldview regarding censorship.
Which is ironic because, as I found out later, Bradbury never intended F451 to be an anti-censorship book so much as a warning that TV and mass media would replace literature, with the result that knowledge would be reduced to meaningless, contextless trivia.
Books still survive today, of course. But I look at the Internet and cable TV news and I can’t say he got it entirely wrong.
Anyway, as I’ve said before, I’ve enjoyed revisiting Bradbury in recent months. He was one of those people who could write science fiction for people who don’t like science fiction, because his stories aren’t hard SF – there’s very little science in them at all, particularly the Mars stories. You probably couldn’t get away with that today, and yet his stories still work here in 2012.
Or at least they do for me. So I’m looking forward to continuing my Bradbury education.
PRODUCTION NOTE: The headline of this post, incidentally, was lifted from A Connecticut Rabbit In King Arthur’s Court, a Bugs Bunny TV special in which Chuck Jones gives the Mark Twain story the Looney Tunes treatment.
The Chuck Jones version: Bugs tunnels his way to the Georgia Peanut Festival only to end up in medieval England, upon which he says:
I’ve always loved that line.
You can watch the whole episode here, if you like.
Something wicked that way went,
This is dF
And of course I have to post something about it – partly because I started catching up with him last year via The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, and partly because Fahrenheit 451 was one of the few books on my high school reading list that (1) I enjoyed and (2) was very influential on my eventual worldview regarding censorship.
Which is ironic because, as I found out later, Bradbury never intended F451 to be an anti-censorship book so much as a warning that TV and mass media would replace literature, with the result that knowledge would be reduced to meaningless, contextless trivia.
Books still survive today, of course. But I look at the Internet and cable TV news and I can’t say he got it entirely wrong.
Anyway, as I’ve said before, I’ve enjoyed revisiting Bradbury in recent months. He was one of those people who could write science fiction for people who don’t like science fiction, because his stories aren’t hard SF – there’s very little science in them at all, particularly the Mars stories. You probably couldn’t get away with that today, and yet his stories still work here in 2012.
Or at least they do for me. So I’m looking forward to continuing my Bradbury education.
PRODUCTION NOTE: The headline of this post, incidentally, was lifted from A Connecticut Rabbit In King Arthur’s Court, a Bugs Bunny TV special in which Chuck Jones gives the Mark Twain story the Looney Tunes treatment.
The Chuck Jones version: Bugs tunnels his way to the Georgia Peanut Festival only to end up in medieval England, upon which he says:
Never again, never never again, do I take travel hints from Ray Bradbury! Huh! Him and his short cuts!
I’ve always loved that line.
You can watch the whole episode here, if you like.
Something wicked that way went,
This is dF
