The first paper I wrote in college, so far as I can remember, was for my freshman English class on Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. How can one describe Ray Bradbury, who died last week? I despair precisely because description, prose, was his great gift as a writer. When you read Bradbury, you feel the textures of cloth and you taste the smoothness of vanilla ice cream. Even as he aged and his stories descended into sentimentality and predictability, his powers of evocation remained as powerful as ever. This may be why he excelled in the short story form: with the exception of Fahrenheit 451, the novels for which he most celebrated are actually short story collections. The short story is the prose form closest to poetry, and Bradbury's prose was always something just barely short of poetic.
His great gift to his chosen genre of science fiction was never a revolutionary storyline or a new conception of the human relationship to technology. Instead, it was to put human beings into space and the future. For all their strengths as writers, Asimov and Heinlein's lead characters tended to be super-human: clever, morally upright, and generally infallible, even when making mistakes. Bradbury's astronauts and housewives, on the other hand, were always us: not stereotypically flawed, as is the all-too-common antihero of modern popular fiction, but limited, uncertain, and as bewildered by childhood and adulthood in Dandelion Wine as by alien landscapes in The Martian Chronicles.
In the 1980s, DC Comics launched what we today would call a "reboot" of the Martian Manhunter, whose home planet clearly owed a great debt to Bradbury's imagination. As was absolutely necessary, then, the comic was dedicated "To Ray Bradbury, the man who discovered Mars."
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