(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)
There's an air of mystique around writers of speculative fiction that is palpable to everyone who has ever looked up at the skies and wondered what possibilities lay beyond. Think Isaac Asimov's famous picture, sitting on a throne with symbols from his work emblazoned proudly, or Arthur C. Clarke's eerily accurate descriptions of supercomputers and nanotechnology decades before either concept came to fruition. Starting from Jules Verne, who was one of the pioneers of the genre, every popular science fiction writer worth his salt has been treated as a cross between a rockstar, an oracle and a messiah.
Last week, the world was robbed of one such oracle, the legendary American writer Ray Bradbury who passed away at 91, following a prolonged illness. Many of his works like Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes, have come to be regarded as classics of the genre; expanding and re-defining our ideas about speculative fiction.
There's a story from Bradbury's childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, which has been told very often. It's a typical 'moment of revelation' story that one comes across so often with regard to writers and artists everywhere. It involves the 12-year-old Bradbury's encounter with a circus magician named Mr Electrico who performed with an electrified sword. As the man himself said in a 2001 letter, "When he reached me, he pointed his sword at my head and touched my brow. The electricity rushed down the sword, inside my skull, made my hair stand up and sparks fly out of my ears. He then shouted at me, "Live forever!"
The next day, the enchanted young boy returned to the carnival ground to meet the magician again, hopefully to pick up the trick for himself. The encounter changed Bradbury's life for good, a cathartic moment, that had a profound influence on his work. Grateful for this divine intervention, Bradbury explained in the letter, "I went home and the next day traveled to Arizona with my folks. When we arrived there a few days later I began to write, full-time. I have written every single day of my life since that day 69 years ago."
With such a brutal work ethic, it should come as no surprise that Bradbury wrote 27 novels and over 600 short stories across a career spanning more than six decades, to say nothing of his numerous plays, screenplays and non-fiction works. Of these, Fahrenheit 451 remains perhaps the most adored – the film adaptation was directed by the renowned French auteur François Truffaut.
Set in a dystopian American landscape, the 1953 novel imagines a future where books are outlawed and "firemen" are people who burn books for a living (the title of the book refers to the temperature at which paper burns). As the official motto of the firemen states, "Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes." Think about The Satanic Verses, or scholar James Laine's biography of Shivaji, and you get an idea about the scary prescience of Bradbury's novel.
His stories, like those of his contemporary Isaac Asimov, often focus on the unexpected and bizarre ways humans react when confronted with alien settings, or unfamiliar technologies. What sets Bradbury apart is a nostalgic air, an intensely detailed way of summoning an instant in time and space – children were his favoured set piece, with their ill-informed notions of permanence and mortality.
In one of my favourite Bradbury stories, The Veldt, two children get a little too enamoured of a virtual reality toy, to the increasing dismay of their parents. Stories like A Sound of Thunder and All Summer in a Day also focus on the inevitably tragic consequences of being hung over about an irretrievable past.
In a coincidence that even he couldn't have possibly scripted better, the day Bradbury died was also the day the Transit of Venus took place, a rare astronomical phenomenon, which happens once every 243 years. Perhaps rarer still is to come across a writer who captures the imagination of the reader like Bradbury does; it is this quality which will ensure that he will, in the words of a certain Mr Electrico, "Live forever!"
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