Ray Bradbury: The Loss of a Dark Magician

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

 ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

I have read a fair amount of science fiction over the years and Ray Bradbury was always one of my favorites.  He was certainly a gardener.  While his view of the future was not as consistently dark as Philip K. Dick's version, he often had a warning wrapped within his fascinating and insightful tales.  Given his lack of a college education and inability to drive a car, I find his understanding of the past, present, and future to be all the more amazing.  He was a man full of stories that needed to be shared. 

Hopefully, Bradbury's death last week at the age of 91 will only increase the attention paid to his work and cause us all to dream a little more and think harder about the world we want to inhabit.  As Bradbury said, in reference to his story Fahrenheit 451, "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."

The New York Times published a nice summary of Bradbury's take on the future called Uncle Ray's Dystopia, which was filled with examples of his warning about technology. The author sums up Bradbury's vision in this way: 

There’s already been a lot of rhapsodizing about Ray Bradbury’s “sense of wonder,” the dark magic and October chill he infused into his work. But let’s not turn him into something harmless, a kindly, childlike uncle spinning marvelous tales of rocket ships and dinosaurs. Don’t forget that he was also the crazy uncle, the dangerous one, a malcontent and a crank, alarming everyone at the dinner table with impassioned rants and dire warnings.

I think its time to take his stories off the shelf and read through them again.  I am sure I will see them in a new light now that many years have passed.  And I know I will miss the dark magician and his dire warnings.  As Bradbury noted in his own words, "People call me a science fiction writer, but I don't think that's quite true. I think that I'm a magician who is capable of making things appear and disappear right in front of you and you don't know how it happened."