Ray Bradbury, Still Going at 90

THIS Sunday marks the 90th birthday of the first Los Angeles writer I ever read. I can still remember some of the images and moods in his story collection The October Country. And the yearning lyricism and use of The Red Planet as a metaphor for the American West makes The Martian Chronicles, some days, one of my 10 favorite works of fiction.

Critic Ted Gioia has a wide-ranging tribute to Bradbury on his blog Conceptual Fiction. It gets into Bradbury's earliest work, his Midwestern-to-Los Angeles life story, and his discomfort with the science-fiction genre.


HERE is a piece I wrote in 2003 that began this way:
Ray Bradbury is the first Los Angeles writer many people read. He's also the first reasonably serious writer -- someone concerned with political and moral themes -- many encounter. His early science-fiction novels and story collections have drawn readers, especially intellectually ambitious teenage boys, for a half-century now. Many of these Bradbury fans become lifetime readers, moving into all kinds of weightier fare, from the darker, more complicated science fiction of William Gibson, Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick to mainstream literary work without end. He's the ultimate gateway drug.


Despite my mixed feelings for Bradbury's recent work, he's one of the finest citizens of literary L.A., and it's appropriate that Fahrenheit 451 has become, especially lately, his most talked about and read novel -- even if its meaning has changed a bit with time. 


The threat the book lays out is not so much censoriousness as ignorance -- the sense that books are relics of the past. This man with minimal formal education has been a huge advocate for reading as well as for public libraries. As the husband of a school librarian laid off (like all of her peers) by the city of Pasadena -- this will likely result in us leaving the state in the next month or two -- I can assure everyone that Bradbury has better values than those directing institutions in contemporary California.


Long may he thrive. 

Pro and Con on Ray Bradbury

THE first Los Angeles writer many people read -- I think this was true for me -- is Ray Bradbury. The fantasy and science-fiction writer, nearing his 90th birthday, gets a very fine treatment from Nathaniel Rich in Slate this week. (Here for his piece.)


I dedicated the book I co-edited, The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles, to Bradbury; my partner in crime Dana Gioia and I regarded him as a contemporary myth-maker whose Martian Chronicles stories are among the very finest work ever written about California. I still love that book and some others, such as the macabre, atmospheric The October Country.


"The best stories have a strange familiarity about them," Rich writes in his piece pegged to the Everyman Library The Stories of Ray Bradbury. "They're like long-forgotten acquaintances — you know you've met them somewhere before. "


Rich makes a real case for Bradbury as a wide-ranging talent who deals intelligently with technology, reckons with disillusionment, and put a strong stamp on the horror genre as well. I'm fond of young Mr. Rich, who recently departed the revived Paris Review; I met him in New York and wrote about his wondrous first novel here in a piece that also looked at two other first-time novelists in New York, Ed Park and Keith Gessen. (The Paris Review also has an interview with RB in its latest issue.)


But I should confess here that while my interest in science fiction and fantasy have come back to me with a vengeance over the last few years, I've been quite disappointed with most Bradbury written since the end of the '50s. One of the toughest pieces I've ever had to write was this review of an earlier career-spanning story collection. 


Why the man's output has decline so severely I can't say. I wish Bradbury well of course, and despite my feelings for his work, part of me is pleased to see the renewal of interest in his work. As I say in my piece, Bradbury's early work can serve as a powerful gateway drug to more powerful stuff and for that we're all grateful.