The good lady has just told me Ray Bradbury has died.

Bradbury was one of the grandfathers of fantastical fiction, even when I was a lad. I would agree with his own assessment that, except for Fahrenheit 451, he wasn’t a Science Fiction writer, as most of his work was fantasy.

Partly because of that I haven’t read all of his work, not much in fact. Fahrenheit 451 obviously, but also The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man.

I like these quotes from him in the obituary linked to above:-

“Fantasies are things that can’t happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.”

“When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.”

Had he never written another word Fahrenheit 451 would still have stood as a proud memorial. A novel about the importance of the written word, and the abomination that any book burning, of any book at all, represents. It is also about the indomitability of the human spirit.

Ray Douglas Bradbury 22/8/1920 – 6/6/2012. So it goes.

PS Publishing, 2010, 112p.

This was the collection I mentioned had been in a BSFA mailing about 18 months ago – a taster from Postscripts.
I’ve only just got round to reading it. The authors include Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell and Gene Wolfe.

Most of the stories are not SF but are fantasy or horror; the best of which is Lisa Tuttle’s Closet Dreams where a young girl dreams of her incarceration by a man she calls the monster.

Of the out and out SF Eagle Song by Stephen Baxter concerns messages from Altair which recur at time intervals that decrease in powers of three from 7510 BC to 2210 AD. While clearly not our own history it parallels that closely, so the phrase “hippy chick” and the use of helicopter gunships in Vietnam supposedly in 1967 jarred a little. Footvote by Peter Hamilton relates the consequences of a private venture opening a wormhole to another planet and Gene Wolfe’s Comber is set on a world where cities drift on tectonic plates.

The writing throughout all the stories cannot be faulted but the fantasy and horror didn’t do too much for me.