One of my favorite Bradbury stories: "The Rocket", in The Illustrated Man. A junkyard owner tries to save money to send his family to space, but can't afford it, so he builds a replica rocket with some kind of 3D windshield display to convince his kids that they are flying through space.
R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
31–40 of 98 posts
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#32My favorite Ray Bradbury memory is the time he came to my school to talk about his books and ended up yelling at my English teach for trying to find hidden meaning that wasn't there just for the sake of busywork. RIP Mr. Bradbury.
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Orson Scott Card is not too far off, IMO.
Sadly, I found over time his newer books became steadily worse. It's odd to me that someone like Jim Butcher can get steadily better where other authors 'give up', start believing their own hype, use ghost writers, or something.
I've wondered if the declining arc of Card's writing is connected to his apparently increasing narrowness, rigidity and dogmatism in general.
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#34My favorite Ray Bradbury memory is the time he came to my school to talk about his books and ended up yelling at my English teach for trying to find hidden meaning that wasn't there just for the sake of busywork. RIP Mr. Bradbury.
When I was in school, I often wondered how often teachers did this.
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#35Is a weird thing with authors, that even though you never knew them other than through marks on paper, when they die it can actually feel like the death of a friend.
Bye Ray.
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#36There are a couple of enjoyable radio dramatizations of his some of his stories from the 50s available for download at the Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/XMinus1_A
Stories include:
"And The Moon Be Still As Bright"
"Mars is Heaven"
"The Veldt"
"Dwellers in Silence"
"Zero Hour"
"To the Future"
"Marionettes, Inc."
"There Will Come Soft Rains"
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#37RIP Bradbury. Martian Chronicles is indirectly one of the most influential books in my life, due to an interesting twist... In high school, we had a literature class where there was a list of a couple hundred books we could choose from to read each month. At the end of the month, the teacher had a canned test she had purchased somewhere for each book, that we would take to prove our comprehension. For those of you wh…
The very fact that the teacher allowed students to choose what they wanted to read, rather than the books that the teacher him/herself liked (which was the unfortunate case for me), is wonderful. Had I been afforded such a situation, it probably wouldn't have taken me 10 years (after High School) to finally enjoy reading for myself.
On the other hand you're not doing your students any favours if you let them only read the stuff they're interested in; or rather, the stuff they think they're interested in at the age of twelve. Gotta force them to broaden their horizons and read something else once in a while or they'll become... well, the kind of adults who only read science fiction.
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#38“If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
This is why I hate twitter for limiting us to 140 characters. I love this quote, but the darn thing doesn't fit!
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#39“If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
This is why I hate twitter for limiting us to 140 characters. I love this quote, but the darn thing doesn't fit!
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#40I often walk by this building https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Carnegie+Library+Waukegan,+Ct... which is the library he spent lots of time in as a youth.
Sadly, the building is now closed, but I do hear occasional rumblings of it being reopened.