However we choose to look at it, October thrills and titillates each of our senses and reaches into the very depths of our suspect souls, whether we actually encounter the dead or merely imagine their various states of being. Oh, the blessings of October, my favorite month. As far back as I can remember, in [...]
By the late 1960s, Ray Bradbury had channeled most of his creative energy away from his fiction and into his promotion of American space exploration and into his often-frustrated Hollywood dreams. When delving into fiction, he would return time and again to the safe harbors of his early successes. Jonathan R. Eller, Bradbury Beyond Apollo [...]
As America and Russia continued to progress into space, Ray Bradbury saw the efforts as a new phase in man’s spiritual consciousness. God, Bradbury declared, wanted man to approach the universe. The encounter with space was a “Cry of the Cosmos.” As such, science fiction as a genre was entering not just respectability, but the [...]
In the first volume of his three-volume biography, "Becoming Ray Bradbury," Jonathan R. Eller draws upon his friendship with Bradbury as well as upon a myriad of primary sources to write one of the best biographies of the famous author that I’ve yet encountered. Becoming Ray Bradbury, by Jonathan R. Eller (360 pages, University of [...]
In Ray Bradbury’s understanding, the government might very well be wicked and evil, but it would always follow the lead of the Masses and become their tool, rather than the other way around. I’ve been reading the works of Ray Bradbury since grade school. Probably like many of my generation, I was introduced to him [...]
What makes time so wonderful is that it humbles us as well as inspires us. And if we simply recognized each person on social media as a complete human being born into a specific place and a specific time, we might be able to get past so much of what we erroneously label as discourse. [...]
Little did Ray Bradbury know of his prescience in 1951, as he criticized society’s obsession with screens and the far-ranging effects of technology. Could television supersede community? Could it control us to the point of isolation and loneliness? Bradbury’s writing gives us much to think about. I am haunted by a lonely man. At sundown [...]
Dandelion Wine is a summer read if ever there was one. I know quite a few Ray Bradbury lovers who read it as a summer ritual, and for good reason. From the first moments when we meet Douglas Spaulding, we know his life is one of imagination and adventure. In Dandelion Wine, Doug is tantalized [...]
Over the last thirty years, political correctness has metastasized. Today, so many politically-correct assumptions have become mainstream that, as Tocqueville once predicted, they have narrowed our questions and our ability to question, rather than actually tell us the exact answers to things. Over the last decade, it has become normal for students, professors, and the [...]
Star Trek is a modern allegory and mythology for late Western Civilization. The series worked best when Captain Kirk stood for willful impulse; Mr. Spock for aristocratic reason; and Dr. McCoy for democratic passions… The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman (St. Martin’s, 2016) As [...]
Do you want to rule a world? Blow apart a sun? Test a theory of community? Explore the very depths of depravity? End slavery and misery? Destroy all empires? It is possible. . . At least in the imagination. The proper study of man is everything. The proper study of man as artist is everything [...]
Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview and Other Conversations Sam Weller, ed., (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, December 2014) One of the hardest things I’ve had to assess in my professional life as a historian and a biographer is just how much to take seriously in a person’s life. I consider, pass, and render judgments on a moment-by-moment basis! [...]
An American original, Ray Bradbury, will enjoy a high reputation for centuries to come. The future will remember him for hundreds of short stories and at least four profound novels: Fahrenheit 451; The Martian Chronicles; Something Wicked this Way Comes; and Dandelion Wine. Though Bradbury never set out intentionally to discuss dystopia or utopia, each [...]
From May 2001 to January 2010, professor of creative writing, fiction author, and biographer Sam Weller interviewed one of America’s greatest and most original talents, Ray Bradbury. Not every moment of every day, of course, but over countless hours, nonetheless, throughout the decade. As Mr. Bradbury himself admitted not long before his death, “Sam Weller [...]