Ray

Posted by Steve | Jun 06, 2012 | Comment

Well… this is a sad day.

The epic Martian Chronicles was one of the reasons I became a filmmaker/storyteller/world builder.Farenheiht 451 helped me to become present.

Science fiction author Ray Bradbury, whose imagination yielded classic books such as “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” has died at 91, his publisher said Wednesday.

You would think that someone with such an amazing ability to play in other realities would love our new technological age,
but Bradbury was adverse to many new advances, particularly the proliferation of the Internet and “giant screens.” The Guardian last year called him “one of the last bastions against the digital age.”

“I don’t try to describe the future,” Bradbury has said. “I try to prevent it.”

He fought against the digitization of his books, only agreeing to publish Fahrenheit 451 in ebook form in late 2011 as part of a seven-figure deal to renew the book’s hardcover rights with his American publisher, Simon & Schuster. When Yahoo approached him in 2009 about publishing a book through its properties, Bradbury reacted violently.

“You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It’s distracting,” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times that Yahoo declined to verify. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere,” he added.

“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury told The Times. It was in his hometown library, after all, where he first indulged his love for books; he wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter in the basement of UCLA’s library. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Today, he is being commemorated across the web, and is currently trending in the U.S. on Twitter. One wonders what he would have thought of that.

- Read more on Mashable

Posted by Steve | This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2012 at 11:58 pm. It is filed under Featured, News, Noteworthy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.