Lovely tributes to Ray Bradbury. Sarah Hoyt:
Bradbury spoke directly to my poetic soul. The first book I read in English was Dandelion Wine. I still have it, that same copy, all underlined, with notations on the meaning of words on the side. It took me months to read, but it was worth it. And the richness of the words leached into my vocabulary and my own writing.
Bradbury never made you stop reading to notice how cleverly he wrote. On the contrary, his music held you inside the story, as if the words had come out of your own mind and heart.
[. . .]
I learned many techniques from many writers — exposition from Heinlein, ironic viewpoint from Austen and Mitchell, clarity and invisibility from Asimov, motive from Richter.
But from whom else could a writer learn to take seemingly ordinary language and make music with it? Ray Bradbury was the rhapsode of our time. Now he’s gone, but his music lives on, played on his virtuoso instrument: the voice of every reader, whether we read aloud or in the privacy of our hearts.
When I was in high school, I chose a passage from "Fahrenheit 451" to memorize and recite as a literary interpretation exercise in a speech class. Nearly four decades later, only fragments remain. The most important is this one:
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.
Science fiction" was too narrow, too dismissive a name for what Ray did, and he didn't like the label either. His skills transcended the genre, leaped across many genres, comic and tragic, plays, TV, poetry, epigrams, novels, novellas, a stupefying output. And his vigor was legendary. I remember being gobsmacked when, six years ago, at age 85, Ray told me he was working on an opera.