R.I.P. Ray Bradbury

[hepcat]

, but I definitely respected his importance in geek literature

literature...just literature.

[Jaymann]

Although I am a huge SF fan, I was never much into the Rayman. But you must respect what he did to bring SF into the mainstream.

[Kraken]

He was a giant in his genre and a respectable figure outside of it. I didn't like his work very much when I was a young teen; I was into the hard-science writers like Asimov and Clarke. Didn't appreciate the soft/social sf until I was older. Bradbury would simply write "The ship came down from space", where I wanted to know what powered it and where it had been.

Ultimately, of course, sf is about people, and Bradbury was one of the more astute writers in that realm.

[Isgrimnur]

Ray Bradbury, [url]suspected Commie[/url]:

According to documents declassified recently through the Freedom of Information Act, the bureau investigated the "Fahrenheit 451" author in the 1950s and 1960s because of suspected communist sympathies.

One informant warned agents that Bradbury, who died June 5 at age 91, wrote stories that were "definitely slanted" against capitalism. The informant added that science fiction itself could so terrify readers that they would succumb to "incompetence bordering on hysteria" and would be helpless during a third world war.

The bureau noted Bradbury's opposition to Sen. Joe McCarthy and other anti-Communists and his support for civil rights. But it concluded that Bradbury had never been in the Communist Party and that interviewing him was unnecessary because he did not have "informant potential."

[hepcat]

It's gotten to the point that I seriously doubt an artist's talent if they WEREN'T suspected of being a communist during those days.

...that or I immediately assume they were spineless toadies that would roll over on their own grandmothers if given a chance.