Happy Birthday, Ray Bradbury

[filkertom]

Eighty-six and going strong.

What's your favorite Bradbury story or stories? I love Something Wicked This Way Comes, but not as much as I love I Sing The Body Electric. (The TV adaptation. The Electric Grandmother, starring Maureen Stapleton [with Paul Benedict as Mr. Fantoccini] had me calling my grandmother from Cincinnati where I lived at the time, bawling about how much I loved her and missed her. Just bawling.) And there's very little that can overcome the chills delilvered by There Will Come Soft Rains and The October Game.

Comments

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Dandelion Wine. That's one of my favorite books ever, although rather light for his usual style.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wouldn't call it light. Just subtle. It's about the greatest horror of all, isn't it? The inexorable reality of growing and then dying, and how to cope with the full knowledge of that path once it bursts upon you...

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Except that I don't see that as horror. The only story that's horrible in there is the one where the bratty little girl denies that the old woman was ever young and steals her stuff. (It's the stealing her stuff part that pisses me off every time.)

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Well, the knowledge almost kills Douglas from fever just trying to process it. It can be pretty terrifying.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

_Dandelion Wine_. It forged a good deal of my psyche in some ways. I read it when I was about ten. I have had a phobia of death since I was two years old, quite literally, and DW was the first thing I ever read which addressed square-on the question of what it means to people to know, and understand, that someday they too will have to die.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

There Will Come Soft Rains -- that's from The Martian Chronicles, yes? About the death of the long-empty robotic house?

Yeah, that one gets to me, too.

But for my money, the best story from that collection is Usher II. I cannot read the protagonist's rant against censorship ("And they took one hammer blow to the Looking Glass, and smashed it and every Red King and oyster away!") without my blood boiling.

[mannoftalent.livejournal.com]

I'm still partial to "Something Wicked" unfortunately, despite the fact that we spent money to make a demo and sent it to him, he's holding onto the theatrical rights. On the other hand, he did call personally to explain why...

[wormquartet.livejournal.com]

I was very lucky in that my high school had a class called "Literature of the Fantastic" devoted to sci-fi, fantasty, and horror. This is where I was first exposed to Bradbury.

However, I only very recently read "The Martian Chronicles" for the first time (in my ongoing quest to catch up on all the crap I feel like I should have read a long time ago - I'm currently 25% through Huxley's "Brave New World,") so that's currently what's foremost on my mind. The whole book was awesome, and the way it consistently portrayed humankind as an ignorant and arrogant race concerned only with its own comfort and glory was uniquely unforgiving. "There Will Come Soft Rains" was shiver-worthy...but "The Martian" was the story that really got to me.

-=ShoEboX=-

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

My 10th-grade English class had The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man in its regular curriculum, and I think I read Fahrenheit 451 in class either that year or in 9th grade. So, I think I was pretty lucky in that regard. I'm afraid I can't remember a lot of the details of Chronicles, though. I'll have to reread it sometime.

I'll always have a spot in my heart for "The Veldt", though.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Fahrenheit 451. Hands down.

[adamselzer.livejournal.com]

I had to read October Game several times to work out exactly what happened - it still seems a like there's a leap here, in which certain deeds must have been committed awfully quickly and quietly, moreso than would seem possible. Still. That's one chilling story.

[aiela.livejournal.com]

My dad gave me his copies of The Vintage Bradbury volumes 1 and 2 when I was 8 or 9. The Veldt was a good one, as well as The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl always fascinated me.

[minerva-fan.livejournal.com]

Ooooh!!! I totally forgot about The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl!!! (Why did I think that was a Poe story?) Fabulous, fabulous storytelling.

Gotta be...

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

The Halloween Tree

For some reason I've always loved that book. As usual the animated thing didn't do it justice. And the book had some inaccuracies in it. But I still love it. It's one of the reasons Halloween is my favorite holiday - I was able to understand it.

*rummages through bookshelves*

Strange...I thought I had a copy of it... :-(

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

I hadn't realized the electric grandmother was an adaptation. It's been so long since I've seen it. It brought tears to my eyes too.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Hey, Electric Grandmother is
available for purchase! (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001CKHR8/102-4675720-4172955?v=glance&n=404272)

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I have that VHS. One of the things I intend to transfer to digital when I get the hardware.

[minerva-fan.livejournal.com]

I will always love The Illustrated Man the best--it was my first Ray Bradbury, and imho, the best. The story with all the horror/fantasy authors exhiled on a distant planet still gets to me. I also think Dinosaurs, Ink. (is that the title?) was amazing. Got my little adolescent brain turning at serious RPMs...

[greenlantern-oa.livejournal.com]

Something Wicked This Way Comes is my favorite Ray Bradbury book, but I also love The Martian Chronicles!!
These were the first two Bradbury novels I ever read under recommendation from my dad and of course they are the ones that stillhold a special place in my heart!
I read The Halloween Tree every year to my 4th grade class (then watch the animated movie) and they love it, so I think that also goes up on my list of favorite Bradbury stories!!

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

"Something Wicked.." sings to me, both movie and book.

I always wished that Ray would do more screen work. He's a fantastic screenwriter and knows how to adapt. If you've ever seen the Gregory Peck version of "Moby Dick".

Happy Birthday Ray. Rock On Man.

[greenlantern-oa.livejournal.com]

You know I show Little Nemo and His Adventures in Slumberland every year after the big FCAT tests in Florida. Anyways, I have always enjoyed the comics and that movie (Have a cel from it too) and just recently I noticed that Ray Bradbury wrote the screen play for it!!!
The man is very good at screen work and I too wish he would have done more of it!!

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

"There Will Come Soft Rains," no doubt about it.

One of the most chillingly understated stories I've ever read.

[janet-coburn.livejournal.com]

Always and forever Fahrenheit 451. One of the books that most influenced my life.

[trektone.livejournal.com]

Love his short fiction! R is for Rocket and S is for Space are two favorite collections, though so is The Illustrated Man . One of my favorite stories: "Uncle Einar."

Mr. Bradbury is scheduled to make a Worldcon appearance -- I'm jazzed!

[allandaros.livejournal.com]

Usher II, definitely. I'm not all that big a fan of Bradbury, but Usher II is one of his works I'll always treasure.

[decadentdave.livejournal.com]

Perhaps not a surprise but my favourite is "Dandelion Wine", particularly the last story in the book. This was Tom's inspiration for the song "Dandelion Wine" and the book was a partial inspiration for the band's name.

[batyatoon]

Something Wicked This Way Comes is the first (and so far really the only) work of fiction to ever keep me awake at night after I'd finished reading it. Brrrrrr. So, so beautiful and creepy.

"The Long Rain" seems to me to be the story that most perfectly achieves what Poe says is a short-story writer should attempt: begin with the effect you want the story to have on the reader, and put nothing in the story that doesn't contribute directly to that effect. I come out of that story with the tremendously intense feeling of having just come in out of a long hard rain. Every time.

"Downwind from Gettysburg" was the story that made me cry. Both in itself, and in the crushing certainty that I will never be able to write like that, not in a million years.



And and and "The Fog Horn". And Dandelion Wine. And "The Toynbee Convector". And The Halloween Tree. And "April 2005: Usher II". And...

God, I love Ray Bradbury.

[sophia9847.livejournal.com]

Gotta go with Farhenheit 451, with "There will come soft rains" as a close second.

[tonemangoldfarb.livejournal.com]

Dandelion Wine is absolutely wonderful.

[skipjim.livejournal.com]

Not a huge Bradbury fan myself. But I always did like "The sound of distant Thunder"

[barbara-the-w.livejournal.com]

Dandelion Wine. Hands down.

I read an excerpt of it first, in a collection of short stories (the part where GreatGreat Grandmother is going to death, which is rather like going to bed). And I had to -- had to -- read the whole thing.

The poem he wrote for the preface "Byzantium" is one of my favorites and I can still recite it.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Fahrenheit 451 for novel, "Sound of Thunder" for short. Bradbury in general honestly isn't one of my favorites, but those two pieces are.

[darrenzieger.livejournal.com]

I need to go back and re-read a ton of Bradbury stuff. He was one of the authors whose work I devoured when I first started reading SF as a kid, and I'm sure there are nuances I missed. But of all of the aforementioned authors, his works are the ones that remain the most vivid in my mind, 30 years on.

I think it was "There Will Come Soft Rains" that made me a committed science fiction fan -- moreso than any space adventure could have. Bradbury's short fiction (I read his novels later) showed me that SF could be poetic; that it make you cry as well as go "gee whiz" (my subsequent reading of Clarke's "Childhood's End" confirmed that theory).

Other than "Soft Rains," it's hard to nail down a favorite. Pretty much every story in The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The October Country, A Medicine for Melancholy, R is for Rocket and S is for Space (that is, most of his short fiction of the 50s and 60s) affected me deeply. In fact, looking through the Wikipedia entries for those collections just now, going over the titles and descriptions, gave me chills. I don't think I'd be the same person today if I hadn't read those stories as a kid.

<plug> one of my odder recordings is a song inspired by the final chapter of the Martian Chronicles, "The Million Year Picnic." You can hear the song ("The Million Year Day") at http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pageartist.cfm?bandID=430692 ... it's very "Jon and Vangelis," though the recording suffers from my lack of a jon Anderson-esque vocal range.</plug>