Ray Bradbury

Like so many great horror writers, Ray Bradbury was utterly without fear. He wasn’t scared of optimism or innocence or sentiment. He didn’t give a damn if the literary lions accepted him, though they did. “If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me,” he once said, “I’d have killed myself.” Though best known for science fiction, he wrote in every genre and form, from fantasy to poetry, and he wrote beautifully enough for adults and clearly enough for kids. He faced up to parts of human nature most people don’t see, even in their nightmares. His advice to writers was as follows: “You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

Bradbury, who was 91 when he died on June 5, never went to college, but he read and absorbed everything from Shakespeare to Heinlein. His masterpiece, The Martian Chronicles, published in 1950, is about human colonists who land on Mars only to find a world that’s a reflection of their own dark, unconscious landscape. Bradbury explored both outer space and inner space. To him they were the same thing. He wasn’t a prophet of the future. He never even learned to drive. “I don’t try to describe the future,” he said more than once. “I try to prevent it.” We thank him for saving us from the futures he prevented–and for giving us the one he made.