Friday, June 8, 2012

Ray Bradbury has left us - Rest in peace - by Vijaya Schartz

Science Fiction author extraordinaire Ray Bradbury was born in Illinois in 1920. He wrote his first short stories in his teens, and the Hollerbochen's Dilemma, was first published in 1938.

Since then, he wrote eleven novels and over 600 short stories, novellas, essays, even screenplays, and children's stories. The novel everyone remembers is Fahrenheit 451 (1953), a dystopian, science-fiction portraying a world where books are banned and burned at that specific temperature. That story became a movie in 1966.

But for us authors of science fiction, Ray Bradbury was a symbol. He broke the mold and dared writing about hot political issues in a science fiction context, and many of his stories are moral tales.

Ray, we shall miss you at the many conferences and conventions where you still appeared despite your advanced age. And the ideas you developed in science fiction are still inpiring new authors to cross boundaries and write about true human conflicts in an entetaining way.