Ray Bradbury
(born in Waukegan, Illinois on August 22, 1920)
"[Television is] a really
dreadful influence on all of us. Don't ever look at local television news
again. It's all crap. There's no news, there's no information. It's negative,
negative, negative. You look at that, and you think the world is coming
to an end."
(Ray Bradbury)
His reputation
as a leading writer of science fiction was established with the publication
of The Martian Chronicles in 1950 (published in England under the
title The Silver Locusts). However, his best-known novel is Fahrenheit
451, released in 1953 - it is set in a future when the written word
is forbidden. Resisting a totalitarian state which burns all the books,
a group of rebels memorize entire works of literature and philosophy. Ray
Bradbury's writing has been honored in many ways, but perhaps the most
unusual was when an Apollo astronaut named the Dandelion Crater on the
Moon after Bradbury's novel, Dandelion Wine.
Ray Bradbury's interest in special
time-paradoxes is reflected in some strange ghost-like stories about meetings
of two separate time positions, e.g. Night Meeting (a short story
originally published in The Martian Chronicles, 1950) or in the
more recent short story That Woman on the Lawn (publ. originally
in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1996);
his classical time-travel short story is certainly A Sound of Thunder
(1952,
it reappeared in the collection The Golden Apples of the Sun and Other
Stories, 1953)
quotations from Bradbury's works:
""A Tyrannosaurus rex. The
Tyrant Lizard., the most incredible monster in history. Sign this release.
Anything happens to you, we're not responsible. Those dinosaurs are hungry."
Eckels flushed angrily. "Trying
to scare me?"
"Frankly, yes. We don't want
anyone going who'll panic at the first shot. Six Safari leaders were killed
last year, and a dozen hunters. We're here to give you the severest thrill
a real hunter ever asked for. Travelling you back sixty million years to
bag the biggest game in all of Time. Your personal check's still there.
Tear it up."
Mr. Eckels looked at the
check. His fingers twitched.
"Good luck," said the man
behind the desk. "Mr. Travis, he's all yours."
They moved silently across
the room, taking their guns with them, toward the Machine, toward the silver
metal and the roaring light."
....
"Tyrannosaurs fell. Thundering,
it clutched trees, pulled them with it. It wrenched and
tore the metal Path, The men flung
themselves back and away. The body hit, ten tons of cold flesh and stone.
The guns fired. The Monster lashed its armoured tail, twitched its snake
jaws, and lay still. A fount of blood spurted from its throat. Somewhere
inside, a sac of fluids burst. Sickening gushes drenched the hunters. They
stood, red and glistening.
The thunder faded.
The jungle was silent. After
the avalanche, a green peace.
After the nightmare, morning..."
(Ray Bradbury:
A
Sound of Thunder)
