I never met him, but that's not important. Most writers aren't especially interesting in person. The most fascinating parts of their lives happen inside their heads. Flamboyant characters are good material for writers, but seldom make good writers themselves. (Example: Christopher Marlowe had a romantic and exciting life, and got knifed to death before he was thirty. He left behind two great plays and some poetry. His pal William Shakespeare led a very boring and prosaic existence and cranked out at least a dozen great works plus a like number of merely excellent ones.)
Ray Bradbury is called a science fiction writer, and (more importantly) called himself one. He wasn't ashamed to be seen in the halls of a hotel swarming with fans in Klingon costume. I think it's significant that he was one of the headliners of the current issue of The New Yorker -- a special science fiction issue boasting a cover illustration of a raygun-armed space ranger blasting his way into a literary sherry hour. Unlike several of his fellow contributors to that issue, Bradbury never denied the space ranger; if anything, he embraced science fiction's pulpy roots even when he was selling to the "slicks."
For that, all of us owe him a tremendous debt. If he had been more willing to trim his sails to fashion, he probably could have been more successful. But he wrote what he loved and taught others to love it as well.
Most of the giants of the field most of us grew up reading are gone now -- Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, Hal Clement, Arthur C. Clarke, L. Sprague De Camp, Philip Jose Farmer, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Anne McCaffrey, Gene Roddenberry, Fred Saberhagen, Jack Williamson, Roger Zelazny, and many others I'm no doubt forgetting. But it's not in the spirit of science fiction to mourn the past. They all looked to the future, and so should we.
We must become new giants.
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