In praise of Ray Bradbury

Sad to hear of the death of Ray Bradbury, although he enjoyed a good long life. He was a wonderful writer. Rather better, I think, than the more fashionable Philip K. Dick — certainly Bradbury was the superior story teller, and his fiction was as much about what it is to be human as the mildly sci-fi weirdnesses which I suppose gave him his early fame.

Between the ages of 15 and 18, when I was besotted with US literature, he was one of my three favourites — along with Updike and Sinclair Lewis. An odd threesome, I suppose. Oddly, it wasn’t Bradbury’s acclaimed masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451, which captivated me; I thought that sorta dystopian stuff had been done better by Orwell, Zamyatin and Huxley.

It was the short stories, full of menace, wonderfully atmospheric. Only Graham Greene was a greater master of that form, in the second half of the 20th century — and even then not by much. Bradbury also deserves credit for telling Michael Moore to get stuffed when the fat leftie referenced his title for Fahrenheit 9/11.