On Jun 8, 3:57 am, "William Sommerwerck" <
grizzledgee...@comcast.net>
wrote:
I have to agree with Mr Sommerwerck's comments. When I was 14 and
just discovering science fiction (a discovery that had a major
influence on my world view, though I rarely read it any more)
Bradbury's fiction seemed miraculously wonderful. I can still recall
the day I spent reading his short novel, "The Fireman," in Galaxy
magazine, and how completely it blew me away. But I was no more than
16 then and had never read a work of literary fiction except the awful
slog throughs we were forced to read in high school English class.
Bradbury's fiction was hopelessly overwritten, his :"science" non-
existent and his stories mostly gimmicks like the fiction of his much
superior contemporary, Robert Sheckley. He never wrote a word of real
science fiction; he was basically a writer of dreamy fantasies for
adolescent males, though without even a hint of sex unlike, say, A
Merritt.
Despite the NY Times' claim that he brought science fiction "into the
mainstream" he had zero effect on other writers or on the genre. He
may have been the first SF labeled writer to break into Playboy, but
Robert A Heinlein had been writing for general circulation magazines
years before Bradbury. The writers who began appearing on the NY Times
best seller list in the early '70's included Heinlein, Frank Herbert,
the awful Robert Jordan, and Kurt Vonnegut but never Bradbury.
Ray Bradbury seems to have been a nice man, a writer of cuddly tales
and in his later years of harmless detective fiction, but the obits
I've read seem to me to be way off the mark.