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Author Ray Bradbury — who sent generations of readers on travels to fantastic future worlds — has died this morning in Los Angeles, at the age of 91.
Author of more than 27 novels and story collections, such as his famous “The Martian Chronicles,” the enduring “Fahrenheit 451,” “Dandelion Wine” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes,”and more than 600 short stories, the influential Bradbury has been credited with bringing a bit of class to science fiction, helping to move the sometimes maligned genre into the real literature.
In a podcast on the 365 Days of Astronomy, Bradbury said that he wanted to be buried on Mars.
“I don’t want to be the first live person to arrive there,” he said. “It’ll be too late. But I want to be the first dead person that gets there. I want to arrive in a Campbell’s soup can. Bury me on Mars in thing called the Bradbury Abyss. They gotta name a place on Mars for me, and I will welcome that.”
Bradbury definitely needs to have a place on Mars named after him.
Bradbury wrote this advice in “Fahrenheit 451”: “Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in 10 seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream.”
Ray Douglas Bradbury was born Aug. 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois and used the ambiance of small time life to enhance his fiction.
“When I was born in 1920,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2000, “the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.”
Bradbury will be missed.
The sad news came via i09.