Ray Bradbury: Mainstream with a Message.

While Ray Bradbury was never quite regarded in SF circles with the reverence as the ‘Big Three’ of Heinlein, Asimov or Clarke, it’s inevitably Bradbury who we should think of as the writer who really brought science fiction to the mainstream. A master story-teller who was driven to write everyday for the sake of his own immortality (so he said), no other SF writer of the twentieth century has had quite so much influence in those dominating media of film and television.

While early film adaptations of his work were simply crowd-pleasers that included the pioneering stompy monster of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and the creepy yet misunderstood aliens of It Came from Outer Space (1953), later material wandered into philosophical musings on man’s relationships with technology in The Illustrated Man (1969) and the ambitious TV miniseries of The Martian chronicles in 1979. But perhaps most celebrated of all was Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) based on Bradbury’s book-burning novel of 1953. While his writing always treated the past with nostalgia, his visions of the future were inevitably bleak and none more so than in this tale of a future where books were regarded as something without value. Bradbury famously said of the source novel that he wasn't trying to predict the future; he was trying to prevent it. But in a sense all he was really doing was summing up the job of any writer with a penchant for dystopian futures. After all, the world would be a very strange place indeed if we just went round confidently pointing out that the world is going to hell in a handbag just for the sheer satisfaction of being right. Along with Orwell’s 1984, Fahrenheit 451 is perhaps popular culture’s most famous warning.

Bradbury’s work has continued to be used as source material to this day including Disney’s underrated Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) and numerous low-budget outings in the noughties. Bradbury even got his own series with The Ray Bradbury Theater in the eighties and nineties, often adapting his own previously published material into its half-hour format.

Bradbury passed away on June 5^th aged 91. We can be sure that, as dumbed down television, inane talent shows and lowest-common-denominator movies continue their inexorable quest for our entire attention, Bradbury noted how the warning of Fahrenheit 451 has been largely ignored in a world dominated by the media he did so much to keep as challenging as he could.