I have linked here before to various wonderful stories and insights by Ray Bradbury who died this week after a long life of writing genius.

The appreciations pour forth. Here is a nice one.

Here is a rare example on the Internet of a full short story by him:

‘No profession,’ said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.

‘You might say that,’ said Mr Mead.

He hadn’t written in years. Magazines and books didn’t sell anymore. Everything went on in the tomb-like houses at night now, he thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multi-colored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.

‘No profession,’ said the phonograph voice, hissing. ‘What are you doing out?’

‘Walking’, said Leonard Mead.

‘Walking!’

‘Just walking,’ he said simply, but his face felt cold.

‘Walking, just walking, walking?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Walking where? For what?’

‘Walking for air. Walking to see.’

‘Your address!’

‘Eleven South Saint James Street.’

‘And there is air in your house, you have an air conditioner, Mr Mead?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you have a viewing screen in your house to see with?’

‘No’.

‘No?’ There was a crackling quiet that in itself was an accusation...

Here’s a summary of another more than prescient classic from fifty years ago – the man who murders his chatty house.  

Bradbury was not really a ‘science fiction’ writer, whatever that means. He chose improbable and ‘normal’ settings alike as backdrops for his free-ranging ideas. The story about the children’s playroom where the walls create dusty African scenes, with lions which are all too realistic. The man who travels through time to kill a dinosaur but accidentally kills a butterfly too – and changes an election result far into the future. The Illustrated Man whose swirling tattoos seem to give scary predictions…

He also had an acute eye for tense human relationships. His story ‘The Big Black and White Game’ is a superb parable all about a local baseball match between cocky ‘whites’ and their cheery ‘black’ servants, which gets more and more sour as the blacks effortlessly wallop the ball. The whites get sweaty and humiliated – and start to play dirty.

Here he is devastating form about people who want to destroy books in all sorts of subtle ways:

About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.

But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?

A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I “do them over”?

Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.

Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader.

In my story, I had described a lighthouse as hav­ing, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God-Light.” Looking up at it from the view-point of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.”

The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.”

Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?

Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito—out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch—gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer—lost!

Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like—in the finale—Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been ra­zored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention—shot dead.

Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?

How did I react to all of the above?

By “firing” the whole lot.

By sending rejection slips to each and every one. By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.

Superlative.

Buy his best stories here, and marvel at the precision and ingenuity of his writing.