Sad news. America's greatest speculative prose writer since Edgar Poe, the genius of uncanny and strange stories, short and long, Ray Bradbury, has died, at the age of 91, just as the rare transit of Venus began. Any reader of Playboy knows his stories, which added lustre to those steamy pages. The Martian Chronicles was much-watch TV in my childhood. Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Illustrated Man classics. And then, of course, there is Fahrenheit 451. If Bradbury never quite became as big as Orwell or Burgess, he is certainly the equal or master of any science fiction/ horror writer of the last century, including Asimov, Clarke, Herbert, King and Heinlein. Perhaps his books were turned into weird, or schlocky screenworks. Perhaps he wrote too much. I never minded.
A poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.
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Christian Ward