I awoke this morning to
discover to my dismay that Ray Bradbury, deemed “Master of Science
Fiction”, has passed away at the age of 91. Bradbury’s stories, especially
those found in The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles had profound effect on my understanding of storytelling, my
dreams of what is possible, and why I’m now covered in tattoos.
Bradbury’s wonderful
literature was introduced to me by my grandmother when I was staying with her
and my grandfather one summer at their home in New Hampshire. She took me to
the local library and had me very specifically borrow The Illustrated Man. Of all the books I have read since, none has
left me with a greater sense of enlightenment on the power of fiction than
Bradbury’s, which I held in my ten-year-old hands.
The world changed for me
then: I endlessly imagined my walls as psychomorphic portals to any strange,
fantastic, and often dark desires; any time I traveled, I tirelessly postulated
what life would be like if I had no contact with anyone else as I zoomed across
the void in an all-too-pleasant space pod, slowly going mad over the years;
machines became animated and dreadful, herding us foolish primates to our
selfish demise; love was defined. Bradbury wrote words, spells, which unlocked
the thresholds of my speculative experiences.
He set a standard for
genre writing and for short stories (in particular, to me) that I feel has been
rarely matched with such cultural impact since. As I devoured his work and
began to read more of his predecessors and those whom came after, I found that,
sure, there are better authors in their respective time periods, who were able
to precisely reflect their era in their works, but Bradbury was the king of the
Rocket Age. He was able to infuse the horror of Poe, the adventure of Burroughs
and Howard, the unending dreadful weirdness of Lovecraft, the short prose of the
Pulps, and combined it with the sentiment of the 40’s (“Look Up! What’s
Out There? Let’s Find Out!”) and the worry of the 50’s (“We’ll be
blown to bits!”), to create characters ever pursuant of a better life
often waylaid by a world (or galaxy) of imperialism, chaos, and technology run
rampant. Doom may not have been the ending of every one of his tales, but you
cannot shake the feeling that it wasn’t far off.
The Illustrated Man features a narrator who comes across a man
covered in tattoos from neck to toe, who laments that he is never able to keep
a job because his tattoos move, tell stories, and scare people. The stories in
the book are the stories that are played out on the man’s body. This is the
most brilliant concept I’ve ever read: this man is not just a living story,
he’s a living novel. He is a kaleidoscopic universe unto himself; the implication
that tattoos can have ever evolving interpretations and meanings is what I base
the designs of the tattoos I have on my body. As a storyteller myself, Bradbury
handed me the allusion I needed to eventually begin constructing a symbolic
language of which any meaning can be derived based on the individual viewing my
tattoos… kind of like a book.
So Ray Bradbury, I give
you my sincerest apologies that I did not tell you how crucially important you
are to my life when you were alive. However, I know that death has no hold on
you for your works will be read in space pods on strange worlds in the
millenniums to come. Thank you, and safe travels.