Ray Bradbury was something of a Libertarian, which many science fiction fans are. He was also an ardent critic of the public schools and had been as far back as the 1950’s.
Did not see those facts in the obituaries!
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When I was a teen, I read every book of his I could get my hands on. My mother was a reading specialist, so reading was big in our family. “Fahrenheit 451” was one of the most gripping books I first read. I was insatiable for his work after that. I never considered myself a fan of science fiction, but I loved his writing.
bflr
Several elements about his writing as science fiction impressed me. The first was his rejection of the “happy ending” in which all the loose ends were at least intellectually tied up. Instead he preferred the characters to live on at the end of the story, leaving the reader with a “and then what happened?” feeling.
And often it is not the characters left alive, but the situation, such as the automatic house in the short story, There Will Come Soft Rains; or the equivalent of a murderous ‘holodeck’ in The Veldt.
An unfinished story he was commissioned to complete for a publisher when its writer died, was a more conventional science fiction tale of a future war between the US and China, fought with giant, high speed underground tunneling battleships.
He took that conventional story and added a twist to it by having almost the entire crew of the tunneling ship die from a rapidly killing biological warfare disease. The sole survivor had been a minor character, most noteworthy in being an intensive chain smoker.
He was spared because his body had subtly mutated, so that for him, nicotine was an essential nutrient, and stored in such quantity in his body, it made him toxic to most pathogens. A novel conclusion to the story.
Martian Chronicles was my first SciFi book back in the fifties. I was hooked and mostly a SciFi reader for many years after that. I had not read any for the last 20 years until I recently picked up some John Scalzi.