Coincidence is a strange and complex force, with many textures: in recent months, I have been voraciously attacking many classics of science fiction literature; this week, both The New Yorker and Tin House are releasing volumes dedicated to the often misjudged or illegitimately ill regarded genre; and the filmmaker just began to read The Illustrated Man, his first foray with the late literary genius Ray Bradbury, who passed a mere two days ago. Such cosmic parallelism, were it more grand, replete with political intrigue or humane struggles or philosophies of personal freedoms and rights in the era of technological pioneerism, could form the foundation for a Bradbury story. He is being heralded with being one of the premier writers in contemporary times to bring science fiction, a genre elusively ubiquitous and mocked or scorned, woefully so, into the mainstream, assuredly assuming that the mainstream is something to be sought and desired. For me, he was simply a great writer, one who did not spurn or shun the inevitable scientific details that surround and encompass and pass through us all daily, and who dared to explore the implications of these inescapable truths, some natural and some constructed by our own advancement, on humanity and society.
(image taken from UCLA Newsroom)
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