Fresno Famous

This is probably not news to anyone with a facebook or twitter feed (or eyeballs and ears) at this point, but science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury died last night at the age of 91. 

Bradbury made his mark in the 1950s and '60s, first a collection of short stories known as "The Martian Chronicles" and later with "Fahrenheit 451," a cautionary tale of censorship, that became his best-known work.  

What to say on his death? I didn't follow his career, can't even say whether he had written anything in his later years (though his obit says he had a book published in 2009, and still did a 1,000 words a day on an electric typewriter). If I read "Fahrenheit" in junior high or high school (most of us did), it left little impression, my attention span being what it was. I read (or, re-read) it for a book club a few years back and quickly put Bradbury in my big-three, along with George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut, but still it would be insinsere for me to say he'll be missed. I can always pick up those books again and have at it.

I will say that his vision of the world, that way of thinking (or maybe thinking at all) seems to be absent (or at least severely lacking) in contemporary literature. That we could use some more of. That, if anything, will be missed.