I guess this journal is becoming the obituary column. Oh well, I can't help it if all the great ones seem to be dying lately. Butzi Porsche, Carol Shelby, and now.. the writer Ray Bradbury. Augh.

Hardly a year has gone by when I have not been a little heartened by the fact that Bradbury was still alive. I grew up listening to old time radio shows on public radio that featured his stories from broadcasts that were already many decades old back then. Then, I read his books for myself and discovered that the dramatized stories were only brushing the surface of his wonderful work. I knew that all those who had performed his stories on the radio were dead, even back when I was a kid. Yet, surprise, surprise Bradbury was, weirdly, still alive, even as I grew into adulthood.

Well, some good things must end, and now Bradbury has finally ended with his death on Wednesday. He had reached his 90s.

People often recall how poetic and lovely his work was, but it was the stuff with bite from him that attracted me the most. His dark tales took his usual flair for the poetic and turned it into proper nightmares, even while being thought provoking as well. Some of his horror stories genuinely scared me, which I can't say for most of the more graphic stuff one finds published today.

When it came to chilling stories of the kind that touched more on sociology and politics, Bradbury's work could be just as hard hitting and even more subversive. He predicted, quite rightly if one trusts statistics, that people would eventually become ensconced in their homes, going out less and less as home entertainment media flourished and books became a thing of the past.

In one classic Bradbury story, a man simply walks outside his home one time too often during prime time television, and a police car comes by to pick him up. He notices upon entering the car, which speaks to him with a voice that questions why he is outside and what may be wrong with his television, that there is no human driver in the robotic car. He asks where he is being taken to and is told he is to be re-educated at an institution. As he is driven there, he see's all the quiet homes in the night with all the people watching screens and never leaving. The streets are utterly empty, save for the police cars, which don't even have people in them anymore.

In a Bradbury horror story of the future, conformity is enforced, but it's not conforming to a regimental society or a military push, but rather, conforming to watching television and avoiding books or troubling questions about society. In a Ray Bradbury distopia, it's not that there is constant war, deprivation or cyberpunks making the streets unsafe. No, it's just that people have quietly stopped going outside. Or thinking very much. There may in fact be a war on, but people would rather watch TV than consider it. As time has passed, his vision only appears more prescient.

But writers of the time like Orwell and Bradbury are from a different era, one in which totalitarianism had recently been on the rise and the death of personal liberties had been something nations had only just recently struggled with, along with issues of surveillance and privacy. These days, his ideas seem to be increasingly forgotten as our own time grows more distant from that era.

His messages may have once seemed subversive when I first read them, but I now view them as intrinsically American and mainstream, in a way, in that they reflect our best values before we started, as he predicted we would, to forget them. Robots now give out tickets and our cities have become filled with surveillance cameras. Just as the world is becoming more connected through technology, we hear CEOs at tech conferences declaring our ideas of personal privacy "outdated" and suggesting that we should make our lives more convenient by telling them all about ourselves constantly through their helpful applications that lead us to watch more and more media and be entertained to death. The other day, my tablet asked me to give it my location because Google wanted to know it. Didn't give me a reason, just said it wanted to know.

While Orwell envisioned a boot stomping on a human face forever, Bradbury understood that many people may not need to be forced under any boots to give up their minds, souls and rights. It might just be convenient to do so and happen before we have noticed it, after the books have all been burned.

Rave