Wake of the Flood - Page 3

Celestial Eclipse: Ray Bradbury (Aug 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012)

For many years, Ray Bradbury's stories have nourished my love of science fiction, space exploration and futurism. Just a few of my favorites are three gems:

The Veldt is a short story written by Ray Bradbury that was published originally as The World the Children Made, in the September 1950 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, later republished in the anthology, The Illustrated Man, in 1951. In this story, the parents are devoured by lions in the jungle Savannah room created by their children.

The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair tells the tale of two elderly spinsters, listening to the oafish sounds of Stan and Ollie moving a piano out for their Pasadena neighborhood.

In The Kilimanjaro Device (first published in LIFE magazine, January 1965), Ray Bradbury has a magic jeep, driving near Ketchum, Idaho, coming upon Ernest Hemingway and offering him a better alternative to the writer's tragic end of his depression and suicide. Instead, Hemingway dies glamorously in an airplane crash into 19,340 foot Mt. Kilimanjaro, in tribute to his most famous short story.

Did you know that Bradbury was interested in civic planning? When my grandfather, David Tannenbaum, served as Mayor of Beverly Hills (1956), a monument (Celluloid) was erected, dedicated to the film industry and honoring his promotion of the motion picture business with the city. Here is what Ray Bradbury had to say (Too Soon From the Cave Too Far From the Stars – A New Millennium Revelation, 1989):

"At the corner of Beverly Drive and Olympic in Beverly Hills stands a bronze monument: a 20 foot tall film scroll, up-flung to the sky. At its base, in bas-relief, stand vivid portraits of some of the stars who created Beverly Hills: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Tom Mix, Rudolph Valentino, Harold Lloyd and Will Rogers. How do you revamp Hollywood and Vine? … What if we re-created a similar upthrust pylon ... but 50 foot tall, panoplied in gold, with the bas-reliefs of others who created the Hollywood image? A competition, perhaps, to recall the famous at the center of our lives, with the endlessly unwinding ribbon of film, it has to make it seem endlessly in motion, rising, to vanish in the stars. With that grand reel of film flung to unspool itself in the heavens, wouldn't the world's tourists, arriving, shout, 'Yeah! Hollywood and Vine, by God. At long last! Hollywood and Vine.' Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

But I do digress. Let's go back to the Synchronicity theme – Ray Bradbury and the Transit of Venus (an Internet commentary). Bradbury's stories inspired scientists. Science then killed the myths he told. Yet his stories live on, embodied yet not present on a small black dot, twin to our fragile and transitory home. Sic transit omnia. Sed verba perdurant.