The Death of Ray Bradbury

Dmitri Prieto

HAVANA TIMES — Today I learned about the death of Bradbury. The writer, 91, was one of my Russian mother’s favorite science fiction creators.

His contribution to contemporary American literature was able to filter into the USSR, over the iron curtain and past the censors.

For me he illuminated key moments in my life – childhood, adolescence and youth.

With an intense, dense and enduring light, the author of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 had the rare ability to turn terror into enlightenment.

This is why his most important works have the unquestionable mark of the terror of the mid-twentieth century.

What has become of that terror, today? Are we still experiencing it to some extent? Will we ever manage to live without it?

I don’t know.

But Bradbury is still with us. Let’s read him again, sooner rather than later.

Almost necessarily.