Author Ray Bradbury is dead at the age of 91 today. 

Mars was one of my great loves, and when I first read my brother’s copy of “The Martian Chronicles” I was purely blown away.

Bradbury’s writing was very cinematic, and he wrote screenplays as well as print  fiction.  A Ray Bradbury made-for-TV movie I happened across by chance on TV ~ and thinking about it still gives me chills ~ was “The Screaming Woman.”

Although I’d read it more than once by the time I reached college, when Jim Cox screened François Truffaut’s chilling film adaptation of Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” I was gripped by its power.

I’ve read an awful lot of Bradbury in my life, and seen much of his work on screen, but the one that is my favourite, and I hate it that it is a Disney film, is “Something Wicked This way Comes."  Jonathan Pryce was brilliant as the perfectly sexy frightening personification of evil, Mr. Dark, pitted against Jason Robards’ ineffectual everyman Dad.  Robards’ bumbling opposition to evil fuelled by unconditional love is nothing less than sublime.   The book is good, too :)

Although Bradbury wrote science fiction, fantasy and horror, what he really wrote about was people. 

I wish I’d had a chance to meet you, Mr. Bradbury.  Your work has had a profound effect on my life.