Ray Bradbury - At Play in the Fields of the Lord

I sometimes feel the outcast in conversations about the "hot" book of the moment, whether that be The Hunger Games or The Harry Potter series or Game of Thrones.  I haven't read any of them.  I'm still catching up on Asimov, Bova, Clarke, Ellison, Heinlein, Ursula LeGuin, Phil K. Dick, and so many others from that unparalleled generation of speculative fiction and science fiction brilliance, including Ray Bradbury.

Mr. Bradbury left us last night . 

What's saddens me even more than the death of someone so influential in elevating science fiction and speculative fiction to it's rightful place in literature is the ignorance of today's youth, most of whom have never heard of the aforementioned writers and probably wouldn't care if they did because, let's face it, they didn't write about shimmering vampires or jump on zombie bandwagons.  Instead, they built their own unique wagons with innovation, intelligence, and gusto.

As a burgeoning writer starting out a bit later in life, I can only hope to aspire to one-tenth of Mr. Bradbury's genius and success as a storyteller.  

Ray Bradbury will be missed deeply but his work will live on in posterity forever, thanks in part to the very same technology that he and his visionary peers foretold in their prescient stories.