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Tribute to Ray Bradbury, read by Jerry Stone

This award has nothing to do with any public nomination, nor the judging panel, for it is Sir Arthur’s Special Award, given to a recipient of his choice.

This year, Sir Arthur has chosen to give the award to Ray Bradbury.

His name will be immediately familiar to many of you; if not, you will be likely to have heard of:
• Fahrenheit 451
• The Illustrated Man
• Dandelion Wine
• Something Wicked this Way Comes
• R Is For Rocket
• S Is For Space
• The Golden Apples of the Sun
• and – The Martian Chronicles.

Ray Bradbury was born in 1920 in Illinois, and graduated from high school in Los Angeles. He sold newspapers on street corners in L.A. from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947. In all, Ray Bradbury has published more than thirty books, close to 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, and plays.

Fahrenheit 451, which was filmed by Francois Truffaut, is considered by many to be Bradbury's masterpiece; a scathing indictment of censorship set in a future world where the written word is forbidden. In an attempt to salvage their history and culture, a group of rebels memorize entire works of literature and philosophy as their books are burned by the totalitarian state. The title refers to the temperature at which paper burns.

But his reputation as a writer of courage and vision was established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, which describes the first attempts of Earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, and the unintended consequences.

Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor - of crystal pillars and fossil seas - where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization.

It is highly appropriate that at a time when we are obtaining our best views of Mars, from orbit and on its surface, that Sir Arthur should choose to give this year’s Special Award to someone who created a unique view of mankind’s future on the Red Planet.