I love books. I love words.

I am doing the 30-day book challenge to get some conversations started about books. Please do join in with a comment on your own books – or a link to your own post!

Day 13 and the next prompt is:

Who is your favourite writer?

My favourite writer is Ray Bradbury. He is classified as a Science Fiction Writer and much of his work is speculative futures. I was already hooked on space and SciFi having grown up through the Apollo Moon missions. In the late 60s and through the 70s there were many astronaut toys, and space books, and Apollo Mission collector cards, and Star Trek the original series.
How could I not get hooked on space?
Bradbury books found me because of the Martian Chronicles. A series of short works with connecting bridges chronicling the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists. It was to my young mind brilliant writing. It is brilliant writing.
While the setting is definitely speculative and science – the stories are all about people and how people behave. The same reason I enjoyed Wagon Train in Space – err I mean Star Trek. Stories about people reacting and behaving as people always have and always will….and yet still having that moment of thoughtful kindness and nobility peak through and change things for the better.
Next was The Illustrated Man. Another collection of short stories tied together by a framing device of “The Illustrated Man”, a wandering ex-member of a carnival freak show with an fully tattooed body. The tattoos had been embedded on his body by a time-traveling woman as living animations. The stories are again human stories set in speculative worlds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illustrated_Man
A finally his Greentown books – which essentially retold parts of his living experience growing up in the mid-west. Dandelion Wine; Something Wicked This Way Comes; and Farewell Summer.
Simply gorgeous story telling that capture the wonder of childhood, and the fear that lurks inside every moment of every day.

And yes I skipped Fahrenheit 451. I do not like that book.