Ray Bradbury, writer of novels like “The Martian Chronicles,” “Farenheit 451,” The Illustrated Man,” Something Wicked This Way Comes,” and many others, died today.  He resides among the pantheon of my favorite writers because there was a something, a quality about his work that made it accessible, and somehow more possible than the worlds of Robert Heinlein, Issac Asimov, or Arthur C. Clark, who all seemed so enamored of the worlds that they built that it sometimes felt that they forgot to make them welcoming places for human beings.

Which is not saying that Bradbury did not challenge the way we see the world, he did, but did so in an almost stealthy fashion.

The best medicine, after all, is that that you don’t know is medicine.

His work is present in much of the science fiction that we see today, and influences the work of others, whether or not we, or they, notice.  For instance, Kurt Wimmer‘s “Equilibrium,” is essentially Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” with the addition of Gun Kata.

Ray Bradbury may have passed, in a physical sense, but his ideas–and the ideas borne of those ideas–are going to be with us for a long, long time.