[liff] The Bottle of Dandelion Wine has Gone Dry

2839.Summer is over; the man is no more, though the illustrations may endure.

Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012, aged 91.

It's a sad and big loss, but we are cheered inasmuch as he was one of the most celebrated and influential American writers of this modern age, and is roundly credited as:

elevating the often maligned reputation of science fiction. Some say he singlehandedly helped to move the genre into the realm of literature.

I wouldn't say he did it all by himself. But it wouldn't have happened without him. He was the prime mover. He made the world safe for authors such as Ellison and Lem and even Mieville. And now he ascends into the pantheon beside Hawthorne and Poe and suchlike, the heavenly panel of literary judges, and that is indeed precisely where he belongs.

It was Fahrenheit 451 that was, in a seminal germ, responsible for teaching me critical thinking. I'll tell y'all sometime (but it's perfectly possible I've already prattled about it sometime in the last 2,837 entries. It was a formative moment).