The media botches Ray Bradbury’s legacy

Please note: This post draws on a class I took at Penn, STSC 110 Science and Literature with Mark Adams. If you like reading and fun books, and still go to Penn, I highly recommend it.

I’m sure it does not come as news that Ray Bradbury passed away last week at the age of 91; when he died, major news outlets rushed to eulogize the beloved author of science fiction.

In doing so, they got the story completely wrong.

Nearly every obituary did two things: One, call Bradbury a writer of science fiction. Two, include the following quote, in which Bradbury desperately tries to prevent the occurrence of One:

I always wanted to be a magician, and of course that’s what I turned out to be. The best description of me is a magician, and not a science-fiction writer.

While I imagine that those who knew Bradbury through Farenheit 451 or The Martian Chronicles might have lingered over the excerpt, readers familiar with some of Bradbury’s other work – Something Wicked This Way Comes, or one of my favorite books written by anybody ever, Dandelion Wine – likely considered this ‘revelation’ trivial.

Yet while writers almost uniformly considered the quote sufficiently remarkable to include in Bradbury’s obituary, they apparently considered it insufficiently serious to incorporate its message into their headlines:

Walking out during The Avengers is probably an overreaction

It’s been a week since I touched this blog – believe it or not, I sometimes have better things to do – and when I fired up WordPress, I imagined the recent success of The Avengers would be a decent excuse to share a quick thought on The Hunger Games I’ve been sitting on for far too long.

As it turns out, this is not that post.

When I googled ‘The Avengers’ ‘the avengers’ to find reference to the fact that it is now the highest-grossing movie of 2012 – and enable my admittedly-nebulous link to the more-recent release –  I instead came across a post on the The New York Times ‘Motherlode’ blog titled That ‘He’s Adopted’ One-Liner in ‘The Avengers’? Not Funny. And since it was marginally more contemporary, I decided to postpone my aforementioned note on The Hunger Games. Straight to an excerpt:

A Pirate’s favorite blog

When two free copies of WIRED arrived in the mail, I felt compelled to read them – primarily because I feel the need to read everything that comes my way in print. (Confession: one ‘corner’ of my room is dedicated to stacks upon stacks upon boxes of New Yorkers, etc., dating back to high school, and I still have every intention of getting to them – eventually.)

This was not the first time I’ve read WIRED (in print or online), but it was the first time I had read it in a while, so I was mildly surprised to find a bundle of content on a decidedly non-wired topic: pirates. The magazine contained eight pages (not counting ads) dedicated exclusively to pirates (like Kim Dotcom Edward Teach). By far the highlight was a short bombshell cannonball entitled ‘An arrrrrrcane bit of arrrrmchair history about a piece of pirate arrrrgot’:

In brief consideration of John Carter

This might just be the first non-negative review of the movie you’ll read.

It took me almost a full week, but I finally got around to John Carter tonight. Since I did my bit to promote the movie before its release, I figured I should write something of a followup. This will be brief.

I enjoyed the movie. Yes, it started. very. slowly. No, Taylor Kitsch (yes, I had to look up his name) did not manage to change his affect once in 139 minutes as John Carter. Yes, plot points were often difficult to follow. No, I’m not sure how Agent Smith managed to land himself quite so many cameos. Yes, it was in many places over-the-top cliché.

But at the end of the day – or middle of the night, as it were – I’m glad I saw the film for what it was: a rather enjoyable science fiction/action movie that, yes, had no shortage of flaws, but can also claim its share of smile-inducing scenes and memorable moments.

So why all the negative reviews?