I was saddened to know that Ray Bradbury had passed away.
His works, especially The Martian Chronicles and The Golden Apples of the Sun, inspired my imagination when I was a teenager.
Another of my favourites was The October Country. It had this air of melancholy throughout the collection which I found strangely gripping. I just loved it.
His work might not have had mass appeal of Arthur C Clarke or Isaac Asimov. However, the thing I loved about his work was the way he depicted the fear and the lust towards “unknown”. The unknown of impending nuclear holocaust during the Cold War as well as the unknown of space exploration.
The scenery wrought out with his pen was a beautiful backdrop of the anxiety felt in postwar America.
Now, the Cold War era has long gone and America’s enthusiasm for space exploration has petered out.
The time we are living in now is a world apart from the time he reflected in his work. Still, his book has always been the part of my fond memory of my teenage time. And it will be forever…
