It was sad to hear about the passing of Ray last Wednesday. He was a terrific author whose stories have permeated the West (I need to make a Picayune glossary to save everyone the trouble) long before I was born. For me, Ray was the only living author from my home state (Illinois if you forgot) I knew of and respected being a Sci-Fi geek. I would dare say his writing was as influential as HG Wells, especially when you notice the references everywhere. The easiest one to find is The Simpsons using the premise from The Sound of Thunder in a well-loved Treehouse of Horror. It was recently made into a terrible film starring Edward Burns, the things I watch while bored in a hotel room. People of all political stripes also point toward Fahrenheit 451 when their hackles are raised by governments trying to ban certain books/ideas.
I got into Ray when his novel The Martian Chronicles aired as a three-night, six-hour opus on NBC. This would’ve been around 1980 I recall. The first part was up against Battlestar Galactica 1980 (or something compelling) so I was channel flipping on the upstairs’ portable TV to absorb both. Chronicles‘ special effects were pretty lousy yet the story sucked me in; it’s analogous to the European conquest of the Americas.
There was another short story of us I encountered in my seventh-grade reading-class book. It entailed these school children living on Venus where it rained continuously for seven years straight followed by a one-hour window when it stopped. Being 12, I missed the point of how the children were mean to one classmate because I argued with Mrs. Aiello over the impossibility of rain lasting years, besides, recent probes sent to Venus showed the planet was covered in sulfuric acid. The teacher’s defense was wasted on me…” Steve, it’s the author’s story, he can create any conditions he wants to illustrate his point.” I only regret not getting the chance to apologize for my literalist position then.
Farewell Ray! Thanks for convincing me to like your Sci-Fi which had some fantasy elements and wasn’t Star Wars, Star Trek, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica.