About Ray Bradbury. Playboy Interview: Ray Bradbury. A candid conversation with science fiction's grand master on the future of space travel, computer flimflams, political correctness and why he's always right. Even at the age of 7. Ray Bradbury. He bounces with enthusiasm, he nearly always wears shorts and his homes are stocked with toys - from the statue of Bullwinkle that presides over the basement of his Los Angeles home to the nine- foot dinosaur that occupies its own bed at his desert hideaway. Like spaceships (real ones) and Martians (imaginary ones). With his white hair and grinning, ruddy face, he defies you to take him seriously. But then he starts talking and you realize you're in the presence of a vast mind whose interests span the galaxy. His writing has baffled people much the same way. His early work was ignored - after all, it was science fiction and was thus treated with the scorn often saved for comic books and romance novels. Bradbury, however, was no drone. His prose soared like literature, and he populated his tales with appealing characters and inventive contraptions. Beyond that, he introduced challenging themes and asked the complex questions that had been the province of serious novelists. No one in science fiction had asked them before. In addition to his books, he has published more than 5. John Huston's version of . Having trouble getting the residents of your city to use mass transit? Playboy Interview: Ray Bradbury A candid conversation with science fiction's grand master on the future of space travel, computer flimflams, political correctness and why he's always right By Ken Kelley Even at the age of 75.Bradbury can offer a quick fix. Are you the owner of a dying mall? Bradbury will tell you how to bring back the customers. Disney hired him to help design Epcot, and NASA flew him to Cape Canaveral to lecture astronauts. Science fiction purists scoff at his attempts at poetry and metaphoric fancy. Undaunted, he rises each morning and heads to the typewriter (computers, he complains, are too quiet) to write, a habit that began when he was a teen in Los Angeles. It was a magical summer for the 1. A former Playboy model has been jailed for her part in the attempted murder of a Bosnian gang leader. Slobodanka Tosic, 29, has been sentenced to two and a half years for luring convicted murderer Djordje Zdrale into a. Under loppet av en vecka b Stevie Case; Born: Stevana Case (1976-09-07) September 7, 1976 (age 40) Other names: KillCreek: Alma mater: University of Kansas: Occupation: Vice President, Revenue: Employer: Layer: Home town: Olathe, Kansas. Bradbury, who roller- skated to movie premieres, studio gates and the Brown Derby to badger movie stars for autographs. With no money for college, he spent three years after high school selling newspapers and every free moment reading at the library and browsing local bookstores. He also took a writing class and sold his first story (for $1. At 2. 2, he found his writer's voice with the short story . In another burst of confidence, he asked a young bookstore clerk out for coffee. Maggie is the only woman he has ever dated, and in 1. Over the next few years he eked out a living selling short stories to magazines until he his Martian pay dirt. Clarke, first- rate talents trying to bring creativity and respectability to the genre. In 1. 95. 3 he published what many believe is his most compelling novel: . The book was timely warning against the anti- Communist hysteria that had gripped the country. He recounts the ordeal in a memoir entitled . Bradbury did, however, create an original screen treatment for what is considered one of the most influential science fiction movies ever made, . These days he's busier than ever, with an output that now includes 2. In addition, he writes most of the half- hour episodes for the weekly . Clarke for this magazine, to talk with Bradbury at his Los Angeles residence. Kelley reports. . Maggie pointed out that they were insured, and when that failed to calm him she offered the first of many heaping bowls of popcorn. That did the trick, and he soon became the avuncular raconteur. He is always blunt and often politically incorrect and he rarely backs down, no matter how unpopular his views. When he raised the logical solutions he espouses in countless essays and on the lecture circuit, I could tell why he's so popular: His enthusiasm is so spontaneous he reminds you of an insistent child - a big, overgrown kid not unlike the one who roller- skated up to Oliver Hardy and asked for his autograph. He beamed as he signed the dog- eared copy of 'Dandelion Wine' I've kept since I was ten years old. Why is it so important? In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required. It has been since Sputnik. And it will be for the next 1. ![]() Playboy model Katie May died from a simple visit to a chiropractor for an adjustment, which ultimately left her with a fatal tear to an artery in her neck. TMZ obtained a copy of Katie. 1968 Playboy Playmate of the Year Angela Dorian has been charged with attempted murder after she allegedly shot her boyfriend from close range in their Hollywood apartment Saturday night, TMZ has learned. Overnight, instead of an apple on the teacher's desk, there was a book by Asimov. For the first time in history, education came from the bottom up as kids taught their teachers. ![]() Also, as a child, did you want to have someone tying your shoes? You tied your own as soon as you could. Science fiction acknowledges that we don't want to be lectured at, just shown enough so we can look it up ourselves. The way to teach in this world is to pretend you're not teaching. Science fiction offers the chance to pretend to look the other way while teaching. Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them. Unfortunately, so much old science fiction is too technical and dry. Why aren't women as interested? The male is motivated by toys and science because men are born with no purpose in the universe except to procreate. There is lots of time to kill beyond that. They've got to find work. Men have no inherent center to themselves beyond procreating. Women, however, are born with a center. They can create the universe, mother it, teach it, nurture it. Men read science fiction to build the future. Women don't need to read it. In fact, in People, you said that CD- ROMs are more for men than for women - and you were denounced as sexist on the letters- to- the- editors page shortly thereafter. I've got a lot of toys. But computers are toys, and men like to mess around with smart dumb things. They're tools for the future. Stop talking to people around the world and get your work done. That's a lot of flimflam, you know. On top of that, when they buy it they have to buy other things to go with it. So you're talking about hundreds of dollars from people who cant afford it. The Windows thing isn't bought by women. I bet if you look at the sales figures, it's 8. Crazy young men or crazy older men who love toys. It's not going to do a bit of good if you don't know how to read and write. Don't tell me you've got a better ending for it. I have no time for that. Do you really think it's in our future? First of all, it's a religious endeavor to be immortal. If the earth dies, we must be able to continue. Space travel will give us other planets to live on so we can continue to have children. It's that simple, that great and that exciting. Will we be able to in time? We should back on the moon right now. And we should be going off to Mars immediately. NASA's budget is being whittled away as we speak. Where did we mislay the moon and back off from Mars? The problem is, of course, our politicians, men who have no romance in their hearts or dreams in their heads. JFK, for a brief moment in his last year, challenged us to go to the moon. But even he wasn't motivated by astronomical love. But once we reached the moon, the romance started to fade. Without that, dreams don't last. That's no surprise - material rewards do last, so the history of exploration on earth is about harvesting rich lodes. If NASA's budgeters could be convinced that there are riches on Mars, we would explode overnight to stand on the rim of the Martian abyss. We need space for reasons we have not as yet discovered, and I don't mean Tupperware. NASA feels it has got to flimflam you to get you to spend money on space. Space travel is life- enhancing, and anything that's life- enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever. I've pleaded with them for 2. Most of the early films NASA made about the Mercury and Apollo projects were inept. I want to fuse poetry and fact in a way that, as my various presentations at world fairs did, leaves the audience in tears. But NASA never does transcendent, poetic or explosive things to sell itself - nobody cares about NASA in Congress except, notably enough, Bob Packwood. I wish he were still in Congress. I sent him a telegram a year ago and told him to stand firm because those women are jerks. They are offended 2. There are very few other senators like him, and it's a shame he's gone. The shuttle is a big mailbox, an expensive experimental lab. It's not nearly as exciting as it should be. It should have been launched first to circle the earth, which is all it's doing. After that, it should have been sent to the moon, and the program could have ended there. Then we could have built a colony on the moon and moved on to Mars. We need something larger than ourselves - that's a real religious activity. That's what space travel can be - relating ourselves to the universe. NASA is to blame - the entire government is to blame - and the end of the Cold War really pulled the plug, draining any passion that remained. The odd thing to me is the extraordinary number of young people the world over who care about these things, who go to see science fiction films - 2. Close Encounters and Star Wars - who spend billions of dollars to watch the most popular films ever made. Yet the government pays absolutely no attention to this phenomenon. It's always the last to know. But I think it is a forlorn hope. I hope we'll have a manned expedition to Mars, though the politicians put it way down on their list. But it would be so uplifting for the human spirit. It's hard to get the government to act the way it should. Carl Sagan and I and a lot of others stayed up all night. Suddenly, the first photographs of Mars started coming back on the giant screen. We were all exhilarated - dancing, laughing and singing. Around nine in the morning, Roy Neal from NBC News came by and held this microphone in front of my face. Bradbury, you've been writing about Mars and its civilizations and cities for all these years.
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