Ray Bradbury, the author of "Fahrenheit 451" and the man who would never take credit for science fiction, died yesterday at 91. The New York Times remembers him as "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream. His name would appear near the top of any list of major science-fiction writers of the 20th century, beside those of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein and the Polish author Stanislaw Lem."
Bradbury's works included "Something Wicked This Way Comes," "Dandelion Wine" and short story collections like "The Illustrated Man." The lesser known adapations of Bradbury's works come from two video games from the 1980s and another nearly twenty years later. The spiritual sucessor to his "Fahrenheit 451" was a game of the same name released for Atari, Commodore 64 and PC as an "adventure game."
Taking place after five years after the end of the novel, Guy Montag is working with the literary underground to sneak into the 42nd Street Public Library in Manhattan and find the "microcassettes" that now hold the last copy of the burned collection. The text-game was apparently praised for mixing dialogue with giant purple chunks of text, but that was 1986 for you.
On the newer end came an adapation of "Sound of Thunder" for the Game Boy Advance in 2005. Based on the story about a time hunter that inevitably screws up the present because of an event that occured while leading a prehistoric big game hunt. It was supposed to be a tie-in to the film adaptation that got shoved into a DVD release and forgotten on the SyFy channel.
But when it comes to remembering Bradbury, let's stick to the words that inspired a whole generation of kids into science-fiction and thinking dandelions could cure any problem.
