RAY BRADBURY: THE LAST INTERVIEW and Other Conversations

ed. by Sam Weller

Melville House Publishing
(www.mhpbooks.com)
2014, 99 pages, $15.95

ISBN 978-1-61219-421-9

Click Here to Purchase

I once wrote a True Review editorial, one of my favorites, called “God Only Knows What I Would Have Been Without You.” It wasn’t meant to be a tribute to the song by the Beach Boys, but an homage to how I was influenced as a writer and reviewer by the works of American fantasist Ray Bradbury, and how Bradbury’s works inspired and molded me. There is so much beauty and poetry in the works of Ray Bradbury.

He is the writer of a short story, “The Gift,” that I discovered at the back of a middle school English textbook. After reading that, I was hooked on Bradbury’s works for good. I’ve read his entire oeuvre.

Bradbury biographer Sam Weiler has contributed fantastically to the Bradbury-verse, presenting a collection of stories but with many lifelong interviews with the SF grand master.

Bradbury speaks in many of these interviews, some right before his death in 2012, about the profound influence on his spirit that his own grandfather, Samuel Hinkston Bradbury, bestowed. Ray even admitted he wanted to be buried close to his grandfather, who introduced Ray to a plethora of all things fantastic, a profound influence on Ray’s life.

Who knows what Ray would have turned into without his grandfather?

(I did not know or even meet any of my grandfathers. They passed away years before I was born.)

This I know: Ray was my Samuel Hinkston Bradbury. He who led and dazzled me with all that is fantastic about being a science fiction and fantasy fan. I’m here because of you, Ray, and this book made me realize that even more. True Review would never have existed without Ray.