Ray Bradbury - "Minor Poet"

On 10th July 1972, Ray Bradbury​ was the first speaker in a twelve-week series of free lectures entitled Cosmic Evolution: Man's Descent from the Stars at San Francisco's Exploratorium. "I will be participating as a minor poet and sub-minor philosopher," Ray said, "seeking to explain our age and the great three-billion-year age ahead."

By this time, Bradbury had been closely associated with space - partly through his fiction, but more importantly through his non-fiction writings and public speaking.

Other contributors to the lecture series were all scientists, including: Freeman Dyson, who lectured on intelligent life in the universe; Nobel Prize-winning chemist Melvin Calvin, on the origin of life; and Philip Morrison, who concluded the series with "The Context of Mankind: a Summation."

Five years later, Bradbury and Morrison would sit together on a NASA panel with novelist James Michener and explorer Jacques Cousteau, discussing "Why Man Explores". The answer to such a question clearly required not just a scientific answer, but a poetic one.

Asteroid 9766 Bradbury

On 24th February 1992, an average-sized asteroid was discovered by Spacewatch observers at the Kitt's Peak Observatory, and designated 1992 DZ2. Eight and a half years later it was given a name: 9766 Bradbury.

Dr Jeffrey Larsen of the Spacewatch Project and the University of Arizona wrote to Ray Bradbury to tell him of this astronomical re-naming. He provided technical details of the asteroid's orbit, and more graspable information such as its size (three to nine kilometres in diameter) and distance from the Sun (2.45 astronomical units). Dr Larsen also informed Ray that the asteroid had not been observed for its physical composition, and thanked Ray "for inspiring me in my youth" through his writing.

Ray immediately faxed Dr Larsen back, exclaiming "Holy Magoly!" He thanked Larsen for "this wonderful baptism" and felt sure that this would earn respect from his four daughters.

Ray Bradbury had been similarly honoured by the Apollo 15 astronauts, who named a crater on the Moon as "Dandelion Crater" in 1971. Shortly after his death, he was astronomically honoured once more, when the Curiosity landing site on Mars was named as "Bradbury Landing".

Style Fingerprint

We all know that different writers have a different style to their work, and we often think we can identify the author by detecting their style in a passage of text. Some scientists in Sweden have taken this idea to a mathematical extreme, and determined that each author has a distinctive style fingerprint, which can be established by cataloguing the words the use and comparing their frequencies.

A yet bolder claim emerging from the study ("The meta book and size-dependent properties of written language") is that each time an author writes, s/he is drawing on a personal "meta-book". It sounds to me that this is another way of saying that an author has a basic repertoire, and each new work is built from that repertoire.

Most Bradbury readers will be intuitively familiar with this idea, and can certainly cite example of particular linguistic tricks and techniques that Bradbury uses over and over again.

One of the clearest reports on this new study is on the BBC News site, here.