To all the family of readers of Ray Bradbury,

I have only posted a couple of times but have been reading RB's fiction and have been profoundly affected by him since childhood.

It occurred to me that science fiction and fantasy writers should qualify as subjects for the PBS series _American Masters_ and I put in a request for three via the WNET staff: Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Shirley Jackson.

Ray Bradbury topped the list because I teach college writing in Tucson, Arizona, and have a feeling of resonance with the colonizing culture and the old indigenous culture. Whether it is too topical to link these feelings to our current flap about "Illegals" in Arizona, I think that an _American Masters_ segment might bring out the humanity that informed the Mars that Ray created. The sensitivity about an old culture on Mars certainly finds its echo here in Tucson where those echoes of the old culture are here for anyone who chooses to hear them. My husband is an astronomer who works up on Kitt Peak Observatory and he brings home the tribal newspaper _The Runner_, since Kitt Peak is on the Tohono O'odham reservation. It is a real experience reading _The Martian Chronicles_ here in Tucson, since Sam Weller, Ray's biographer has noted that Mars was, in fact, formed here in the brain of young Ray.

I am enjoying that biography a second time, have read the Tucson pages to my students, and I sure hope that I sparked some interest at the _American Masters_ production offices on honoring the fine writers of science fiction and fantasy (and other non-genre work by these same writers) Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Shirley Jackson (her short story "The Lottery" is read all over the country in First year College English every semester).

Hope you are all having a wonderful summer!
Hello from Mars...

Gloria

Hello Gloria,

Hope your suggestion(s) for American Masters takes wing!
If other board members are interested, perhaps this web page may help: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americ...edback/#usermessagea

Oh, why didn't I think to include the link to American masters? Glad you did, though.
Gloria