Miss Helen Loomis from Dandelion Wine.

Hmmm... fathers, sons, firemen, a janitor, a hot dog salesman, not many other professions represented.

Well, you left out countless rocketship captains, time travellers (and fake time travellers), writers, inventors, farmers, bone-eating consultants, undertakers, fingerprint obsessives and compulsive nightwalkers!

I would like to add to this list of Ray's works about women, "The Woman on the Lawn", Ray's tribute to the memory of his mother, which was equally touching as both a poem and a short story.

Ray wrote a lot of futuristic stories during the 1950s, at which time society's whole big "thing" was to have a single income, preferably earned by the man, so the woman of the house would not have to work outside the home (some had enough of that during the war and relished the comparative "luxury" of being housewives.) An outside job indicated a woman was single, divorced, widowed, or her husband's income was inadequate. (Remember how Ralph Kramden of "The Honeymooners" resisted Alice getting a job although they had no children. It was a matter of pride.)

Ray was raised in a home where the father worked and the mother kept house, and wrote a lot of stories with this family structure. These seemed terribly outdated to me when I read them in the 1970s when women were becoming "liberated" and protesting for the "right" to work. (Also a matter of pride.) From the 1980s on, both number of inventions and the cost of living jumped so dramatically, this "right" was lost in the "necessity" of two-income families, with fewer stay-at-home moms or homemakers.

Undoubtedly, raising four daughters who were preteens to teens in the hotbed of unrest of Southern California in the 1960s, Ray must have got an earful of women's issues. Anyhow, SOMETHING makes him bristle at the slightest suggestion that female characters be approached any differently in his writing.

I will say this: in his futuristic stories, there is a lot unexplained about society. Perhaps in that near future, women will have tired of battling a cutthroat world for the privilege of paying costs and upkeep of possessions and actually relish time at home again. I remember as a teenager, thinking of Lydia in "The Veldt," what a wimp, when she said she wanted to shut off the machines and take care of the family herself. Yet as life becomes more automated, people really do yearn for traditional roles and that seems natural to me now. (Of course now that I'm getting old, yada yada.)

And, of course, a lot of people now have online jobs where they never have to leave the home. I know one young couple with three children, a huge beautiful house on which they continue to improve, and I'm not sure either of them sets foot outside the home to work. (The wife may have part-time employment outside.) So in some ways, Ray's 1950s stories seem more futuristically up to date than they did twenty or thirty years ago!

Sci-Fi and fantasy very rarely gets the respect it genuinely deserves. If she ever read Dandelion Wine, I think she'd love it. But then, I don't think to highly of her in general for various other reasons so please note I may be biased in saying I doubt she'll ever even consider a Bradbury novel. Her loss.

Lovely tribute to Ray reported in today's issue of The National Ledger (Stacy Jenel's column):


DEAR STACY: I would like to know what the ever-classy Nichelle Nichols has been up to lately? Any news? -- James C., Austin, Texas

DEAR JAMES: The still-lovely actress best known as Lt. Uhura of the classic "Star Trek" series keeps working, with recent roles in movies including this year's "Are We There Yet?" comedy, and next year's action/adventure flick "02." She's also written two books, "Saturn's Child" and "Saturna's (cq)Quest," and remains an active presence in the "Star Trek"/sci-fi/space universe. She recently read excerpts from Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" at a Planetary Society dinner honoring the author, for instance. Nichelle, who was told she was a role model for young African-American girls by Martin Luther King just months before his assassination, went on to help recruit minority and female personnel to the space program as a volunteer for NASA.

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Does anyone know which excerpt from The Martian Chronicles was read by Ms. Nichols??

This message has been edited. Last edited by: The Lake,

someone said something about Mildred being a complex and deep character. How is that? She couldn't even complete sentences correctly. However, Clarisse was a complex charater