We all discover things that change us forever, that make us better than we were before the thing was discovered.

Ray Bradbury was one of those things for me.

I remember being in my teens and reading a collection of short sf stories and coming across ‘The Fog Horn’ for the first time. It wasn’t my first brush with Bradbury – that had been ‘The Veld’ a little while before – but it was ‘The Fog Horn’ that really got my attention. It was a beautiful polished gem of a story, so rare and wondrous that it sparkles in my mind even now. Track it down and read it, you’ll see what I mean.

(WARNING: My wife just read the following paragraph and said it was pretentious. She also called me a rude word. So I read it back. It’s close to how I feel about Bradbury’s stories. The paragraph is not as elegant or poetic as Bradbury deserves, but it’s close enough. The paragraph stands. Sorry, Wifey.)

I read a lot more Bradbury, and I discovered many more jewels: ‘The Crowd’ and ‘Skeleton’ glittered, but they were dark stones, like clots of blood trapped in amber; as were ‘The Playground’; ‘Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in your Cellar’; ‘The Homecoming’ and ‘The Small Assassin’. ‘The Martian Chronicles’ and ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ were lustrous, rich and strange. ‘Fahrenheit 451’ was opalescent, with books burning at its heart. ‘A Sound of Thunder’ seemed light and dazzling, but at its core was a swirl of obsidian black.

Some of these jewels had flaws – some of the ideas were too big or odd or way-out for one to wholly suspend disbelief – but that only served to make them richer, more fragile, more beautiful, somehow. What’s important is the weight of the imagination that dreamed them into existence: the lyrical, literary style that raised them above the majority of the sf I was reading at the time.

Or are reading now, to be honest.

Bradbury’s stories changed me: they taught me to dream bigger, bolder, and in brighter colours; they taught me to write, more than any other writer’s stories before or since.

It was from Bradbury that I learned the discipline of sitting in front of a typewriter every day; typing a word or two at the top of the page, sort of centred, and letting it stand as the title, then allowing my brain and fingers to do the title justice as I pounded words out into that frustrating, magical old Olivetti. I honed my craft with Ray’s advice – ‘Write. Don’t think.’ – handwritten, reverently, on an index card on the wall in front of me. (The ‘Relax.’ bit that usually sits at the end of the quote doesn’t really suit my style.) It’s still my writing mantra, although I have switched it around into ‘Don’t think. Write.’ because I needed to pretend I’d made it my own.

I feel sad that he’s gone because he was important to me in a way that is as rare as the jewels that he has left behind him.

But what jewels they are.