Last week, Ray Bradbury passed away.  The morning I read the news, I thought, ‘My hero has died.’  For some reason, I thought he never would – his work was – and is – so vivid, his enthusiasm for the craft so infectious, it would not have surprised me if he’d lived forever, just as Mr Electrico had reportedly commanded him to from a sideshow tent back in the early 1930s.

But soon, the truth of it – and the futility of hoping that somehow the brightest stars won’t fade and perish – sunk in.  Ninety years old, though!  A good innings.  A full innings.  Certainly full for me and for countless thousands like me who were transformed by his love for words, of life, and of the potential of unfettered imagination.  Each of us  knows of his short story A Sound of Thunder, even those who haven’t read it surely have heard of the butterfly effect, or at least seen the homage to the seminal time travel short story on The Simpsons.  For me, three of Bradbury's works redefined what writing was and could do.  The bittersweet short story The Homecoming, about ordinary Timothy and his extraordinary undead family, shocked me, delighted me, and – most of all – stayed with me after I finished it.  As a teenager, Something Wicked This Way Comes struck a note that still resonates like the whistle of that night train across the plains; its dusty witch in her awful balloon is an image that is so fantastical and beautifully terrifying the book needs no other, yet is rich with hundreds more.  But it was Fahrenheit 451 that found deepest root in my brain, and cemented Ray Bradbury as a writer whose work I admired perhaps above all others.  Its strange blendings, its stunning counterpoint, have never let go of me: the shadowed night beauty he depicted in suburban ordinariness as Montag walks the city's footpaths contrasted so sharply with the glowing, polished techno-horror of the poisonous mechanical hound relentlessly chasing its prey on silent rubber feet. (Could there be a Terminator without a Mechanical Hound?)

Bradbury, like H G Wells before him, was a visionary.  Not a prophet, I think he once argued, but a critic, or a counselor; warning against yielding to the parts of our nature that prefer to receive than to give, to lounge than to walk, to watch than to read, to be told what to think rather than to think for ourselves.  He, like Wells, was it seems more gifted Cassandra than benevolent consigliere, since so many of his danger-filled predictions have come to pass.  We sit back and watch shows about cooking, rather than messing our own kitchens; we work sixty hours a week to pay for devices that save us time we no longer have.  Despite this, his work wasn’t depressing, even its saddest and scariest and most judgmental about our foibles – it still brimmed with joy and child-eyed curiosity.

I realised I was wrong to think he died.  He is alive, a metre from where I type, in half a dozen books of his I own and treasure.  And I was wrong, I realised, to think him my hero.  Heroes are those who sacrifice their own comfort or health or lives for the betterment of others.  They are not people who play the sport they love for money; I hate, with passion, hearing professional sports people called heroes.  In the same vein, Bradbury could never be a hero: he spent his life doing what he loved to do – writing.  He made money, but I’m sure he would have written (as he did in his youth) without financial reward.  And he encouraged those of us who love words to try and tap into the rich vein he found – I highly recommend you read Zen in the Art of Writing; it is every bit as inspiring as King’s seminal On Writing.  No, he was not a hero.  He was an inspiration.  Was, and is.

PS Who is my hero? Janusz Korczak.  If you don’t know his story, do follow the link, and perhaps you’ll see why.