Tried to post this as a reply, but there was a character limit on status updates.
Bradbury is great. He's just kind of the Model T of poetic science fiction. It's hard to read him today and see his works the way they were seen on release. His influence has affected sci fi in a huge way that's more difficult to track than Heinlein or Asimov. He was an innovator that commonly broke new ground. Try to remember how big of a deal close encounters of the third kind was on release, and then watch it now. It feels slow, boring, uninspired. Would viewers of SAW or Event Horizon think that "The Exorcist" was the most horrifying movie ever? Probably not, but the day it first hit theaters, it was a revolution in it's genre. Anyway, that's why people recommend Bradbury. If you want kind of a modernized version of a classic Bradbury story, there is a Christian Bale movie called Equilibrium, which is pretty good rip off of Bradbury's most famous tale, Fahrenheit 451. If you want to try a different Bradbury book, Dandelion Wine is great, if lesser known.
I do get why it's hard for new readers to latch on to his work. If you hear a groundbreaking musician from 1952, it's often hard to tell why they were such a big deal, now that we've been acclimatized to the much more potent evolutions of music that they eventually inspired.
Both King and Koontz were influenced by Bradbury, as were most sci fi and horror writers. In his day he had movies, tv shows, radio dramas, hardback bestsellers, and the like. He was a huge deal in science fiction's embryonic decades.
Bradbury is great. He's just kind of the Model T of poetic science fiction. It's hard to read him today and see his works the way they were seen on release. His influence has affected sci fi in a huge way that's more difficult to track than Heinlein or Asimov. He was an innovator that commonly broke new ground. Try to remember how big of a deal close encounters of the third kind was on release, and then watch it now. It feels slow, boring, uninspired. Would viewers of SAW or Event Horizon think that "The Exorcist" was the most horrifying movie ever? Probably not, but the day it first hit theaters, it was a revolution in it's genre. Anyway, that's why people recommend Bradbury. If you want kind of a modernized version of a classic Bradbury story, there is a Christian Bale movie called Equilibrium, which is pretty good rip off of Bradbury's most famous tale, Fahrenheit 451. If you want to try a different Bradbury book, Dandelion Wine is great, if lesser known.
I do get why it's hard for new readers to latch on to his work. If you hear a groundbreaking musician from 1952, it's often hard to tell why they were such a big deal, now that we've been acclimatized to the much more potent evolutions of music that they eventually inspired.
Both King and Koontz were influenced by Bradbury, as were most sci fi and horror writers. In his day he had movies, tv shows, radio dramas, hardback bestsellers, and the like. He was a huge deal in science fiction's embryonic decades.