A final hug for our dear friend

My first exposure to Gore Vidal came when I read the collection of essays he published in 2002 called Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. He understood immediately after the September 11th attacks that the attacks would be used by the powerful to take away civil liberties and the country would turn into a “seedy imperial state.” A shortened version of a remarkable essay, which he wrote in the aftermath, was published by The Guardian. It boldly considered how Osama bin Laden had presented himself as a “liberator” to the Muslim world and how post-9/11 the powers that be were further transforming the US into a police state.

I don’t remember my reactions to the stories themselves so much as what came after — a lifelong love of both Bradbury’s work and science fiction in general. I read everything by him I could find, from his horror and sf through to his more conventional works about life in Ireland. As a boy, I loved his paeans to boyhood and the joy of fresh new sneakers in Dandelion Wine. I read The Martian Chronicles over and over, breaking the spines of multiple copies.