This one really sucks to do.  Ray Bradbury, author of the Martian Chronicles, died Tuesday after a long illness.

I know I have said before of other authors that they had an impact on my life, but Ray Bradbury was probably the start of my inevitably (and enjoyable) journey to nerddom.  I read the Martian Chronicles in grade school and I can say they opened my eyes to the possibility of something other than this drab, mundane, and more or less meaningless world we humans infest.

The idea of being able to go to another world and colonize it captured my imagination like nothing else.  Of course, Bradbury was a genius when it came to creating poetic, otherworldly landscapes with words, so it was easy to see what he saw.

Even more importantly, however, is the fact that in addition to being a welcome escape in my childhood he inspired a generation of authors who took me to other worlds on a daily basis.  Ask any author of that generation worth his or her salt who their early inspirations were and most of them will list Bradbury.  He was truly a pioneering and wonderous author.  I will truly miss him.

I didn’t really have any good Martian images so I just grabbed this Mars Attacks! shirt from the Movie T Shirt collection.  I’m pretty sure this movie would not have come to be had Bradbury not been around.

Dave

Dave’s on his way to Italy, so it falls on me post blogs.  Actually, he told me he has two reviews lined up and will try to post them from Italy, as well as talk about his time there.  I expect a lot of pasta stories.  Anyway, I know the easy ones to hit are episodes 1-3, but here is a question that has bugged me for a while about Episode 4.

The Death Star arrives in the system with the Rebel base.  They are behind the main planet and have to wait 30 minutes to clear it and get a shot at the moon that the base is on, giving Luke and friends the time they need to hit the exhaust port.  However, the Death Star is armed with a giant planet destroying turbo laser.  Why not just save the time and blow up the main planet?  The shockwave and debris alone would probably destroy the moon the base is on.  It’s not like Tarkin was that interested in not blowing up planets.  Would have been a huge time saver, and in Jedi they were shooting that thing off all the time, so you can’t say it would need to recharge.

For that matter, if blowing up the Death Star was a million to one chance, why weren’t the rebels bugging the hell out of there?  They couldn’t leave Hoth fast enough in the next movie.  I would have abandoned that base but left the fighters behind to go for that last ditch chance.  Makes sense to me.

This cool Japanese Star Wars image I got from Dave’s movie t shirt collection by the way.

Jason