Science Fiction Giant Bears Ancient Message

This above all: To thine own self be true.

--Polonius, in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”

In the hot, stuffy room there appeared a white-haired, pink-skinned giant who stood up and bellowed:

“Crazy Ray tells you--you can change your life right now!

“Get the hell out of here! Do what you want to do. Don’t listen to anyone who doubts you. Pick your friends to believe in you. Listen to your stomach--if it’s serene, those are your loving friends. If not--Aaarrrgh!--get out!”

It was like a scene from a Ray Bradbury science fiction story. It was Ray Bradbury.

Prolific, Popular

The white and pink giant is one of the country’s most popular and prolific writers. The occasion was the opening of the Pasadena Public Library’s Author Series, and the message was the one Shakespeare wrote for Polonius to deliver in “Hamlet.” It’s the same message repeated in the “Prince Valiant” and “Buck Rogers” comic strips and in the “Tarzan” and “Oz” books, Bradbury said.

It’s the message Bradbury has shouted to audiences for 30 years, since the first of his 400 books, short stories and poems were published.

Bradbury, 64, has a loud voice and a smile that seems uncontrollable. He lives in the Cheviot Hills area of Los Angeles. He said that being true to himself may be his only unusual quality--one available to everyone.

He was a kid from Waukegan, Ill., who moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was 13 and never got a college education; a poor kid who roller-skated to the public library every day and never learned to drive; a kid who stayed with what he loved--including dinosaurs, Tarzan, Buck Rogers, Prince Valiant and Oz.

‘Stay With the Trash’

“Stay with the trash,” Bradbury advised.

As he grew, he became enamored of public libraries, librarians, book stores, Venice, unusual characters, science, fiction, Shakespeare, Alexander Pope and Charles Dickens.

“I graduated from the Los Angeles Library at the age of 27,” he said. “Then I discovered that in the basement of the UCLA library you could use a typewriter for a half-hour for 10 cents. . . . I wrote ‘Fahrenheit 451’ for $9.50.”

“I love to do things quick, in an emotional explosion,” Bradbury said. “I discovered the more you do, the more you dredge up from the subconscious.”

But he said he spent 30 years on his latest book, a mystery novel, “Death Is a Lonely Business.”

“Too much fiction now is about reality,” said Bradbury. “I don’t have to tell you any more about despair, disaster, war, crime--you get that all the time.

“I hate the doom-sayers. Around them, I speak positively in the hope that I’ll depress the hell out of them.”

He said his current work includes “a novel, a couple of musicals, ‘Ray Bradbury Theater’ on cable TV and an opera based on Moby Dick in outer space--a great white comet that appears every 40 years.”

“It’s a big gamble,” Bradbury said of the opera. “But I don’t want to see another play in which a woman walks on stage and turns on a faucet and water comes out. I want wine to come out.”