Four years ago I wrote a post in my Creating Story blog about seeing Ray Bradbury at a 2009 book signing in a local bookstore.
Bradbury had arrived in a wheelchair, a rumpled man with a huge shock of white hair. He filled the room with excitement.
After speaking for a few moments, he had fielded questions from his fans. Someone asked him what he thought the future held for our young generation. He sat up tall in his wheelchair, his eyes sparkling, and almost cried out, “We should go back to the moon! Go on to Mars, with the moon as a base camp. Then go on to Alpha Centauri.”
Here was a master storyteller who spent a lifetime exploring this world and the entire universe in his imagination. His voice quivered with excitement when he told us of his own recent visit to the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, California. The JPL scientists guided him as he drove the Mars Rover on the surface of the same planet he had visited in his imagination since The Martian Chronicles. This from a man who never had a driver’s license in all of his then almost 90 years,
This is the power of story. Travel back to the moon. Probe the vast universe.
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