There was a copy of The Silver Locusts (the UK title of The Martian Chronicles) knocking about my house. It was the first time anyone had ever written a story that spoke to me personally. The first one I read was Homecoming, about a human child in a world of Addams Family-style monsters, who wanted to fit in.

I encountered Ray Bradbury's stories as a boy. Ray Bradbury was the kind of person who would give half a day to a kid who wanted to be a writer when he grew up. My friend grew up to be a writer, the kind who writes and supports himself through writing. That it's work, but the best kind of work. When Bradbury found out that he wanted to be a writer, he invited him to his office and spent half a day telling him the important stuff: if you want to be a writer, you have to write. Last week, at dinner, a friend told me that when he was a boy of 11 or 12 he met Ray Bradbury. And I wrote it last year as a love letter and as a thank you and as a birthday present for an author who made me dream, taught me about words and what they could accomplish, and who never let me down as a reader or as a person as I grew up. It's a monologue called The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, and was a way of talking about the impact that Ray Bradbury had on me as a boy, and as an adult, and, as far as I could, about what he had done to the world. Y esterday afternoon I was in a studio recording an audiobook version of a short story I had written for Ray Bradbury's 90th birthday.

Ray bradbury the silver locusts