If you know anything about science fiction, you know Ray Bradbury. He imagined and wrote about how things would be years and years ahead of his time (and many of them are in our daily life now!). Even if you have zero interest in sci-fi, you’ll want to read what he says about his early inspiration for writing: 

“I learned that I was right and everyone else was wrong when I was nine. 

Buck Rogers [one the first sci-fi comic adventures, popular 1929-1967] arrived on scene that year, and it was instant love. I collected the daily strips, and was madness maddened by them. Friends criticized. Friends made fun. I tore up the Buck Rogers strips. For a month I walked through my fourth-grade classes, stunned and empty. One day I burst into tears, wondering what devastation had happened to me. The answer was: Buck Rogers. He was gone, and life simply wasn’t worth living. 

The next thought was: Those aren’t my friends, the ones who got me to tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; they are my enemies. 

I went back to collecting Buck Rogers. My life has been happy ever since. For that was the beginning of my writing science fiction.” 

—Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius within You

More about Bradbury: 

In 2012, the NASA Curiosity rover landing site on the planet Mars was named “Bradbury Landing.”

Ray Bradbury (1920 – 2012) was an author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of modes, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction…most acclaimed for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections, The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951). 

The New York Times called Bradbury “the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream.”

Ray Bradbury followed his heart.