On Ray Bradbury
an appreciation
Without Ray Bradbury, there is no Stephen King.
He was my muse for the better part of my sci-fi career.
In his 1973 essay “The Joy of Writing,” Ray Bradbury argues that a writer’s loves and hates are the only appropriate subjects for his or her writing. “What are the best things and the worst things in your life,” he asks the reader, “and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”
Bradbury’s own writing career exemplifies this approach in its capacity for both great storytelling and authorial self-indulgence. The latter is an inescapable part of his oeuvre. Any dedicated reader of Bradbury’s short stories, especially the later collections, finds him constantly revisiting old haunts to ever-diminishing returns: his Midwestern youth and beloved carnivals, the Arizonan deserts of Mars, the inhuman technological future of earth. Consider one of Bradbury’s signature authorial identities, the lover of libraries and defender of the Western canon against short attention spans and self-appointed moral guardians. “The Exiles,” a 1949 short story collected in The Illustrated Man (1951), represents the first published example of this theme, taking place in a Fahrenheit 451-esque future in which all horrific and fantastic books were “destroyed a century ago…burned in the same year that Halloween was outlawed and Christmas was banned.” This censorship has affected the afterlife, forcing the ghosts of macabre authors — including Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Poe, and Bierce — to flee to Mars, where they raise spectral apparitions of their literary creations and await “the return of superstition” on earth.
“The Exiles” is classic early Bradbury, full of the gusto that he identifies as the most important part of writing, and the product of a young writer truly enjoying where his imagination takes him. Bradbury would begin recycling aspects of this story the very next year. In “Usher II,” collected in The Martian Chronicles (1950), an eccentric Martian colonist takes revenge on members of “The Society for the Prevention of Fantasy” by killing them in ghoulish recreations of Poe’s stories, while Fahrenheit 451 (1953) ends with its dystopian city destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, leaving the surviving bibliophiles to rebuild civilization like monks in dark age Europe. In the ensuing decades Bradbury would write many more stories in this vein, paying tribute to his favorite authors — and to reading in general — in increasingly more heavy-handed ways. Two stories collected in Long after Midnight (1976), for example, use artificial intelligence and time travel to bring George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Wolfe, respectively, into the spacefaring future, and the 1994 short story “Last Rites,” perhaps the most sentimental variation on this theme, follows a time traveler who visits Poe, Melville, and Wilde on their deathbeds to assure them that they will live on in their books.
Nostalgia is the primary tone of late Bradbury, and his short story collections of the 70’s-2000’s feature tributes to Bradbury’s favorite childhood movies (he wrote two separate short stories about Laurel & Hardy), mawkish tales of old people rediscovering their inner children, and further portraits of the artist as a young Midwesterner. When I saw him speak a few years before his death he repeated all of the same anecdotes that appear again and again in interviews, essays, and prefaces: his young adult days spent selling newspapers during the day and reading books in the UCLA library at night; spending almost $10 in change to write Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter; working on the Moby Dick (1956) script with John Huston in Ireland. His final and probably worst novel is, fittingly, Farewell Summer (2006), a return to his adolescent alter ego in idyllic Green Town, Illinois published a half-century after Dandelion Wine (1957.)
Bradbury’s creative decline was, in short, something very common to science fiction and fantasy authors. Like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, his fellow ‘ABCs of science fiction,’ he spent much of his career in an almost endless process of sequelization.
As I get older I find science fiction as science fiction less and less appealing, in part because I’ve had ample experience with just how repetitive it can be. In England I read a few books by one of the seminal British science fiction writers, Brian W. Aldiss, who argues, in his role as a critic of the genre, that science fiction exists to ask questions like:
Shall we increase technology until the whole surface of the planet is covered by concrete and steel? Is religion an aberration? Is war inevitable? Will artificial intelligence take over our governance, and is that desirable? Do we need to conquer space? How would utopia come about?
Aldiss, in other words, joins many other authors and fans in defending the genre as a literature of ideas and ideas were exactly what I found in his fiction: technological and sociocultural speculation, wrapped in a thin layer of story. (One noteworthy exception is “Supertoys Last all Summer Long,” a moving story that formed the basis for A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)).
Ray Bradbury himself adopts a similar stance in his 1980 essay “Dusk in the Robot Museums: The Rebirth of Imagination.” The sixties and seventies, argues Bradbury saw a renaissance in science fiction reading as children rejected the “snobbery” of teachers and librarians in order to read fantastic literature. Science fiction reflects the ‘History of Ideas’ and provides the same kind of creative thinking that inspires real-world technological breakthroughs; according to Bradbury, the “science-fiction dreams” of our cave-dwelling ancestors lead to fire and tools. He predicts a new generation of children, free from the kind of snobbery exemplified by painting’s “sixty-odd years of abstraction super-abstracting itself until it vanishes up its own backside,” using science-fictional thinking to solve the world’s problems.
That future has not come to pass in the last 36 years. “Dusk in the Robot Museums” is clearly Bradbury on the defensive — one gets the impression that it was written as a response to a critic denigrating his writing as science fiction instead of real literature — and seems out of place with the rest of his oeuvre. Bradbury’s fiction certainly does not present an optimistic view of technology, or of the future in general, and this predicted utopia sounds strange coming from a man who refused to drive a car and would later describe the internet as “a big scam the computer companies cooked up to make you get a computer into every home." Science fiction certainly does not have a monopoly on ideas in literature, and mere forward thinking can’t overcome cardboard characters, contrived plots, and thematic heavy-handedness, all of which are endemic to Bradbury’s worst stories and to the genre as a whole.
His best stories, on the other hand, don’t need any handicap for being science fiction and can stand as classic stories in their own right. I find his early stories much more re-readable than those of, say, Asimov, and a major reason is that Bradbury is, the aforementioned essay to the contrary, not necessarily a science fiction author, or at least not a science fiction author in the same way as Asimov, Clarke, or Frank Herbert.
This, of course, leads us to the often-asked questions about what defines science fiction and what differentiates it from fantasy and other genres. C.S. Lewis’s essay “On Science Fiction” is the best account of the genre I’ve read, and especially appropriate here because it mentions Ray Bradbury. For Lewis, ‘science fiction’ refers to five distinct kinds of fiction published under that name. The first, which he calls “radically bad” is “an ordinary love-story, spy-story, wreck-story, or crime-story” set in a “faintly imagined” future. His next three categories echo the rebranding of science fiction/fantasy as ‘speculative fiction:’ the “fiction of engineers,” which imagines future technology like the works of Clarke and Jules Verne; speculation about conditions (and life) on other planets like Wells’ First Men in the Moon; and “eschatological” fiction about “the ultimate destiny of our species” like Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Clarke’s Childhood’s End.
Lewis’s final category of science fiction, the only one that he is “greatly interested in,” “represents simply an imaginative impulse as old as the human race working under the special conditions of our own time.” Unlike Aldiss, who finds the origins of science fiction in the gothic novel’s mixture of Enlightenment and Romantic ideas, Lewis sees the genre as inseparable from myths and legends of ancient times, as the form they take in a world transformed by technology. ‘Science fiction’ stories about space exploration, he argues, reflect the exploration and subsequent disenchantment of the earth’s surface during the 19th and 201th centuries; other planets are simply the only remaining places with room for strange lands populated by fantastical creatures. The “pseudo-scientific apparatus” of these tales exists primarily to get characters from point A to point B while offering “the most superficial appearance of plausibility.” Discussing his own science fiction, for example, Lewis notes that the steampunk spaceship in Out of the Silent Planet and the supernatural intervention of its sequel Perelandra serve essentially the same purpose and are equally divorced from any real science. (The essentially magical hyperspace travel in Star Wars is another obvious example of science fiction ‘science’ as “the merest sop to our critical intellects.”)
The difference between the majority of science fiction and Lewis’ ideal is perhaps best seen in the adaptation of “The Sentinel” into 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film released after Lewis’s death. Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, in which a lunar exploration sets off a “cosmic burglar alarm” left by ancient aliens, exemplifies categories three and four in Lewis’ schema: speculation about the lunar landscape and, as in Childhood’s End, about the impact that advanced aliens might have on homo sapiens. The short story and the finished film, Clarke once wrote, “bear much the same relationship as an acorn and an oak tree,” and everything I’ve read about the film suggests that this growth came about as a result of Stanley Kubrick’s discovery and development of its mythic dimension. Kubrick explained the film’s Homeric title during a pre-production interview, stating that, “for the Greeks the vast stretches of seas must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our own generation.” The film has become first a cult hit and then an all-time classic of cinema by offering something more, something much older, more archetypal and more Homeric than Clarke’s speculation about first contact with another intelligent species.
Homer’s Odyssey, appropriately enough, is the earliest example Lewis gives of the kind of story with “the marvelous… in the grain of the whole work.” He continues:
If good novels are comments on life, good stories of this sort (which are very much rarer) are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.
Lewis lists a number of stories that he sees as exemplifying this possibility of literature, including, among others, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan, and his longtime friend J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. “Some of Ray Bradbury’s stories,” he writes, “perhaps make the grade.”
My argument is, of course, that they do. I haven’t lost my early love for fantastic tales as I have grown older, despite my disillusionment with science fiction/fantasy as a genre. What changed is that I now turn to Coleridge, Poe, Kipling, Chesterton, Dinesen, Kafka, Peake, and indeed Lewis himself for this kind of storytelling instead of genres stories of spaceships and robots, or of elves and wizards. Bradbury’s best writing, which I can argue can be found in his short stories from roughly 1946-1955, falls under the first category rather than the second.
To be more specific, I’d place his best stories not in the “golden age of science fiction” per se but as that era’s representatives of a much older tradition of American storytelling, that of Washington Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip van Winkle,” Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “Young Goodman Brown,” Poe’s Tale of Mystery and Imagination, Melville’s “Bell-Tower,” Twain’s “Mysterious Stranger,” and Fitzgerald’s “Benjamin Button.” His later stories, as previously discussed, are too often simply rehashes of stories from this period, and, as for his novels I feel that fantastical fiction almost always works better in short stories than in novels. Poe, one of Bradbury’s idols, famously argued that the prose tale should be short enough to be read in one sitting in order to maintain its “unity of effect;” Bradbury’s best tales work in this way and need the concentration provided by the limited length of a magazine short story.
Read, for example, 1947’s “Jack-in-the-box,” a product of his early career collected in The October Country. The entire story has the “single effect” of its title, with its young protagonist running “like a small dark comet” through the halls of the mansion that is his universe, full of the jack’s coiled-up tension, waiting to break out. It ends with the boy escaping the confines of his dead world — a miniature, vaguely Southern gothic Gormenghast — to discover a “room as large as the sky” outside its gates. A sympathetic reader cannot help but feel a sense of his exhilaration.
“Jack-in-the-box” also exemplifies much of Bradbury’s best short fiction in its avoidance of science fiction’s outward trappings (the story, indeed, has no overtly futuristic or even supernatural elements.) If you’ve ever read one of his essays or interviews, for instance, there’s a very good chance that you’ve experienced him waxing poetic about the time he found an abandoned rollercoaster on Venice Beach and imagined it to be a dinosaur’s skeleton – an image far removed from, say, Asimov’s robots, “psychohistory” and city-planets. This experience lead to the 1951 short story “The Fog Horn,” best known for its very loose film adaptation, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), with visual effects by Bradbury’s lifelong friend Ray Harryhausen. While the film inspired Godzilla and the ‘50s atomic monster movie in general, the original story has a very different tone, one best described as melancholic. It concerns, in brief, the loneliness of a dinosaur that has outlived the rest of his kind and survived up to the present day.
Bradbury often cited Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio as an influence, and this dinosaur, along with many other Bradbury characters – the title characters, for example, of “The Dwarf,” “The Pedestrian,” and “The April Witch” – share the isolation of that book’s “grotesques.” This mood, I believe, explains Bradbury’s special appeal to people in their teens and early twenties. That is the age of angst, of course, but it’s also a time when many people experience a true sense of loss: the death of childhood, the narrowing of possible futures. Bradbury expresses this sea change in melancholy fantasies, in the extinction of the dinosaurs, the burning of books, the colonization of Mars and death of its original inhabitants, the drowning of a young girl in “The Lake.” Bradbury considered the latter story, written when he was 22, to be the first time he expressed “something that was really me.” Its protagonist returns to his childhood hometown to find
faces with echoes in them. Echoes of hikes on ravine trails. Faces with small laughter in them from closed grammar schools and swinging on metal-linked swings and going up and down on teeter-totters. But I didn’t speak. I walked and looked and filled up inside with all these memories, like leaves stacked for autumn burning.
The older Bradbury’s exercises in nostalgia, as cloying as they can get, do reflect this poetic young man and his lost childhood.
Bradbury’s space stories resemble C.S. Lewis’ science fiction in that they use technology as only a means to an end. In an introduction to The Martian Chronicles, for instance, he notes that “There Will Come Soft Rains,” with its automated home of the future, is the only real science fiction story in the entire collection. He describes the rest as “pure myth.” The title of Bradbury’s 1951 short story “Here There Be Tygers” provides the best illustration of this: outer space as the terra incognita populated with a menagerie of strange creatures by the cartographers and travelers’ tales of old. This sense of discovery, indeed, permeates Bradbury’s fiction, and I don’t think that my exegesis of this particular story can really communicate this aspect of his fiction, or the candy bag urge for “just one more” that his best short story collections inspire. Writing about Bradbury, then, means turning to writing in general, to his style which has been described as poetic and as perhaps the most memorable in science fiction.
Even prime Bradbury, however, had a weakness for purple prose, for adverbs and for using four or five similes when one would have sufficed. He always had a weakness for on-the-nose dialogue that put his own thoughts (or strawman versions of arguments he disagreed with) in characters’ mouths. His “darlings” are alive and well. His prose is, in short, the exact opposite of many of the adjectives used to describe good modern literary prose: elegant, clean, precise, economical. The beginning of “The Long Rains,” for instance, reads like something Dickens would have written a century earlier:
The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.
At its best, however, Bradbury’s writing has a positive something rather than just the absence of what characterizes good 20th century literary fiction. Bradbury himself describes that something as gusto in “The Joy of Writing,” and both that term and the essay’s title reflect the pleasures to be found in his writing. Flying imagery reoccurs throughout his stories, which at their best give an unmistakable sense of flying on the wings of imagination, of a man furiously typing on an old typewriter in an attempt to keep up with his train of thought. Bradbury’s prose, for all its faults, communicates the breathlessness of a writer in the process of discovery, one at times struggling to find words for the visions passing through his head. Bradbury’s uncontrolled unpolished stories, with their hesitations, repetitions, and occasional awkward passages, are like the pentimenti-filled paintings of Willem De Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn — they embed the creative process into the final product, giving the best of them the unmistakable flavor of sheer joy in creating.
This joy drew me to Ray Bradbury as a teenager and continues to inspire me as a writer. I’m not sure I realized it at the time, but when I saw Bradbury speak a few years before his death I glimpsed the young man, the 25 year-old in love with dinosaurs and with finding terrors and wonders around every corner, inside the old man retelling old stories and kvetching about technology. I strive to put as much joy into my own writing.
love this profile on him so much! bradbury’s sci-fi writing has always felt as if it acted like a vehicle for him to talk about deeply human things in literary fiction instead of being boxed in the genre
I really enjoyed this overview and analysis Robert. Your distinction between science fiction as a “literature of ideas” and the older, more elemental imaginative impulse that Bradbury embodies I found illuminating. You capture and explore why his best work continues to feel alive even when some of its supposed futurism has dated. The technology is rarely the real subject. It is a mechanism for reaching something more mythic, melancholic and emotionally strange.
A parallel occurred to me while reading. I am rarely excited by science-fiction cinema now, which seems paradoxical. We have closed much of the gap between the present and the fantastical and often deeply anxiety-inducing visions imagined during the twentieth century. At the same time, visual effects, sound design and filmmaking technologies have made possible extraordinary levels of audiovisual world-building. Cinema can now show us almost anything. Yet its imagination of the future often seems to have stultified.
There are important twenty-first-century exceptions, of course, but so much contemporary science fiction feels derivative: familiar dystopian architecture, recycled cyberpunk iconography, variations on corporate authoritarianism, ecological collapse and artificial intelligence. All of these are clearly at the forefront of techno-social discourse
The technical capacity to construct worlds has expanded precisely as the capacity to imagine genuinely different worlds appears to have contracted. Perhaps the future has become too recognisable, too closely aligned with our present anxieties, to retain the openness and strangeness it once possessed?