When Montag the Fireman goes into his bedroom, he hears a
“little mosquito-delicate dancing hum in the air, the electrical murmur of a
hidden wasp snug in its special pink-warm nest”. His wife Mildred is lying in
bed with her earphones plugged firmly in, “music and talk and music and talk,
coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind”. Mildred has her earphones in most
of the time, but has learned to lip-read her husband and so can still carry on
a conversation of sorts. Thus, Ray Bradbury, near the beginning of his first
novel Fahrenheit 451, illustrated the
isolating effects of technology on his future protagonists. In this dystopian
tale of book-burning firemen, he was not trying to predict the future. “When I
wrote that book [in 1953]”, he told an interviewer for Locus magazine in August 1996, “I was trying to prevent a future, and by god it’s
arrived, so we have to get our teachers on the ball, to change our present so
that the future is better.”
In
that same interview he said that what he was most proud of was discovering that
all the astronauts he had met (and his status ensured that he had met many of
them) had read him in high school. “Boy, that is absolutely incredible! You’ll
have to forgive my ego, but there is a crater on the moon named for my Dandelion Wine, and I’m very proud of
that.” He credits science fiction writers – “we modern science fiction writers
of the last 40 years” – with preparing the way, culturally and intellectually,
for a future in space. Bradbury had been one of the best-known science fiction
writers in the world ever since the 1950s, and he was always prepared to extol
the virtues of the genre in public. He encouraged young writers, just as established
people like Henry Kuttner, Robert Heinlein and Leigh Brackett “all took time to
read my dreadful stuff when I was 20 years old.” And like those writers of the
1940s, throughout his life he continued to believe that science fiction was important: it was the only literature
that helped prepare people, particularly young people, for the future, and to
help them towards the right future.
It
is one of the paradoxes of his life that Bradbury, who was known as a great
science-fiction writer, wrote so little science fiction. Fahrenheit 451 was the only novel he wrote which could be defined
as science fiction, as he himself would say. In fact he wrote very few novels:
only eleven, and most of those were actually collections of linked short
stories cobbled together into a novel, in what the SF writer Van Vogt called a
“fix-up”. Bradbury wrote around 500 stories, it is said, 200 of which were
gathered together by HarperCollins back in 2008 in two large volumes called Ray Bradbury Stories, but many of those
were not science fiction either. He wrote some of the classic science fiction
stories, all of which have been reprinted many times, and which are well known
to all serious readers in the genre. “A Sound of Thunder” (1952), in which a
careless time-traveller changes the future, is a classic time-paradox story;
“The Veldt” (1950) is a chilling story of what one might now call virtual
reality; “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) is one of the most effective, and understated,
stories of nuclear holocaust. Every Bradbury reader will have a favourite
story; and it is likely that it will come from that first most prolific period
of Bradbury’s career, from the late 1940s and early 1950s. But most of his
stories were not science fiction even then: they were horror, or fantasy, or a
blend of the two. In the terminology of the times, they were weird fiction:
indeed, many of them had originally been published in Weird Tales, an American magazine that ran from 1923 to 1954.
The
strange relationship that Bradbury had with science fiction can best be
discovered in the pages of what was his most critically respected of his books,
The Martian Chronicles, a fix-up published
in the USA in 1950 (and published in the UK in 1951 as The Silver Locusts). It enabled Bradbury to break out of the genre,
or ghetto, of science fiction and fantasy publishing: most of the short stories
he published after 1950 were not to be found in Weird Tales, Planet Stories
or Thrilling Wonder, but in the Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s, publications with a wide
readership and of a certain literary respectability. When Bradbury talked in
1996 about “we modern science fiction writers” he was paying his dues to a
community which he had in some ways left many years before.
The Martian Chronicles is a collection
of stories about the colonisation of Mars, one of the classic SF themes. Yet it
shocked the SF writers and readers at the tie of its first publication. It paid
no attention at all to the latest astronomical discoveries about the fourth
planet. It was not in the slightest bit worried about the mechanics of getting
a rocket to Mars, or in speculating what it might really be like up there (for that you could go to contemporary
novels such as Robert A Heinlein’s Red
Planet, 1949, or Arthur C. Clarke’s The
Sands of Mars, 1951). A review of The
Martian Chronicles by the writer L. Sprague de Camp in the February 1951
issue of the leading science fiction magazine of the time, Astounding Science Fiction, probably sums up general feelings at
the time about Bradbury among SF writers and readers, and it is worth quoting
in full:
Mr. Bradbury’s Martian stories
have made a stir in the field, and now comes a whole book of them, forming a
connected account of the settlement of Mars by Earthmen, 1999-2026. The early
settlers find a few surviving Martians—fragile humanoid creatures with a
shape-changing power they sometimes use against Earthmen. The latter, mostly
Americans, settle, but when atomic war engulfs Earth they nearly all rush back
to Earth for its final destruction.
Bradbury is an
able young writer who will be better yet when he escapes from the influence of
Hemingway and Saroyan—or their imitators. From Hemingway he takes the habit of
stringing together many short simple sentences and the Providential or
impersonal viewpoint, all characters described purely in terms of external
action. All right for Hemingway’s Neanderthaloid characters with no minds to
explore, but of limited use in a fiction of ideas.
From Saroyan—or
perhaps Steinbeck?—he takes a syrupy sentimentality. He writes “mood” stories,
of the sort called “human,” populated by “little people” named Mom and Dad and
Elma and Grandpa. The come from American small towns and build others just like
them on Mars. They’re the kind we all know and call “nice—but dull.”
His Earthmen
and his elusive Martians are alike given to strange irrational and destructive
impulses. Sometimes the Martians satirize Earthy [sic] faults and foibles; at
other times they are the pathetic victims of Earthly brutality. At the end they
have all been killed or have died off to deepen the melancholy of the scene.
Bradbury
belongs in the tradition of anti-science-fiction writers like Aldous Huxley who
sees no good in the machine-age and can’t wait for it to destroy itself. With
all these reservations, however, his stories have considerable emotional
impact, and many will love them.
Many have, indeed, loved them; and more have probably read The Martian Chronicles – rarely if ever
out of print – than can remember Red
Planet or The Sands of Mars.
Reviews like that of Sprague de Camp, together with Bradbury’s own particular
antipathy to technology (living in Los Angeles for most of his life, he never
learned to drive, or to like flying) perhaps helped to keep Bradbury very much
on the fringes of the science fiction world. But, generous to a fault, Bradbury
continued to declare proudly that he was a science fiction writer; and that,
following his recent death, has been how most obituary-writers have remembered
him.
Edward James
Emeritus Professor,
University College Dublin
Chair, Science
Fiction Foundation
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