Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 17, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. In 1950, seven years before the Soviets launched the first satellite (Sputnik), Bradbury published The Martian Chronicles. The title suggests its framework, as would The Illustrated Man a year later. (Tip: don’t believe critics who say Bradbury does “fix-ups” or loose anthologies. He was much more careful and exact than his critics understood or than he let on.). Chronicles is a future history with dates (charmingly early) of the human exploration and settlement of Mars. Begins in 1999, ends in 2026. Such an immense shift in the human story, such a permanent transfer from the cradle to the future, could have been told from a high (future) historical perspective, big canvas, something that Kim Stanley Robinson took on decades later. Bradbury instead took on the small stories, the lightning flashes, the psychological interiors that traveled with the humans to what they thought was an alien planet. His approach turned out to be as comprehensive as any hard-science terraforming proposal. To select just one layer of interpretation, The Martian Chronicles can be read as as account of imperialism in all its naivety and its cruelty and its self-destructiveness. It is an allegory and an analysis and a moral weighing as terrifying as anything Anubis would do, to use an Egyptian analogy that Bradbury would have loved. And with all this intellectual caffeine, it is beautifully written. Bradbury can thrill you, scare you, horrify you, enrage you, make you weep, and make you silent with awe and wonder. It is my favorite book. I once memorized the entire prologue, “Rocket Summer,” after reading the book in a single day. I told Ray Bradbury that when I met him in Anaheim, California, in the mid-Eighties. He joyously cried, “No! Really?” And he laughed. And we talked some more before the book convention business resumed. I explained to Betsy as we walked away that of course I could not wash my hand that shook the hand of Ray Bradbury.