Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 19, 2020

ddressed the critical health of the imagination in the modern age, the time-traveling personal consequences of being an artist, the lacerating assumptions and actions of imperialism, and the urgency of the danger of totalitarianism. In Dandelion Wine he relived and transformed one summer in the life of his childhood avatar. He weighed the Happiness Machine versus the Time Machine (literally in the novel). He not only drew from the well of memory, he tested the potability, broke down the elements, analyzed and foresaw the lifelong legacy of the waters. It is one of his lyrical and poetic performances. This has made some critics uncomfortable, cynical. Damon Knight, usually a perceptive editor, said Bradbury’s only topic was Childhood. See my list previously for my opinion of that blindness. It’s like saying Joyce’s only topic was Ireland or Flannery O’Connor’s only topic was the South. If nothing else is at first achieved in a review of Bradbury’s career, one must acknowledge the depth and varieties in the approaches of his art. Dandelion Wine was half the coin of his magic. In five years, with Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury would offer the other half.

Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 18, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial Post. Fahrenheit 451 remains Ray Bradbury’s most famous and bestselling book. Four years before it was published in 1953, Bradbury, who never got a driver’s license, was walking the streets of Los Angeles late at night as he liked to do, and he was stopped by a policeman and asked what he was doing. “Putting one foot in front the other,” he said. He wrote a dark prophecy of a short story, “The Pedestrian,” out of the incident, and it was the beginning of the dystopian world of Fahrenheit 451. He famously wrote the novel on a rented typewriter in the basement of the Los Angeles Public Library, all three parts, after Ballantine Books asked him to extend the first novella. It has one of the most famous opening lines of the 20th Century: “It was a pleasure to burn.” Bradbury’s fears about the future of books, thereby the future of imagination, were set specifically in the context of the McCarthy Red Scare paranoia and persecution. To react to the stress of the present by extrapolating trends to “1999,” as Bradbury did, is the essential trait of science fiction. From immediate relevance to timelessness is the test of art, and Bradbury passed that test. Not surprisingly and with unintentional irony, the novel has often been censored and banned and objected to by his own publisher in the first case and by schools in the latter cases. People get upset with the image of burning books (shades of the Nazi book bonfires), and when they get upset they sometimes don’t know how or where to respond. It is Bradbury’s genius that he knew this and imagined a powerful story to dramatize it. If books ever do disappear, it will be the last one to go.

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.