Living in the World Ray Bradbury Created
by Joshua Fagan
A very good friend of mine, an Iranian-American science-fiction writer, always argues to me that basically everything in the genre nowadays can be traced back to Arthur C. Clarke: the plots, the ideas, the basic storycraft. While I deeply respect her opinion, I feel I must make a similar claim for a different author. Ray Bradbury is not, on most days, my favorite science-fiction writer, nor was he the first great science-fiction writer, but he was the first science-fiction writer to fully unleash the potential of the genre.
Bradbury was born in 1920 in a small but growing town in Illinois to a Swedish immigrant mother. His family was working class and moved often when he was a child, eventually landing in Los Angeles during the decades before World War II, when massive population growth transformed California from a land still defined by its Spanish-Mexican past and the ghosts of war and annexation into a gleaming beacon of modernity that was distinctly American, less constructed than hazily summoned by the minds of millions of dreamers searching for warm weather and a peaceful, prosperous life.
Just like California, science fiction was in its springtime during Bradbury’s childhood, gradually grasping toward a distinct identity in spurts of creative and frustrating early years. There were of course stories beforehand that handled scientific themes, from Mary Shelley to Edgar Allan Poe to H.G. Wells, but none of these stories were intentionally fashioned as “science fiction” or made to cohere into a clear genre. The idea of science-fiction as it exists now started in a less reputable place, in cheap pulp magazines with stories that often valued adventurous thrills and displays of cool scientific technology over detailed, humanistic storytelling. These pulps were largely, though not entirely, American, and the fact that the great science-fiction writers of the early days, aside from Clarke, were also American is not coincidental. Think of Heinlein, Asimov, and the editor Campbell, among others. Building from these early pulp roots, a country already defined by invention and scientific achievement attempted to build the foundations for what science-fiction should be. Science fiction does not “belong” to Americans any more than high fantasy “belongs” to the Brits, but in both cases, the tendencies and interests of the nation invariably affected the development of the genre. Bradbury came of age in a fertile age for a genre slowly discovering itself, and in a relatively short time, he helped shape that genre for generations to come.
A small number of warm retrospectives on Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles have released recently in commemoration of its 75th anniversary. The most prominent of these is from Sam Weller for LitHub, which makes a number of grand claims about the book, arguably the most convincing of which being that the book “is science fiction as a reflection of modernity,” meaning its ambivalence and dread as well as its enthusiasm. Released in book form in 1950, it is less of a novel than a collection of short stories, many of which had been published beforehand, discussing a future of a colonized Mars in wry, sharply satirical, and often poignant ways. Bradbury did not invent the idea of Mars as a setting for science fiction, which extends back at least into the nineteenth century and was even used by Wells, before becoming popular during the pulp era, wherein it was often depicted in fantastical ways. Bradbury saw it differently, however, as a place relevant for speculation but not inexplicable or fanciful.
It was estranging for him in the way Darko Suvin would later explain, as a place that is interesting because it fundamentally differs from our reality but relevant to us because it differs through processes that are reasonable and explicable. Bradbury’s Mars is a place with culture and history, with original habitants and warfare and disease. It is also a place with tourism and consumerism, often built atop the half-forgotten memories of those darker chapters. Bradbury is resolutely a humanist, in that he is someone who cares about the struggles and hopes of individual human beings more than he cares about technologies or cool concepts, but his humanism has a deep tinge of cynicism. The greatest roadblock to Bradbury for humanistic flourishing was not invading aliens or disorienting technology but the fundamental weaknesses and limitations of the human spirit, a lingering desire for pettiness and pretty lies.
The influence of Poe on Bradbury seems particularly strong in The Martian Chronicles and his other best works, not simply because Poe laid much of the groundwork for what would become American science fiction with stories like “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfall,” but because Poe maintained the same balance of evoking the shadow of the unknown and mysterious without excusing or downplaying the often deeper darkness emerging from humans who wish to lie to others and themselves, believing they are more noble or virtuous than they are, desiring to erase any evidence to the contrary.
Bradbury resisted the term science fiction with the temerity of any great writer who dislikes labels. For Bradbury, “Science fiction is a depiction of the real,” while his stories were unreal and better for it: they were myths, and for him, “myths have staying power.” Still, even his speculative stories that do not rely on science have the foundations essential to good science fiction, the considerations of the unknown but explicable and the fissures and fractures such considerations reveal in the spirit. Fahrenheit 451, for instance, does not retain its chilling science-fictional power because it takes place in the future or because it relies on advanced technology, but because it depicts eternally relevant themes through the framework of a world that is more visceral because it is estranged from everyday reality. The idea of the book-burners gives Bradbury a broad and detailed canvas on which to create a story of censorship and repression, made more striking by its lack of exaggeration: the burners are not robots or psychopaths but ordinary people with relatively ordinary lives who simply, unthinkingly acquiesce to this system. That legacy, of strange but understandable worlds marred by the excesses of human frailty, is what Bradbury bequeathed to science fiction.
The period of Bradbury’s peak creativity lasted for an unfortunately short period of time. Most of the works for which he is remembered were published either during World War II or in the years immediately following. After 1955, when he was 35, he published relatively little speculative fiction that is still read today. Still, the fact that such a small timespan produced enough work to elevate him to the upper pantheon of American writers makes him more, not less, impressive. Most successful writers live and die without writing even one story that even approaches the heights of stories like “The Veldt” or “Here There Be Tygers” or “All Summer in a Day” or especially the best stories in The Martian Chronicles, my favorite of which being “There Will Come Soft Rains.”
Depicting the aftermath of nuclear devastation, “Soft Rains” is a bit of an outlier in the book. There are no human voices except the disembodied narrator, while the detritus left behind by civilization continues to work in a flawed, imperfect way. His world here is one of ghostly lyricism, defined by absence and loss. Science fiction since the death of Bradbury in 2012 is perhaps in a similar state. His loss is deeply felt, and yet his phantasmal presence still exists, the science-fiction world of today being one that he shaped.
Joshua Fagan is a writer and academic currently residing in Seattle. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature and science, particularly the interpretation of evolutionary thinking in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on Anglophone writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.