Up From the Depths of Pulp
and Into the Mainstream
Martians,
robots, dinosaurs, mummies, ghosts, time machines, rocket ships, carnival
magicians, alarming doppelgängers who forecast murder and doom — the sort of
sensational subjects that fascinate children are the stuff of Ray Bradbury’s
fiction. Over a 70-year career, he used his fecund storytelling talents to
fashion tales that have captivated legions of young people and inspired a host
of imitators. His work informed the imagination of writers and filmmakers like
Stephen King, Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, and helped transport science
fiction out of the pulp magazine ghetto and into the mainstream.
Thanks to its lurid
subject matter and its often easy-to-decipher morals, Mr. Bradbury’s work is
often taught in middle school. He’s often one of the first writers who awaken
students to the enthralling possibilities of storytelling and the use of
fantastical metaphors to describe everyday human life. His finest tales have
become classics not only because of their accessibility but also because of
their exuberant “Twilight Zone” inventiveness, their social resonance, their
prescient vision of a dystopian future, which he dreamed up with astonishing
ingenuity and flair. Not surprisingly he had a magpie’s love of all sorts of
literature — Poe, Shakespeare and Sherwood Anderson (whose “Winesburg, Ohio”
reportedly inspired “The Martian Chronicles”) as well as H. G. Wells and L.
Frank Baum — and borrowed devices and conventions from the classics and from
various genres. “Something Wicked This Way Comes” would win acclaim as a
groundbreaking work of horror and fantasy.
“Fahrenheit
451” (1953) — Mr. Bradbury’s famous novel-turned-movie about a futuristic world
in which books are verboten — is at once a parable about McCarthyism and
Stalinism, and a kind of fable about the perils of political correctness and
the dangers of television and other technology. “The Martian Chronicles” (1950),
a melancholy series of overlapping stories about the colonization of Mars, can
be read as an allegory about the settling of the United States or seen as a
mirror of postwar American life.
“A Sound of
Thunder” (1952) — a short story about a time-traveler, who journeys back to the
dinosaur era and accidentally steps on a butterfly, thereby altering the course
of world history — spawned many imitations, and in some respects anticipated
the chaos theory concept of “the butterfly effect,” which suggests that one
small change can lead to enormous changes later on. He also uncannily foresaw
inventions like flat-screen TVs, Walkman-like devices and virtual reality.
Mr. Bradbury,
who insisted that the best way to describe him was as “a magician and not a
science-fiction writer,” grew up on the adventure stories of Edgar Rice
Burroughs and Jules Verne, and was enchanted by the idea of space travel. But
he also saw the dark side of technology. Cold war worries about the bomb haunt
“The Martian Chronicles” and stories like “The Garbage Collector” (1953). And
one of his best known short stories, “The Veldt” (1950), is a cautionary tale
about technology run amok: it depicts a family’s totally automated house,
including a virtual reality nursery that entertains the children by conjuring
up the contents of their imaginations. The unruly children soon become obsessed
with an African grassland, complete with hungry lions that, the parents find,
have suddenly become all too real.
Some of the
children in Mr. Bradbury’s fictional universe are indeed malevolent — like the
diabolical baby in “The Small Assassin,” which in many ways prefigures the
movie “The Omen” and Doris Lessing’s novel “The Fifth Child.” But if Bradbury
is adept at portraying the ruthless side of children, his writing (particularly
“Dandelion Wine” and the stories set in a fictional Midwest) also celebrates
their imaginative freedom, their innocence and their daring.
In fact, the
greatest danger in Mr. Bradbury’s futuristic tales is not posed by aliens or
robots, but by threats to creativity and art (“Fahrenheit,” “The Smile”) and
humanity’s own waning capacity for belief in the strange and miraculous. In one
story in his 1988 collection “The Toynbee Convector,” a ghost grows pale and
ill when surrounded by cynics and intellectuals but begins to revive when a
group of children gather, avowing their belief in him, much the way Tinkerbell
was resuscitated in “Peter Pan” by the audience’s applause.
Mr. Bradbury
himself — who for years had a remarkable self-imposed regimen, producing at
least one short story a week — saw the strange and miraculous everywhere, and
mastered the art of spinning them into enduring yarns. “All my life,” he said
in an interview, “I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright
objects. I turn it over and say, ‘Hey, there’s a story.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/books/ray-bradbury-who-made-science-fiction-respectable.html?_r=1&ref=raybradbury&pagewanted=print
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