Ray Bradbury began writing in the 1940s, at a time when science fiction and fantasy were relegated to pulp magazines with lurid covers, and were looked on with contempt in literary circles. Bradbury, who died June 5, ended up one of the most venerated figures in American letters.
Though often labelled a writer of science fiction, he always was an oddity within that genre. There are gadgets in his stories, and he both loved and feared the possibilities that technology would bring, but he was not a ‘hard’ science-fiction writer in the vein of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. His Martians are armed with guns that shoot bees rather than gamma rays. If we have to categorize him, he was a writer of imaginative literature.
In his Martian stories (some of which were collected together as The Martian Chronicles), Mars serves primarily as a place in which anything can happen, a blank canvas on which he can paint, unconstrained by chains of verisimilitude that come with terrestrial settings. On Bradbury’s Mars, golden fruit hangs from crystal walls in a house with crystal pillars by the edge of an empty sea. Dreams, hallucinations and reality blur. There are books that sing when you touch them.
Bradbury’s books are like that. They sing with an electric exuberance, a passion for life and for the English language.
His imagination is the imagination of a boy growing up in 1930s America. One gets the sense he never grew up, or, rather, he always held on to his childhood, even as time pulled him inexorably through the decades of the 20th century and into the next.
Joy, childlike exuberance and wonder are in Bradbury’s work, but there is also darkness. And there is also in his work a thin, hard-glowing vein of rage.
Bradbury’s rage is reserved for the enemies of wonder, the lumpish ones, the men who come to Mars and vomit drunkenly in its canals, the Moral Climate officers who seek to destroy anything that reeks of fantasy or imagination. Fahrenheit 451, perhaps his most famous book, involves a future in which books are forbidden, but the struggle between imagination and its enemies is for him a recurring theme.
For Bradbury, the struggle against the enemies of wonder, against the stultifying repression of conformity, was a vital and urgent struggle, one that mattered, and one he cared deeply about.
This is not the struggle between art and science, though there are passages here and there suggesting this.
Bradbury understood, as did Plato and Aristotle, the quest for knowledge begins in wonder, and the same spirit that animates imaginative writing drives behind what is most valuable in science. There is a passage in the physicist Richard Feynman’s first volume of reminiscences, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, in which he recounts a period of his life, shortly after getting his first academic job, duiring which he was disgusted with physics and found himself unable to do productive work. What cured him was, as he puts it, taking a new attitude.
“Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything … just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”
Within a week, he was playing with physics again, doing work that eventually contributed to his Nobel Prize.
The conformists, the enemies of the imagination, the ones who want to crush the spirit of playfulness, would destroy not only art, music and literature, but science, as well.
In a coda written for the 1979 Del Rey edition of Farenheit 451, Bradbury wrote:
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
A bit later in the coda, we have:
For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmild teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.
But he said it more succinctly, in one of his finest stories —and the Moon Be Still as Bright, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in June 1948 (introducing Lord Byron the readers of that magazine for the first time?), and reprinted in The Martian Chronicles:
The next afternoon Parkhill did some target practice in one of the dead cities, shooting out the crystal windows and blowing the tops off the fragile towers. The captain caught Parkhill and knocked his teeth out.
Re-reading Bradbury, a dozen years into the 21st century, on a planet that made it through the Cold War without nuclear devastation (and a good thing, too, because we never did get around to building those colonies on the moon), writing on a laptop with computing power that would have seemed unimaginable up until the last decade of the 20th, but still can’t simulate human wit, in a world in which books are not banned but are vanishing anyway, in which no Moral Climate Inspectors knock on your door searching for evidence of illegal possession of Poe but Seuss’ Lorax has been turned into a shill for SUVs, in which imagination is not forbidden but the market efficiently quashes it anyway, I find the stories still live and breathe.
The earlier stories are voices from another era, and some seem dated, but they are infused with a spirit that is timeless.
Wayne Myrvold has been a professor in Western’s Philosophy Department since 1997. He is an affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.