Ray Bradbury: The last of the sci-fi ABCs departs
posted 6-8-2012 - 8:16 pm

 
There is a scene in the middle of The Martian Chronicles wherein a human and a Martian accidentally meet. Each has left his settlement, distracted, and wandered out in search of solitude, quiet, a chance to think. In a strip of Martian desert, past boulders in a narrow place where no one should be, a thin veil separating two realities dissolves, and they suddenly see each other. The thing is, the Martian civilization has been gone for thousands of years. Dead. To the human, the Martian is a ghost of the planet’s past; to the Martian, who is quite alive, the human is a ghost of its future. Surprised, they encounter one another, connect. And marvel.

Whenever I think of The Martian Chronicles, the first thing I remember is that scene: two intelligent beings confronting The Other in the vastness of space. It was breathtaking to me then, and still is. I thought of it again last week when I heard that Ray Bradbury had died.

I grew up reading the ABCs of science fiction: Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke. Isaac, Ray and Arthur C. I encountered them by accident at a time when I was first being introduced to real science in school, and the space race was on television for everyone to see. It was all of a piece to me then: I watched the Mercury and Gemini launches on television before I got on the bus to school. I read science in class in SRA reading supplements (one of IBM’s projects) whenever I got my classwork or homework done half an hour before everyone else did, which was daily, and ran out of other things to do. In truth, I hurried to finish my own work so that I could read the SRA materials: I’d quickly run out of things to read in the school library, which was geared to babies, I thought (even in first grade, I was way past the appalling Dick and Jane, which I’d concluded was written for idiots).

It wasn’t until the school librarian decided to let me borrow books two or three reading levels ahead of my grade, however, that I got the idea to do the same at the public library. Having then persuaded that librarian to change my library card so that I could borrow from the adult (i.e., older than grade school level) section, I didn’t know where to start. So I began alphabetically, stumbled first into the science fiction section. And there was Asimov, waiting for me, with Bradbury and Clarke close at hand. The delightful triumvirate, the Three Musketeers of speculative, provocative thought. So began my adventure, one that I’ve never left behind. By the time I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen, I was thoroughly enmeshed, a convert for life. And I took space travel in my future for granted.

Bradbury was a big part of that. His writing somehow always reached me as more of an interior dialogue between writer and reader, on a more personal level than the other two. Each spoke to me in a different voice, each’s ideas fascinating me in a different way. Asimov was the obvious polymath, with his personality far more evident in his nonfiction and mystery writing and the type of gleeful literary voice that cried ‘Look, ma – no hands!’ He was prodigious, his ideas animated, and he was right out there in front, in your face. Clarke was the Zen master who blended into the shadows behind his work, his voice quiet, thoughtful, inscrutable. Even when he explained a mystery to you, it still managed to retain its sense of the mysterious, and the wonderful. He and Stanley Kubrick were aptly suited to each other when together they created the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Bradbury … Bradbury always stirred a complex set of emotions: imagination, whimsy, longing, loss, love, an elegiac quality. A spark of hope. Wonder.

I became more interested in science because of science fiction, and in ethics. I wanted to understand how we got from Here to There, from rockets into orbit to colonies on distant planets. To understand why we were hidebound and stuck on a planet we seemed bent on destroying. How we got beyond that, and met other life. Whether we were worthy of it all. No nostalgia for me; I read my history per George Santayana’s prescription: to learn from it and not repeat it, not to wallow in it or waste time longing for the past. I was always more interested in what was around the next corner, 10 years ahead, 20 years, 90. A millennium. Would we still recognize ourselves? Would they recognize us? Would we last that long? I needed to know.

Science fiction, to me, was that extension of science that might help envision the answers. True science fiction takes science and extrapolates from what we know, then extends it to its logical conclusions, posing questions along the way. Fantasy never does: it has no science at its heart, which is why I consider it a cuckoo in the nest – a far different creature bearing no resemblance to science fiction, even if the fantasy is futuristic – which is why I object so strongly to commingling or confusing the two. Fantasy like Star Wars was a good escape, but it never made me question my world or want a better one the way that science fiction did. And don’t get me started about why: I draw the line at Vikings with ray guns, witch worlds, and talking dragons. I’ve no patience with such. But I read Bradbury's fantasy and horror books, because he was much more imaginative than that.

Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke made me ask those questions about my world and my civilization. I am still asking because of them. Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and his robot books, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, and Clarke’s 2001, Songs of Distant Earth, Childhood’s End, his Rama series and his short story “The Nine Billion Names of God” were the foundation on which my worldview developed. They introduced me to Big Ideas long before my watered-down school curriculum ever did. Fahrenheit 451 made a particular impression on a girl whose mother’s family had run through Europe during WW II dodging both Nazis and Russian Communists; I knew from family stories what it was to flee a world where thinking and ideas were dangerous and torture and death routine. To escape with your soul intact was no small thing. Bradbury and the others saw that and made it real for me, in a way that my family’s stories never did.

That complex set of emotions that Bradbury evoked and his unique tone of voice permeated everything that he wrote. You could always recognize his work, not just from the writing style but from how it made you feel. There was no such thing as genre for him, or even format. It didn’t matter whether he was writing a short story, a stage play, a TV script, or an essay, fact or fiction – it was just him, revealing something to you one on one, and making you wistful, glad you’d read it. I recall getting about two chapters into his first mystery novel, Death Is A Lonely Business, and thinking to myself: Oh. Well. That’s just Bradbury again. That’s okay. And then I read on, having recognized the feel. It was a good mystery, too, but the more important thing was that it was Bradbury, enchanting me and provoking unnamed longing and thought. I don’t think that he ever lost that particular young boy’s/young man’s small-town voice that he got during his early years in Waukegan, before his family moved them all first to Arizona, then California. That’s not a West Coast voice, despite his decades of dwelling there.

Mostly, what science fiction gave me was a flicker of hope – about everything. It provided a safe format for us to think out and work out our problems. Asimov and Clarke painted the big pictures. Bradbury made me feel that no matter how problematic our future or how advanced we became, we might still retain some of our humanity, the best of our natures. We would still be people, even if we had evolved into forms of energy beyond the need for bodies.

Like Asimov, Bradbury was prolific. Unlike Asimov, who pretty much stuck to books and short stories, Bradbury covered a range of formats: books, graphic novels, essays, stage plays, screenplays, teleplays, even poetry and operas. He wrote nearly 50 books and hundreds of short stories, 65 of which he adapted for his own TV show, The Ray Bradbury Theater, which earned him an Emmy for his teleplay of "The Halloween Tree." He worked in the film business, too. His screenplay for John Huston's film version of Moby Dick snagged him an Oscar nomination. Isaac couldn't claim that.

For his own part, Bradbury lived simply. He stayed married to the same woman for 57 years and survived her by nine. He helped raise four daughters. He preferred bicycles to cars and never bothered to get a driver's license. He remained a happy person.

The ABCs are gone now, their work taken up by others, both colleagues and genre descendants. Asimov was the first to go, having become somewhat of a recluse as he declined to travel but still having left behind a collection of more than 300 hundred books, about a third of which were science fiction or some other fiction. Showing off a little, Isaac. Still the genial smarty-pants to the end, outdoing everyone else and keeping us excited to the last. Asimov exited in 1992 at 72 like a proper showman, leaving us all still wanting more.

Clarke was next, departing us in 2008 at the age of 90. The elder statesman of the three, he'd given us the concept of geostationary communications satellites and the Clarke Belt in which they dwell – without which modern life would be drastically different – and retired early on to exotic Sri Lanka. A scientist himself, Clarke kept in touch with other scientists and with the space program, via phones, satellites and Internet, and wrote until the very end, during his last years collaboratively. His cerebral works didn’t suffer from it, either. I very much liked his final novel, The Last Theorem, co-authored with another science fiction veteran, Frederik Pohl.

Bradbury, the most whimsical of the trio, was the last to decamp at 91, having had the longest writing career at 70 years and arguably the most public life with his presence in the TV and film industry. In his rare spare time, he had been very vocal about his support for two causes: public libraries and the U.S. space program. The first had helped him educate himself when he skipped college, and the second he considered a necessity. He thought we should have had a moon base and a Mars colony by now. I can't disagree.

At least he got to remote-pilot a Mars rover, courtesy of JPL and NASA, the staffs of which no doubt saw him as one of their own. In my mind’s ear, I can hear him as he drove the joystick: Good boy, Rover. A boy and his dog, in an entirely Other context. How fitting.

Ray Bradbury is gone. Long live the master. He’ll certainly live in my memory.