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).

The Twilight series: Parsing images in the arts
When providing politically correct criticism really doesn’t help
posted 11-19-2011 - 7:45 pm CST

 
I got an e-mail yesterday from the Women’s Media Center. I’m on their list for a reason: they have a program called Progressive Women’s Voices that spends decent money to train women like me to be op-ed writers and opinion shapers and gives them the necessary connections. E-mail from the WMC is one of the very few ways to learn when the next class term will be scheduled so that I can apply. So when I get an e-mail from them, I usually glance at it right away.

This one arrived the very same day that the Twilight film franchise’s latest installment, “Breaking Dawn, Part 1,” debuted at movie theaters nationally. The digital missive came with a link and a provocative headline: “Exclusive: Breaking Bella – When Love Equals Violence.” That raised an eyebrow.

Like many other women, I’ve read the books, and that wasn’t exactly the impression I got from reading them. Yeah, they have some serious flaws, but they’re not dangerous or evil. The premise of that headline struck me as too simple minded and not a little blindly PC, but I reminded myself that headlines can be misleading. So I figured I ought to read the column before drawing conclusions.