Ray Bradbury at 100

"Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down."

~ Ray Bradbury

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”

~ Ray Bradbury

I could not allow this day to pass without some sort of recognition. Today marks what would've been Ray Bradbury's 100th Birthday. A year ago, I wrote several pieces about Ray for this blog, including one about why he matters to me as much as he does. To summarize all those pieces, he is the writer who made me want to write.

Increasingly, I've seen a number of my colleagues turn away from the influence of writers of Bradbury's generation (roughly, the Golden Age era authors), mainly for reasons of political correctness. Questionable, and downright offensive, aspects of their stories no longer chime with the zeitgeist of today. As is the propensity with the highly politically correct, if one aspect of a person's character does not conform to their idea of what's "correct," then everything about them must be ignored or dismissed. They must be erased and go unacknowledged. It is a true all-or-nothing/black-and-white mindset, just as flawed as the binary viewpoint of good-or-evil, for it leaves no room for the consideration of nuance. 

Bradbury was a person; by definition he was imperfect. I will not deny that Bradbury, or any of his contemporaries, had their flaws as people, which bled into their stories (that so few women of consequence or characters of color appear in their fiction chafes against my sensibilities). If you want a glimmer into the man behind the artist, all you need to is read Sam Weller's two nonfiction works about him, and you'll see what I mean. However, I also cannot deny that their fiction had its bright spots as well. Besides, without him or his contemporaries, we wouldn't have the fiction we have today. 

Literature, of any genre, is a conversation through time; each new generation either harmonizes with or clashes against the viewpoints of the past. So, today, I want to take a moment and talk about why Ray Bradbury still matters specifically to literature. 

From having read a significant amount of his work, Bradbury remain significant today for three particular reasons. First, there is his carful attention to the craft of writing itself, despite the fact that he was writing "entertainment fiction." Second, there is his status as a bridge builder between so-called "high culture," and "low culture." And finally, there is the "human-centric," and "techno-skeptical" outlook he introduced into the genre with which he's most closely associated, science fiction. 

In one of my earliest blog posts, where I talk about the story, "The Long Rain," I look at how poetic the prose of the story's opening is. This quality is a hallmark of Bradbury's writing in general, and it's something that remained consistent throughout his whole career. Many pulp writers, among them A.E. van Vogt, didn't exactly pay much attention to writing clean prose. They just wanted to tell gripping stories (and it shows, as I point out here). 

Bradbury of course wasn't the only writer of the Golden Age capable of this writing in his fashion. Two of his direct contemporaries, Cordwainer Smith and Theodore Sturgeon, both had a similar facility and quality to their work. Bradbury however was the one who ended up gaining the most mainstream attention of the three (in part due to Smith's premature death and Sturgeon's inability to break into more mainstream slick publications). 

It was this writing style, prose written as a metaphor-laden minefield, that brought literary credibility to the world of speculative fiction. It was also this style that would go on to influence writers of the following New Wave generation as well. Authors like Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, and Robert Silverberg (among others), who employ this same care to their own work. This then paved the way for writers of the now generation to find even wider appeal because no longer could they be discounted for being "good storytellers, but bad writers."

It was this style that enabled Bradbury to jump from the pulps to the mainstream slick publications, which I alluded to earlier. Two of the earliest stories of his to end up in print in slick magazines were is stories "Homecoming," which appeared in Mademoiselle magazine, the story of which I tell in an article on Tor.com, and "The Fog Horn," which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post under the titled "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms." Both of these stories are shameless fantasy, but each of them enabled Bradbury, and by extension Speculative Fiction as an umbrella genre, to begin building an audience away from their original pulp readership.

Again, Bradbury was not alone in this. His early mentor, Robert A. Heinlein, also managed to make the jump from being just a pulp writer to being a mainstream success. Isaac Asimov followed suit when his essays began appearing in mainstream publications, like the New York Times, and the same was true for Arthur C. Clarke and Anne McCaffery, the first woman writer of SF (and possibly the first SF writer, period), to have a book hit the New York times Bestseller List. With the proliferation of television and the interest growing in science fiction and fantasy films as well, 

But before that boom happened, before speculative fiction became the mainstream thing it is today in the visual medium, readers discovered it, and Bradbury was one of their many discoveries. There was something about his work, the viewpoint he projected, that chimed with readers. 

I suggest that it was the sensibility that drew people to his work. 

During the Golden Age, science fiction had a very specific viewpoint it wish to project: extremely techno-positive and scientifically grounded. This was in large part due to the overwhelming influence of John W. Campbell, the legendary (and now rightly much maligned), editor of Astounding Science Fiction (known today as Analog Science Fiction and Fact). He wanted the majority of the authors who wrote for him to write what we now call "hard science fiction" stories, where a good portion of the story reads like a tech manual for a technology that doesn't (and likely will never) exist. 

Fahrenheit 451 brings together everything that 
made Bradbury unique and important. And we're
still reading it to this day.

One author who moved away from that was Bradbury. In the stories of his that we could call "science fiction," which did feature technology, the focus of the story was rarely ever the technology. For him, the tech didn't matter. What mattered was how the technology affected the people in the story. Take a story of his like "The Veldt," one of the earliest stories to focus on virtual reality and domestic automation. We as reader never learn how any of the automation within the house or how the virtual reality of the nursery works. Instead, we see how this technology affects the family dynamics, eventually leading to a terrifying ending. (If you've read the story, you know what I mean.) His interest in the human side of societal and, by proxy, technological development is a hallmark of "social/soft science fiction," the largely preferred form of the many succeeding generations of writers, including, again, the New Wave. 

Yet again, Ray was not alone in this practice. In fact, the man who inspired him to embrace this view and attitude in science fiction was none other than Robert A. Heinlein. Love the man or hate him, he was a tremendously important figure in SF, without whom, Bradbury wouldn't be Bradbury, and SF wouldn't be what we know it as today. 

Arguably, he helped to popularize it by writing science fiction that didn't conform to growing stereotypes about the genre--that it was boy's literature, that it was incomprehensible if you didn't have a master's degree in physics. He helped to expand the horizons of what this genre could be, and thus attract more readers to it. And out of a garden of readers, a few writers will emerge.

One of the anecdotes that Ray regularly regaled his audiences with when giving lectures (which he did until he was a very old man), was the story of his encounter with Mr. Electrico. As a young boy, Ray saw this carny perform his act by sitting in a electric chair and having--supposedly--1000 volts of electricity run through him, causing his hair to stand up on end. Then, taking a sword in hand, he approached the crowd, in which stood a young Ray. Mr. Electrico then placed the tip of the blade upon Ray's nose and shouted, "LIVE FOREVER! LIVE FOREVER!"

From that moment on, Ray partly dedicated his life to figuring out how to do that. He knew that, physically, he couldn't do that. That he's now be gone a full 8 years as of this past June proves it. But he did find another way, another means by cheating death: through his work. As long as people continue to read his work, Ray will indeed live forever.