I’ve thought more about Ray Bradbury this past week than I’ve done for years. Bradbury was a writer I read quite a lot from when I was a child first discovering science fiction, through short story collections like R Is for Rocket. Judging from the various online obituary and remembrance threads I’ve seen, I’m not the only one for whom he was important in kickstarting their sf interest.
Which is fitting, as Bradbury is of course the writer who first put childhood into science fiction. He made small town, white picket fenced America seem as exciting and glamourous as outer space, while making all the paraphernalia of science fiction (rockets and Mars and aliens) a familiar part of everyday sububurban life. Like Roald Dahl he was great at telling adult stories for children, matter of fact if slightly patronising at times.
What set him apart from other science fiction writers was the strong nostalgia that drenched his work; not that others don’t indulge in nostalgia sometimes, but with Bradbury it was a full time pre-occupation. At heart, Bradbury was a reactionary writer and nostalgia was how he channeled it. Remember a few years ago when a rare interview revealed him as a cranky, bitter Fox News watching old man? That couldn’t have been a surprise to anybody who took a close look at his fiction. In almost every story there’s this hankering for a barely remembered, never existed golden past, when America was innocent and every summer a golden one, before progress ruined everything. He never believed in science and progress as other sf writers did; it almost always ended up in tears in his work (the automated house still going after the nuclear holocaust) or at the cost of our humanity, as in that story where the first astronauts on Mars burn the last few existing novels in the world.
Luckily, while his personal polical opinions might have been nasty, this reactionary, nostalgic streak in his fiction just helped created some of the best American fabulation ever written.
No Comments