by Ray Bradbury
I know I cannot answer the above questions. But I also know I am endlessly fascinated with these questions, minor as they may seem to some, or pompous as they may seem to others. And many, including myself, are having a go at answering them, in the science fiction field. Here are a few more:
How do you go about converting a group of non-materialist, utterly alien Martians to the Methodist conviction? If you find a race of dogs or cows on Mars with I.Q.’s verging on 190, capable of carrying on highly enlightened and logical conversations on social and metaphysical topics, where does this put the Christian faith relative to its dictum that dogs and cows do not have souls of transferable value? If these dogs and cows are morally aware and responsible for their actions, that is supposedly the test one must pass in order to be credited with a soul. Well, then, one is tempted to ask the Christian religion to point out that exact moment in the history of dogdom and cowdom on Mars when they stopped being brutes without souls and became equal and perhaps superior to man, thus inheriting the soul as a blessed gift.
I ask these questions both in good humor and in all seriousness. I ask them simply because some time soon they must be answered. The day of the rocket is not so distant that we can delay longer in answering some of them. It will be very embarrassing if we find on far worlds not only that the Adam and Eve legend is the myth we suspected it to be but that Mr. Darwin, too, has been thrown bodily out the window by the things we find on that far world. Science and religion might both run in circles, like broken toys, momentarily confronted with such factual heresy.
Not that we won’t be able to adjust to any problems met at home or abroad in the solar system in 1999. We will adjust. But I also think our adjustment will derive in part from our practicality in both entertaining ourselves with science fiction and looking to our answers now, while still it is afternoon. These problems are human problems, which all too soon will no longer be science-fictional but part of a past history our children will read. I consider none of the above questions improbable or impossible. I consider them very probable and possible indeed.
Consider the similarity of two books—Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, laid in our recent past, and George Orwell’s 1984, set in a future now behind us. Once we were poised between the two, between a dreadful reality and an unformed terror, trying to make such decisions as would avoid the tyranny of the very far right and the tyranny of the very far left; the two of which can often be seen coalescing into a tyranny pure and simple, with no qualifying adjective in front of it at all.
Space, which is very large indeed, is not the only huge thing that stands before man. Bigness in all its forms towers above us—bigness in religion, bigness in the fields of communication, labor, corporative enterprise, and government. No sooner has the private citizen warded off the millstone wheel of one Juggernaut than another lumbers on stage. Compared to other ages, in which man hid from a single Giant here or a Titan there, we are living, it cannot be denied, in a year when every one of us must stand ready, alone, axe in hand, by the Beanstalk.
Science fiction, it has been suggested, could possibly be the axe, which on occasion might hew as much as half an inch of fibrous material from certain Beanstalks. I do not know whether it has ever killed, maimed, or even bruised a Giant. I do not know whether it can be a sling to send the pebble against the brow of Goliath for the millions of Davids alive and put-upon today. I would not dare to say that it is probably the literature of warning or that it might be the dream that can help ward off the nightmare. Too many have claimed too much for science fiction already. And there is no charting agency available to show how much literature goes into the minds and, years later, works down and comes out through the hands of acting individuals.
I know only that there isn’t a time, when I’ve had a really good night’s sleep and am clear-headed, that I haven’t thought of science fiction and been excited and concerned with its function, minor if you wish, both as fresh entertainment and as morality cloaked in symbol and allegory.
Certainly I have often wished that a new name might be applied to this field, since the old name has grown shopworn in the service of bug-eyed monsters and half-naked space women. But there seems to be no way to avoid that, and new writers coming into the field will have to carry the burden of the old label until someone provides a better one, in this land where everything must absolutely have a label.
Even as I finish this article, our civilization is thinking about the future and pouring it into molds to harden and become the newer machines, which will further prove that, in motion, mankind’s ability to externalize his loves and hates, thus more quickly building or destroying his culture, is seemingly inexhaustible. As long as “science fiction” can keep me alert to all this, I’ll go on writing it. And I’ll go on as long as there is gusto and zest in the writing; for if it should ever become completely and bodily nothing but self-important social and political prediction, I think I would become bored, and my reader bored, too.
I once strongly suspected that fun was the handmaiden, if not the progenitor, of the arts: now I know this for certain. And with a great sense of pleasure and personal well-being I intend to continue in the field for a good many years along with those others who are interested in trying to find a bridge to permanently cross that vast gulf of communication for all of us. I do not know whether tomorrow’s street will be full of human beings with Seashell thimble-size radios whispering in their ears and all the world and its problems moved away from and neglected. Or whether by some miracle we may all carry supersonic stethoscopes with us on our rounds, so that each may know the sound of every other human heart. I only know that it would be interesting to walk on that street and think about it and write about it, before that evening sun goes down.
1953
This article, read by Italian Renaissance scholar Bernard Berenson, caused him to invite RB to Florence.
THE RENAISSANCE PRINCE AND THE BAPTIST MARTIAN
The whole affair had its ridiculous side, especially for the year 1953 when it occurred. Why should the world’s foremost authority on the Italian Renaissance start a correspondence with a fairly suspicious and relatively unknown writer of Martian gobbledygook and science-fictional claptrap?
It was, after all, not the Space Age—that was light-years off in some impossible year. When I dared leave fruit-and-nut country, as California was referred to by some, to invade New York, I often found myself at literary parties introduced as good old Buck Rogers or Flash in the flesh.
Very uneasy times indeed. My books, as with most science fiction in those years, went mostly unreviewed, or popped up among the obits in the back of the New York Times.
All the more incredible then, in the midst of those low-profile years, that the Italian Renaissance authority did indeed write to Jules Verne’s bastard son, and here run the facts:
In early May of that year, I had written an article in The Nation defending my strange preoccupation with technologies and space travel.
On June first I opened my mailbox to find a letter on which in a spidery hand these words were inked: B. Berenson, I Tatti, Settignano, Firenze.
I turned to my wife, saying, “Good Lord, this can’t be from the Berenson, can it?”
“For God’s sake,” said Maggie. “Open it!”
I did and read:
Dear Mr. Bradbury:
In eighty-eight years of life, this is the first fan letter I have written.
It is to tell you that I have just read your article in The Nation—“Day After Tomorrow.”
It is the first time I have encountered the statement by an artist in any field, that to work creatively he must put flesh into it, and enjoy it as a lark, or as a fascinating adventure.
How different from the workers in the heavy industry that professional writing has become!
If you ever touch Florence, come to see me.
Sincerely yours,
B. Berenson
I stared at the letter and almost wept.
; Come see me.
I was making $90 a week at the time, writing mostly for the small magazines.
Six months earlier I had attended a first screening of the Cinerama process and sat with tears streaming down my cheeks as images of Italy and France and England poured across the screen.
“When, when, oh when,” I said to myself, “will we ever have money to travel?”
Never, was my own silent response. The market for Martians and people who wrote about them was low or nonexistent.
The letter from Berenson terrified me. I put off answering it, afraid to make a fool of myself. Also, there was the question of travel: an impossibility. We would never meet the old man face to face!
Salvation arrived in the guise of film-director John Huston.
On Saint Valentine’s night in 1951 I had dined with Huston and given him copies of my first three books, containing more than 60 of my short stories. I told him very simply and directly that if he liked my books as much as I loved his films, one day we must work together. From Africa, a month later, Huston wrote: “You’re right. Someday we will work together.”
Two years had passed, with only an occasional note from Huston. Now in the late summer of 1953, Huston telephoned, invited me to his hotel, put a drink in my hand and asked: “How would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay of Moby Dick?”
Years later, Huston was to imitate my response, for the benefit of his friends. My jaw, it seemed, fell literally to my chest, as my skeleton collapsed. When I had put myself back together, I stammered that, very honestly, I had never read the book!
“Well, kid,” said Huston, “get yourself home, read as much as you can tonight, come for lunch tomorrow, tell me if it’s right.”
I stayed up until three in the morning and found old friends leaping from Melville’s text to welcome me—the Bible, and Shakespeare. I prowled the book wildly, plunging in here, wandering there, and at last going back to read that glorious first sentence: Call me Ishmael.
And I was in love.
My family and I shipped for Ireland three weeks later. In the midst of wrestling with “that damned Whale,” I wrote to Berenson, who responded on March 14, 1954:
Thanks for your good letter bringing the glad tidings that you will be coming to Italy in the spring…. If you could let me know a bit ahead just where you expect to be here in Florence, and for how long, it would be best all around….
Thank you for the book The Martian Chronicles…. I have read it with curiosity and admiration…. I cannot and do not mean to try to persuade you that your “framework” seems superfluous. Perhaps you can write only with that trellis to climb on. But your sense of people, their reactions as well as spontaneous actions, is so fine, so delicate, that I could wish you were creating novels written of characters, and characters not engaged in fantastic events…. Let me repeat that I look forward zestfully to meeting you.
Cordially.
Good Grief, I thought, do I head south for one more intellectual free-for-all, to be beat up and bested by a bantamweight Boston exile? But, I had to admit, Berenson hadn’t wasted any time. In this his second letter, he seemed to me anyway, to be measuring my shadow for a possible fall, even though he sugared his gentle half-criticisms with gracious compliments.
With vague misgivings, we headed south.
In Florence, we telephoned I Tatti, and B.B. sent his car for us. Delivered to the villa, we were greeted by Nicky Mariano, Berenson’s personal secretary for some 50 years, an intelligent, warm, and lovely human being. We were escorted to Berenson’s library to await his arrival from a morning’s work on a new book.
Then, suddenly, he was there in the doorway, looking intently at us, a very small man indeed, very frail looking, but energetic in the moment of his speaking. What he said was:
“My Bradbury, I am going to ask you a question. Depending on how you answer it, we shall be friends or not friends.”
I heard my own voice, half trembling, say: “Ask the question.”
“Well now,” said Berenson, advancing slowly upon me, “you didn’t answer my first letter to you for many months. Why? Was it because you had never heard of this man Berenson, and only found out later, and then hurried to write?”
“Mr. Berenson,” I cried. “Your letter scared the hell out of me! I wasn’t prepared for it. I didn’t think I could find the words to respond intelligently, on top of which I had no money, no way to travel, no chance of ever seeing you. It was hopeless. But now, suddenly, here we are! What else can I say?”
“Nothing.” Berenson moved forward more swiftly now, smiling. “Accepted. We shall be friends.”
I think we laughed then, all of us; the room became warmer, we sat down to a splendid lunch and fine wine.
My apprehensions fled. The bantamweight never attacked, never measured me for an intellectual box, never called me the names the bright Manhattan people had once called me. B.B. was simply curious to find out how a hothouse Martian happened to grow that way. I explained as best I could how I had dieted on Popular Mechanics, Science and Invention, with equal parts of Wonder Stories, when I was eight, nine, and ten.
“Well, now we shall diet you on da Vinci,” said B.B., “some of whose sketches could easily inhabit one of your technical fancies. How much do you know of the Renaissance?”
I had learned honestly from my encounter with Huston and the Whale.
Very little, I admitted.
“Splendid!” cried Berenson. “I shall be your guide and teacher!”
As indeed he was. He ran us forth to encounters with churches and galleries and pictures, then called us back for lunch or dinner to watch our faces and listen to our babble. He seemed truly delighted with our naïveté and the prospect of filling up these two young and impossibly empty new friends of his.
I don’t believe his delight would have lasted, however, if we hadn’t proved out as intuitive students.
Our friendship with B.B. was cemented by sheerest accident.
One morning I hailed a horsecab and gave instructions, in my truly abominable Italian, to take us to the Piazza Michelangelo. We wound up, instead, before the Church of the Carmine. Hell, I thought, since we’re here anyway, let’s go in.
In an innocence that would shame a gang of saints, my wife and I wandered the church aisles, stared at the murals, gasped, turned, and hurried back to lunch with B.B.
“Well children,” he said, pouring the wine, “what have we seen today?”
“Someone new to us. Someone we’d never heard of before,” I said.
“And who was this?”
“A painter named Masaccio,” I said, mispronouncing the name three different ways.
“Ah.” B.B.’s eyes twinkled. “And—mm—what did you think of this—Masaccio?”
“His murals looked—” I searched for the proper words “—as fresh as tomorrow morning. That open, that beautiful. Whatever year he painted in, it must have been a turning point. Was it?”
“Was it, indeed!” Berenson laughed and lifted his glass. “To Masaccio, and his new discoverers!”
“But now,” he said, at lunch. “Let me discover some of you. I’ve read your Fahrenheit 451, which you brought along to give me, and I’m fascinated with your Book People in your finale. The idea of having people become books, memorize them, so as to save them from the Burners—superb. But, I’ve been thinking—”
I drank my wine a trifle too fast. “Yes?”
“You could do a sequel to your novel, in which the Book People, at a later date and time, when the Burners vanish and the world is safe from fire—when the Book People are called in to recite their memorized books and remember them all wrong.”
“My God,” I said. “I never thought of that.”
“Think of it!” cried Berenson, eyes flashing. “War and Peace told by an idiot. Crime and Punishment remembered by a fool. Machiavelli’s The Prince mouthed by a numskull. Moby Dick recited by an alcoholic cripple. Oh, the variations are many! You coul
d do a chapter on each book and how it was boned, marrowed, broken, collapsed in ruins and put back together by morons or well-meaning pedants who remember their own interpretation of the soaring lines. Hamlet run to earth by a harebrain. Othello bleached into boredom by a retired librarian, long gone in senility. What fun, what variations, what satire. Write it down!”
I did. It was a superb idea. But it has lain in my files for some 25 years now. I didn’t dare say to Berenson, or perhaps even to myself, then, that it would take a genius who had read, digested, and completely understood the entire body of American and English literature to plow into and create a book like that. Envy the idea? God, yes. But do it? The ghosts of Moliere, Pope, Swift, and Chesterton, plus Shaw, just might bring it off.
Meanwhile, our gentle disagreements continued. I wanted to hold onto my Martians with a tight fist. B.B. oiled his wit with Burgundy and pried my fingers, one by one. “Surely,” he pursued, “you have some stories, some novels in progress about, well, just people. I mean, minus machines, minus the ballet scrims and backdrops of your Mars?”
