Yestermorrow

by Ray Bradbury

  And they tell you.

  And you then trade wisdoms, your large one for their small ones, eh? And they treat you as a crony, as one of their bright crowd, which makes you grow and grow and grow.

  What a wine press to lovingly crush a student in. Aristotle’s shoulder to one side, Euripides to the other, and—smunch! You’re educated by yammer and blab and gab.

  Well, say you, since you speak of Future Theater, what have you, sir, done about it? Your plans, your ideas, your plays?

  I toss my baggage in and travel with Shaw, who, I would like to think, might be amused at the company. The theater of ideas is my meat and drink, but, one hopes, without being ecclesiastical, without pontificating or browbeating. If an idea doesn’t surprise people and win them by passionate and entertaining means, you had best give up and go find a soapbox and install yourself on a street corner.

  I have begun to write a series of plays about that future, which is no further off than one minute after midnight tonight. If we are to live in space for the next two billion years, give or take a million, then we must have reasons for doing so.

  The propaganda for such theater can exist in many forms. I began my first experiments with this when the United States Pavilion people at the New York World’s Fair in 1964–65 asked me to create a ride in the top of the building. Circuiting the darkness on a traveling platform, five-hundred years of American history “happened” to the viewers wending their way through one hundred ten cinema screens of all sizes and shapes, accompanied by a narrator and a full symphony orchestra. It was my job to tell us what we were, what we are, and what we can hope to be. We were, I said, the people of the triple wilderness, who crossed a wilderness of sea to come here, a wilderness of grass to stay here, and now, late in time, move toward a wilderness of stars to live forever.

  The metaphor worked. At the conclusion of our theatrical excursion, a thousand rocket ships took off in a furnace of fire to move toward Alpha Centauri and beyond, surrounding the audience with the passion and desire for flight and, hopefully, for the genetic survival of mankind at the end of that flight.

  Theater? Of course it was. A variation of same. Even more theatrical was the enterprise that took me out to the WED Enterprises building in Glendale. The Disney Robot Factory, is what I call it, if they will forgive me.

  My job there in theater? To seize a few dozen audio-animatronic robot humanoid creatures and fashion a five-billion-year history of Earth coming out of the sun, cooling and bringing forth in its seas the animalcules that one would one day shape spines, and stride in teeming apecrews of men, women, and children, using fire along the way.

  I had Michelangelo spring feverishly from the platform pit as artist magician, a robot who pointed over the audiences’ heads and ordered the ceilings to change. Then I blueprinted the hidden and miraculous machineries of this extraordinary theater to paint, before their uplifted gaze, the Sistine Chapel ceiling and walls over and around and above them. In two minutes flat they would experience what it took Michelangelo hundreds of days to paint.

  Supertheater. Wouldn’t you, wouldn’t I, like to be in a theater where we could see that happen at least once a year every year of our lives?

  For this experience, acted out by robots, accompanied by orchestras and voices, I imagined ape-men robots who, before your eyes, turned into Egyptian priests, then divested themselves to become da Vinci among his fabled machines, Ben Franklin struck to ashes by lightning, the Wright brothers, goggled and elated on Kitty Hawk sand dunes, and finally a man of the future, X-rayed, in whose body we might see the destiny of man. For super-photographed, shot through with probing light, each of us in our cells and molecules is the sun energy we eat and drink each day. In every drop of blood a million small bits of sun burn. Silhouetting a family of the future, I packed their bodies full with ten billion small suns so that the audience would see a true metaphor: we are creatures that came out of the Sun long long ago, have lived by the sun and its energy hidden in foods, broken down to light and power in our flesh. And now we move up in space toward far suns to survive in their strange light and go on being solar creatures forever.

  The machines described above could be used to turn classrooms into theaters of knowledge. The walls of future classrooms should be transparent so that Italian, French, or Chinese environments could be projected on them.

  All this technical gimmickry, of course, is worthless unless a flesh and blood teacher stood alone, in control. These machines should be peripheral, not central. Come back in 40 years or less and you might well find film labs offering major pictures in which you yourself might appear. The leading roles in certain special electronically treated films would be shadowed out, untouched, undeveloped. You in your own home could then measure out a similar space in your own parlor, pace out the performance, act, speak, and photograph yourself so that your image would be superimposed on the film opposite a twenty-first-century Olivier, Burton or, God help us all, Sean Penn. If your performance was poor, the film could be stripped of your image by running it through an eraser, and you start over.

  Or you could cross-pollinate performances with friends across the world, you doing your performance in Los Angeles on one half of a film-image, mailing it off to Paris, where some twenty-second-century Barrault would glue his image to the other half. The variations on this would be infinite. Great actor-teachers across the world could, by electronic tape, offer their instructive services by sharing such films with wild young Thespians in Timbuctoo, Waukesha, and Boyle Heights, who could claim: “There I am, there’s Barrymore, aren’t I great?” even if it wasn’t true!

  But in the midst of this electronic bombardment, you ask somewhat irritably, what about little theater, small theater within the larger fencings.

  But, of course, no matter how large the multimedia, or how complex the stage of twenty-first-century houses, the single actor in the lone spotlight will still be the thing.

  Kids once left home for the big city because everything, meaning the arts and action, collisions of people, and sex, was there.

  Between now and 2020, three hundred such small college towns, with simple, uncomplicated directly staged theater, must and will be built. They will embody by blueprint and dream, the things that cities once were or pretended to be before they, shot like mammoths, fell down dead.

  In those new, small green villages, the old poetspeaker and teller of tales will be reborn of late afternoons to speak through dusk into midnight.

  Which leads us back to end as we began, in that huge banquet room with every other chair empty and every other chair propped with genius, aglow with wit, trembling with the energy of the robot man or woman placed therein.

  I sit me down by robot Shaw. I shut my trap, he speaks my finale:

  “Theater in the Future? How tiresome, how obvious, how easy! It will have a thousand shapes and sizes. Battery-assisted, electronically produced, technologically enhanced, it will still be the poet’s province and the human’s kennel if they dare to sing or most happily bark. It will still be one actor speaking to one listener, no matter how many seem to be eavesdropping. The means may be new but the message stays on as it was when we trembled at mouths of caves and invented fire: lost loves, lost opportunities, lost fortunes, lost wits, lost lives, and the strange small gain that we name wisdom and warm our souls at in the ridiculous night. Much claptrap as before, and small comforts like struck matches within. Would I like to come back every hundred years to check on the forever decline and forever resurrection of that vaudeville, which we call life and stage? No matter if projected on electric tube or lit by candle in a parlor? I would, by God, I would!! Now shut up young man, and eat your jam and biscuit!”

  And shut up I do, and eat I will, and finished am I.

  There’s your Theater, or Theaters for Tomorrow.

  What do you think?

  1975

  SCIENCE FICTION: BEFORE CHRIST AND AFTER 2001

  The history of modern science fiction is so astonis
hing and mercurial that I feel I must sum it up for you.

  Imagine yourself back in the year 1946, 1947, or 1948.

  If you had wanted to read science fiction in those years, in book form, anyway, it would have been almost impossible. Only a handful of books were being published. The finest authors in the field, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Smith, and Van Vogt were being put in print by tiny publishing companies in small editions of a few thousand copies, which almost amounted to vanity publishing; that is to say—paying to have your own work published.

  These books, when they did appear, were greeted by silence. Very few got reviewed anywhere in our country at any time. For all that the critics knew, these authors had never been born, much less got around to writing a book or even a story.

  In the forties, also, only a handful of paperback s-f collections had begun to pop up. Science was exploding all over the place, but s-f was still asleep in the minds of the experts and the great mass of people.

  I remember going to a party, evenly divided between writers and dancers from the New York City Ballet. Back in those years, once the people discovered what I did for a living, I was hooted at and called “Buck Rogers” and “Flash Gordon.”

  If the blacks of our country were a racial minority in the late forties and early fifties, the science-fiction writer was classed as a literary minority best not mentioned, better ignored. We would never go anywhere, do anything, or be anybody. We were rarely allowed to sell stories to the larger and more important magazines. And even in the s-f magazines, some of our more outrageous ideas were rejected and went unpublished.

  In 1948, I wrote a story titled “Way in the Middle of the Air,” concerning a group of southern blacks who, tired of repression, built their own rockets and went off to Mars. The story was rejected by about every magazine in the country, and I finally sold it, late in the day, to a small s-f magazine for $80.

  Not long after, I wrote another story about a group of priests who, arriving on Mars, try to decide whether a creature that they encounter, a fiery spirit that drifts on the air, is or is not “human.”

  That story, “The Fire Balloons,” suffered a similar history. Rejected everywhere, it was published many years later in a small s-f magazine in Chicago.

  It is hard for us today to realize that once upon a time the civil rights movement didn’t exist. And that once upon a time was 1948, 1949, 1950.

  It is similarly hard for us to comprehend the vast power and influence of various religious groups in those same years. My story about the priests on Mars was rejected by editors, again and again, fearful of offending a wide variety of church thinkers, afraid of repercussions and criticism.

  On a political level in early 1950, I wrote a story titled “And the Rock Cried Out.” It told the tale of a white man and his wife who were trapped in an Indian village in South America, shortly after an atomic holocaust. The man and his wife were forced to shine shoes and wait on tables for an existence. The shoe was indeed suddenly on the other foot, for the story questioned whether the couple could make do, and accept being a white minority in a country of dark-skinned people.

  Well, 1950 and the years immediately following were Joseph McCarthy years, the years of McCarthyism, years when our country was shadowed and bullied by our real and unreal fears concerning Communism in the world.

  This story, like the other two, was rejected by editors afraid to tell a tale that, with all its simplicity, might be considered anti-American and therefore pro-Communist.

  It is hard to remember an America so involved with such shadows and such fears.

  So far, I have named only three areas into which science fiction shoved its nose again and again.

  Racial relations.

  Religion.

  Politics.

  Are there more? Yes.

  Philosophy. Pure technology. Art on any level you wish to speak of it. Logic, Ethics, Social science. History. Witchcraft. Time travel.

  Well, the list, as you begin to see, is endless.

  Architecture? But of course! One of the grand thrills of being young and falling in love with science fiction was seeing the early drawings and paintings by men like Frank R. Paul on old magazine covers and inside with each story. They were more often than not pure architectural renderings of fantastic cities, incredible environments.

  Growing up in science fiction was, then, growing up amidst Everything.

  Do you see how lucky I was?

  I grew up in the old field that reached out and embraced every sector of the human imagination, every endeavor, every idea, every technological development, and every dream.

  Is there a better way to grow up? I can think of none.

  But even while I knew this, sensed this, lived this, the culture I lived in did not sense, know, live, or believe this.

  As I have said, in the late forties, s-f was still Sleeping Beauty waiting to be kissed awake by atomic bombs, hydrogen explosions but, above all, Sputnik, then Neil Armstrong bootprinting the lunar soil for all mankind.

  The earliest awakenings occurred from 1948 through 1950 when Doubleday and Simon & Schuster began to publish their own lines of science-fiction books, calling special attention to the incredible imaginative qualities within the field.

  During those same years, Robert Heinlein was the first pulp s-f writer to shift over into The Saturday Evening Post with his, then remarkable, Green Hills of Earth.

  I followed him a short time later.

  But it was only in the Eisenhower years that we really got rolling. We are accustomed to think of Ike as a rather quiet president during whose terms not very much at all happened. The facts, in Space anyway, are otherwise. Long before Kennedy made his pitch in that direction, Eisenhower had, in effect, responded to the universe and the competition, if you wish, of Russia and Sputnik. We put our rockets and then our men, into trajectory. And it was a mild, supposedly conservative, father-image president who lit the fuse.

  In the following years, from 1957 on up through this very summer, an incredible thing happened. Students began to teach teachers. They snowed them with science-fiction books and stories. The teachers held out for a long while, but then the really sly students placed a book on teacher’s desk and said, “Read just the first chapter. If you don’t like it, stop.”

  So the teachers muttered “Lord, Lord” under their breaths, took Heinlein or Asimov or Clarke home, read the first chapter and were hooked.

  The rest is simple but amazing history. Dozens and then hundreds of books of science fiction began to be taught in junior high schools, high schools, and colleges. Dozens and then hundreds of courses and seminars sprang up around the old but newly discovered imaginative field.

  Now, hardly a day passes that some new hardcover science fiction book isn’t published. Now, no weekend is without a dozen new paperback s-f books hitting the newsstands.

  Why has all this happened at this particular juncture in history? Why not 25 or 30 or, for that matter, 60 years ago?

  I have no easy or complete answers. The easiest and most complete would run like this:

  America, above all nations, has always been a country of ideas. We have always been revolutionary, in all the senses of that much overused word.

  Somewhere, years ago, I used a term for us that I think fits more than ever. I called us a nation of Ardent Blasphemers. We ran about measuring not only how things were but how they ought to be. If the wilderness got in our way two hundred years ago, we chopped it down. If the English king and his smothering friends got in our way, we borrowed some revolutionary concepts, freshened them up, and chopped him down. If death and disease got in our way, we raised medicine to its greatest disciplines in the history of the entire world and chopped death down and cured disease and invented pain-killers. If distance got in the way, we chopped it in half by running locomotives down a track and shrinking time. If time got in the way, we raced the sun around the world with jets, and now rockets, and beat it, By Gosh and By Golly, beat it all hollow! We could
make the sun rise and set half a dozen times a day by rushing with improbable haste through the heavens. Blasphemy? That was our middle name.

  So with our medicines and steam trains and electrical devices we Ben Franklin’d our way into and up away from twentieth-century Earth. Which is to say we stood out in rains with a damned kite and stringed key and dared God to pin back our ears with lightning. He has pinned us back a few times. For, come to think of it, in the light of all the dogmas of a great deal of religious thought in the past, we have touched the nerve of the Universal Being. We have dared to sock Death right in the midst of its most terrible grin. We have messed with mosquitoes with sprays and saved half a billion lives. We have reached up to touch the Moon and promise ourselves immortality with starships moving on and on a billion years from this very evening. We Americans are better than we hope and worse than we think, which is to say, we are the most paradoxical of all the paradoxical nations in time.

  That is what science fiction is all about.

  For science fiction runs out with tapes to measure Now against Then against Breakfast Time Tomorrow. It triangulates mankind amongst these geometrical threads, praising him, warning him.

  And since we are at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution and well into the Technological and/or Electronic Revolution, what else is there to read except—

  Science Fiction.

  It is being read now at long last because it is exciting, because it is human, because it is relevant, because it is ecological.

  Sorry about those last two terms, which have been overused to the point of madness the last few years.

  But, there are still snobs in the world, and I must give you weapons to fight them with. There still are people who will come up to you and say: Science fiction? Ha! Why read that?!

  The most direct, off-putting reply is: Science fiction is the most important fiction ever invented by writers. It saw the whole mob of troubles pouring toward us across the shoals of time and cried, “Head for the hills, the dam is broke!” But no one listened. Now, people have pricked up their ears, and opened their eyes.