Yestermorrow

by Ray Bradbury

  For, above all, science fiction, as far back as Plato trying to figure out a proper society, has always been a fable teacher of morality, saying: If you cut down trees, plant new ones. If you invent a pill what will you do with your religious concepts and structures? If your medicines allow people to grow old, what will you do with your old people? If you put people to sleep for five hundred years and wake them up, what then? Madness?

  All of the above statements are science fictional. There is no large problem in the world this afternoon that is not a science-fictional problem.

  The problem of war and world politics is the problem of the hydrogen bomb and the fact that as a teacher of Christian principles the Bomb has, sotto voce, suggested to politicians that war is no longer an extension of politics. All that has been short-circuited by the Bomb. Politics is now an extension of war. The old rules have been reversed. The old men, tired of arguing, willing to blow each other up, have been sent back to the table for yet another round of conversation. Grand, great, good, swell!

  Which doesn’t rule out small wars, of course, but the big ones, for the time being, are stashed in the basement. The difference between large and small is important here. Any reduction is welcome. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Vietnam, but compared to the fifty million or more destroyed in a short five years in World War II, we can only be thankful that the giant Death has been dissolved down to pygmy size. And, under the shadow of the Bomb, the larger nations, even as I write this, move closer together, fused by mutual fears, instead of separated by selfish antagonisms, all because of a science-fictional invention, which was always impossible, and would never be invented: nuclear fission.

  For you see, all the things that have happened to us, were never going to happen.

  Good people said so. Nice people thought so.

  But the science-fiction writers always knew otherwise. They could see that locomotive coming down the track, changing the face of the Civil War. They could see multitudinous inventions, shaping and reshaping mankind and thus shaking the very foundations of churches and synagogues around the world.

  Science fiction then is the fiction of revolutions. Revolutions in time, space, medicine, travel, and thought. It is the fiction of the moralist who shakes his hand at us and says: Behave or I pull the switch! It is the fiction of the writer-theologian who shows man the mirror image of God in himself and promises him a real and true heaven if he gets off his ape-hunkers and fires himself into a new Genesis-orbit around the Moon and then on into the abyss dark.

  Above all, science fiction is the fiction of warm-blooded human men and women sometimes elevated and sometimes crushed by their machines. Given tape recorders, “what do I do?” a man cries out. Given bugging devices and computers, “what next?” he asks again. Given television and movies and radio and records—a veritable Tower of Electronic Babel, where lies my sanity? Be still, stand among trees, green yourself, says science fiction.

  I remember with what happiness, years ago (to the jeers of strangers), I predicted that if the philosopher Bertrand Russell ever wrote fiction it would be science fiction. When Lord Russell finally published two collections of stories, in the fifties, they were predominantly fictions of ideas, which is to say science fictions.

  We are all of us, today, fourth-grade philosophers. We are all of us writers, in our minds, of science fictions, for we are being forced to deal with the problems of the ten thousand million machines, the robots that surround us, talk to us, move us. We must have answers so we speak in tongues, and the tongues are always, always, always science fiction. If your problems are metal and electricity, your answers must be run up out of the same stuffs. We move from simplicity to complexity to simplicity again. The history of radio is the history of mankind illustrated in a brief 53 year span: We began with cat’s-whisker crystal radios, expanded to ten-dial, maniac-complex devices, which drove men mad in 1928, and on around back to wrist watch-size radios in 1973. We will watch the same history repeated as small towns become mad supercities, collapse, die, and turn back to new small towns as we rebirth ourselves at the end of this century.

  Plato’s name has been mentioned. You may well, in exasperation, demand why? Because in many ways I consider his Republic to be one of the earliest forms of science fiction. Whenever man tries to guess at an ethical/political concept, he is, in effect, oiling a machine, hopeful after controlling other men and giving them new freedoms by such control as will allow them to live in peace. So science fiction, we now see, is interested in more than sciences, more than machines. That more is always men and women and children themselves, how they behave, how they hope to behave. Science fiction is apprehensive of future modes of behavior as well as future constructions of metal. Democracy is a science-fictional concept trying to dream itself to birth with every generation. Any philosophy which does not exist but tries to exist, is by this definition science fiction. Politics is an inept science, God knows, but a science nevertheless, to which we are trying to fit keys and open hearts and souls.

  Again, science fiction guesses at sciences before they are sprung out of the brows of thinking men and women. More, the authors in the field try to guess at machines, which are the fruit of those sciences. Then we try to guess at how mankind will react to those machines, how it will use them, grow with them, and how it will be destroyed by them.

  All, all of it fantastic. All, all of it, the story of mankind and inventions, men and machines that step on God’s toes and now, late in the day, say Beg Pardon. To which the Universe says: That’s all right, go build Eden again. Build it on Earth. Build it on the Moon. Build it on out beyond our unreachable solar system; but build it, live in it, take root in it, survive.

  1974

  GRAND TOUR 2484

  On some morning in the year 2484, five hundred incredible years from now, a family named Peregrine, a good name for far-traveling folks, will bound out of bed on the Moon or Mars, or farther out on some colonial pod circling Alpha Centauri, and ask themselves what to do On Vacation.

  Home, might be the answer. Home meaning, of course, Earth, where we all started from. The Seedbed Vacation, it might well be called.

  Let’s go back, someone suggests, to see what’s left of it. See what we did wrong and then did right.

  No, let’s not, half the family argues. There’s nobody left there, only a few genetic retards, so why go back? There are other planets we can visit first. On each one we’ll find something like Earth. Let’s see the other worlds first. After that—maybe—Earth.

  So the Peregrines board their Leapfrogs. Leapfrogs? Yes, that is what they might call their fast-as-the-speed-of-light spaceships. Once aboard, they would blast off on not a short vacation at all. It would be a long haul spanning many years, making landfall at impossible places with incredible climates.

  But—with familiar architectures!

  For what will have happened, of course, as with the westering of Eastern seaboard folks in the mid-nineteenth century, is that people took their architectures with them. As the Europeans spilled over Kansas and died across Arizona, and survived in California, their clapboard houses and picket fences came along. In their dreams, anyway, and in their heads. So when they spat nails and wielded hammers and cut down trees in Sacramento, lo and behold! They re-created Cape Cod and Worcester, Massachusetts.

  So, too, as our space travelers go backward and backward down the light spirals toward Earth, they will retrace the dreams of their forefathers who, as they footprinted Mars or named nameless planets far beyond, put up a miniature Empire State Building here, or roofed a French chateau there, along with all the hardware stores, druggerias and pizza palaces that inevitably dog the heels of any caravansary, be it fire rocket or camel.

  So on their long day’s journey through night, our vacationers will indeed find the familiar architectural faces of Rome here, Venice there and Waukegan, Illinois, just beyond. So the journey will be a journey not only through space but through time and all the ways we ha
d of living and seeing ourselves in shapes and sizes, in colors and textures, most of them brand new, on Mars or wherever we could make a lean-to and turn it into a Southern Manse or Northern Castle.

  All of this, of course, because in the far traveling we will accomplish, we will be forced by time and distance and memory, which hurts, to resurrect the dead in order to go on living. The towns we loved as Earth children will be the towns, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, that we will facade across any halfway-habitable satellite or world. We will carry along stained-glass windows and build entire houses around them. We will tote a brick from the Via Veneto and, halfway to Andromeda, which is too far by several billion years; we will put up an awning and two chairs, and wink at passing Beasts.

  In sum, we will travel in 2484 much as we have done in our time, to revisit the Past that strengthens our Present before we turn back to the sometimes uncertain Futures awaiting us.

  And as we travel back down through the universe, we will revisit the entire history of mankind. We will cross paths with the vast firework calligraphies we left behind with our rocket exhausts on our way to seeding star worlds with our harvest children.

  And depending on which national or ethnic group settled this world or that, we will find the whims and fancies and late-night nostalgias of Arabs who built mosques, or Swiss who cobbled up fake Alps on planets as pancake-flat as Kansas, or Japanese who left a Shinto shrine and a robot factory behind as they said farewell.

  Space and the planets in it, light-years apart, will resemble the back lot of a motion picture studio, with its cross-pollinated structures and its ramshackle remembrance.

  And arriving back on Earth for what might well be our last visit, we will tour Canaveral, where the gantries, still standing, tossed our flags to the Moon. Then, we’ll go see New York, rebuilt in 1999 and again in 2050, the year they blew up every other block of ugly buildings and planted gardens in their place. The neatest real-estate trick of the age! And then on to Chicago, which finished its rebuilding in 2020 and at last was beautiful. And Los Angeles, which went on growing into the twenty-second century and still had no center.

  And then on to Moscow, which finally accepted the true revolution of the twenty-first century: technology.

  A trifle of politics but a huge serving of the automobile, the train, the jet, the Xerox and the Fax, the radio, the TV, the videocassette and the telephone instead of the dull hammer and the blunted sickle. Moscow with architectures, by some miracle at last, somewhat lovely. Lovely, wakened from the tomb not long after some democratic-revolutionary kid’s laser-beam toy melted Lenin in his ice-locker to simultaneously free the glacier landlocked population.

  But why go on? Obviously, Moscow by A.D. 2233, wasn’t a bad place to visit. You wouldn’t want to go there summers because there are too many American tourists, but…

  There you have the grand tour, 2484 style. Back down in time, to a mostly empty Earth, because everyone couldn’t resist heading out and up—or to the New West, as it was called. And the empty cities began to be taken by grass and dust, as the inhabitants of New Earths in separate star systems came back for reunions here in Nantucket or Bombay. Home but no longer home. Mother but no longer mother.

  And we turn around and blast back off, up past the Moon and its abandoned colonies, and Mars and its Martians (all with strangely familiar Cherokee faces), we will fix a last stare at the bloodshot eye of Jupiter, ricochet through Saturn’s rings, then head for our home away from home.

  What a time and tour it will be, far beyond 1984, which turned out to be a bore and not Big Brother after all.

  We, the hyper-ventilating generation, bursting with star-seed, can hardly wait to explode up out-away, so we can come back on a lightship trek for a strange visitation, a peculiar vacation.

  And if not I, or you, or our children—who?

  1984

  OF WHAT IS PAST, OR PASSING, OR TO COME

  Of what is past, or passing, or to come,

  These things I sense and sing, and try to sum.

  The apeman with his cave in need of fire,

  The tiger to be slain, his next desire.

  The mammoth on the hoof a banquet seems,

  How to bring the mammoth down fills apeman’s dreams.

  How taunt the sabertooth and pull his bite?

  How cage the flame to end an endless night?

  All this the apeman sketches on this cave

  In cowards arts that teach him to be brave.

  So, beasts and fire that live beyond his lair

  Are drawn in science fictions everywhere.

  The walls are full of schemes that sum and teach,

  To help the apeman reach beyond his reach.

  While all his ape-companions laugh and shout:

  “What are those stupid blueprints all about?!

  Give up your science fictions, clean the cave!”

  But apeman knows his sketching chalk can save,

  And knowing, learning, moves him to rehearse

  True actions in the world to death reverse.

  With axe he knocks the tiger’s smile to dust,

  Then runs to slay the mammoth with spear thrust;

  The hairy mountain falls, the forests quake,

  Then fire is swiped to cook a mammoth steak.

  Three problems thus I solved by art on wall,

  The tiger, mammoth, fire, the one, the all.

  So these first science fictions circled thought

  And then strode forth and all the real facts sought,

  And then on wall new science fictions drew,

  That run through history and end with… you.

  Inspired by a line from W. B. Yeats

  AFTERWORD

  Architect Jon A. Jerde, AIA

  Ray Bradbury’s incredible accomplishments as a novelist, playwright and entertainer are very well known to most. However, it should not be overlooked that his visions about urban design, placemaking and planning are equally astounding.

  Simultaneous efforts by the Los Angeles Planning Department, Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), the Urban Design Advisory Coalition (UDAC), and the Mayor’s Blue Ribbon Committee L.A. 2000 Study all concluded that what will make Los Angeles comprehensible, more humane and lively, is precisely what Ray told us to do twenty years ago.

  In his chapter “The Girls Walk This Way; The Boys Walk That Way” Ray gives us his observations about the forgotten pleasures of urban life, abandoned opportunities and a prescription of how to have it all using what we’ve already got.

  Two of his other chapters, “Aesthetics of Lostness,” about the importance of eccentricity, and “Yes, We’ll Gather at the River,” are all about connections. Together, they allude to a new art form/science that is just waking up in the minds of alert urbanists and architects all over the world.

  We are limping out of the areas of “new is good, old is bad,” “functional logic as the sole concern of form-making,” and the idea that exhibitionist object-making is the epitome of architectural achievement. What Bradbury talks about is the conscious construction of experience, the design of time, the vocabulary of aliveness.

  Ray’s influence on my designer’s mind began back in my teenage years when I fully experienced his elaborately real places and moods constructed out of mosaics of such sensory stimuli as full-moon-October-leaf-light, the joy of ascending upward in spherical patterns, intimacy and fresh-cut lawn, the mind-expanding nature of a Santa Ana wind and the spiritual symbolism of giggling kids and the corner soda fountain. Ray taught me that urban placemaking has far more to do with these kinds of concerns than issues of architectural fashion, or urban design pattern making. First, and foremost, cities are about life and its derivative set of experiences. Only secondarily are they about objects.

  Ray writes that the metropolis of Los Angeles is really “…80 or 90 separate lonely Ohio-Illinois-Kansas-style towns….” He says that what is missing are the 80 or 90 communal spaces, charged with activities fashioned to suit t
he neighborhood, that would give us the opportunity to “gather and stare” and reinstate a feeling of individual belonging, pride and sensibility into the city.

  Because of size, metropolitan Los Angeles is not perceivable as a place—at best, it is an abstract amorphous gridded field of sameness. Actually the field is made up of “micropolises,” a series of nested neighborhoods or districts, each with subtle but distinct individualities of use, topography, landscape, ecology and inhabitants. Los Angeles becomes comprehensible—no longer abstract—as these micropolises (areas such as Westwood, Little Tokyo, Santa Monica, Silverlake and Pasadena) assume a more identifiable and individual presence. Each micropolis requires a heart, a center, complete with all of the uses, symbols, communal spaces (a la Ray’s plaza) to make it recognizable, identifiable and relatable. Chris Leinberger, in an article published in The Atlantic (January 1988) refers to these as urban villages.

  Creating the 80 to 90 micropolises is precisely what is needed to move Los Angeles on its way from its first growth, suburban hard-to-love-or-comprehend boom town paradise to the beginnings of the twentieth century’s first working model macropolis. Micropolis-making requires everything Bradbury suggests and more, dealing with density, theme, design languages. The net effect produces the much-sought-after answer to big sections of the growth/quality of life issue—i.e., better job/housing balance, reduced travel, vital neighborhoods, improved environments, community pride and identity.

  Over the years, Ray and I have collaborated on various real and unreal projects. Working with him is a delight… he is not normal. Interacting with him is like talking to a chortling fireplace—things like gravity or the impossible are vague concepts to him. His ideas about Los Angeles are pure; he understands the essential spirit and parts of the city as no other.