by Ray Bradbury
In the further fictions that became dreams in American history, the invention of the repeating rifle and the Gatling gun did away with the Indian tribes as we moved across the country.
All, all of it fictions that became sciences and technology.
I must have realized this at a very young age when I skimmed through the pages of Science and Invention, which was starting to make great leaps into future space. Covers of the old science-fiction magazines were filled with incredible cities that towered skyward.
I looked around at my small town, Waukegan, Illinois, and found something horribly missing.
I began to imagine those impossible cities and draw them in place.
Two amazing things happened in my ninth and tenth years:
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century appeared in American newspapers in October 1929, the start of the Great Depression.
That one strip’s concussion shook me into a new life.
In that strip I saw Buck Rogers stagger from a cave, where he had slept for five hundred years in suspended animation, to see Wilma Deering flash through the sky, firing a rocket pistol. Looking up, Buck Rogers found himself in a new age.
That one comic strip transported me into the future. I began to collect Buck Rogers adventures and never returned from that long journey into tomorrow.
The second collision occurred when I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter, Warlord of Mars. His Mars was a fantastic creation, totally impossible but totally acceptable to a lunatic ten-year-old.
John Carter instructed me to stand on my summer-night lawn and look up at the sky, lift my arms out toward the red planet and cry, Mars, take me home! Instantly, as with John Carter, my soul slid from my body, rushed across space, landed on Mars, and I never came back.
From that future, age twelve, I began to write about further futures, because I found the world around me terribly Baptist plain.
Then the Chicago World’s Fair, 1933, exploded. I walked, stunned, through that world of fantastic colors and shapes, where the city of the future was actually built. Entranced by the encounter, I refused to go home at night. My parents had to drag me onto the train to ship me north to Waukegan.
Then I discovered the most incredible truth: The people who had built the fair were going to tear it down two years later.
Idiots! I thought. How stupid that you could build a future and then, mindlessly, destroy all those beauties.
I raced to my nickel tablet and began to draw architectural blueprints of possible cities and outrageous buildings in some reborn time.
Simultaneously I wrote sequels to the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and soon learned the truth of what Admiral Byrd had said when leaving for the North Pole:
“Jules Verne leads me.”
So Jules Verne, with Edgar Rice Burroughs and Buck Rogers, led me on my incredible trip into myself.
This conglomeration was fused when I encountered Mr. Electrico.
Mr. Electrico was a carnival magician who performed on one Labor Day weekend. In his electric chair, he was electrocuted each night and reached with his sword of blue fire to tap kids in the front row. He pressed his sword to my brow, filled me with electric juice, and cried, “Live forever!”
I thought, Boy, that’s great! How do you do that?
I went to see him the next day to find out how to live forever.
We sat on the beach and talked, and suddenly he said that he had met me a long time ago, that I had lived before. He said that I was his best friend in the First World War and had been wounded and died in his arms in the Ardennes Forest outside Paris in October 1918. And here I was, back in the world, with a new face, a new name, but the soul shining out of my eyes was the soul of his dead friend.
“Welcome back to the world!” Mr. Electrico said.
Why he said this to me, I do not know.
Perhaps he saw something of the strange future in my face. Something I could not see myself.
On the way home from the carnival grounds, I stood by the carousel to watch the horses whirl, and hear “Beautiful Ohio” played on the calliope while tears rained down my face.
I knew that something important had happened that day.
Within weeks I began to write short stories combining Burroughs, Verne, and L. Frank Baum and his wonderful Oz.
I have written every day for the rest of my life after that last day with Mr. Electrico.
In the years following, in high school and beyond, I continued to write my fantasies and gradually worked my way up from the pulp magazines to the American Mercury and Harper’s.
Along the way I married, and Maggie, my wife, was suddenly with child.
We were poor, living in Venice, California, when Norman Corwin, our radio-director friend, suggested that I go to New York so that editors would see my work. I took the Greyhound bus to New York and stayed in the YMCA. All the editors that I met rejected my stories; they wanted novels.
It was finally Walter Bradbury at Doubleday, no relation, who one night said, “What about all those Martian stories you’ve published in the pulp magazines? Wouldn’t they make a sort of ramshackle novel if you tied them together in a tapestry and called them The Martian Chronicles? Go back to the YMCA, write me an outline, and if I find it’s good enough, I’ll advance you seven hundred fifty dollars.”
I stayed up all night at the YMCA, created Mars on my portable typewriter, and showed it to him the next day.
He said, “Here’s your seven hundred fifty dollars!”
So The Martian Chronicles was born.
Mainly, I might add, influenced by Winesburg, Ohio. I read that book when I was twenty-four and thought how wonderful if someday I could write something as fine but locate it on Mars. I made an outline for my possible book but forgot it. Now Walter Bradbury was suggesting a tapestry of those stories, and I recalled Sherwood Anderson’s influence.
The rest is history. The book was published to few reviews. In the thirties, forties, and fifties, it was rare for a science-fiction or fantasy book to appear. Readers had to wait months or years, subsisting on H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Then, in the fifties and sixties, more and more novels about the future and outer space appeared. Soon a revolution occurred in American education. For the first time in history, students educated teachers.
They came into the classroom with books by Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and occasionally myself, and gave them to the teacher in place of apples.
The teacher glared at these novels and said, Science fiction—what’s that?
The kids said, Try the first chapter.
The teachers read the first chapter and said, Not bad, then read on and finally began to teach.
Today the novels of these authors and myself are in all the schools and colleges of America.
Much of this was provoked, of course, by our successful Moon landing. When Apollo 11 printed the lunar soil, it imprinted all our lives.
Gateways opened to wider fields. Since that time the most successful Hollywood films have been science fiction or fantasy.
So I’ve come a long way from my encounters with Mr. Electrico, L. Frank Baum, Verne, Burroughs, and, before that, Edgar Allan Poe.
People ask me where my science fiction or fantasy will be taking me in the coming years. I believe that the whole outreach of science-fiction writers in the near future must be in a religious relationship with the universe. It was first indicated in that landmark film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when, in the final scenes, we scan the heavens to see the arrival of the mother ship, which is really an entire city from across the universe.
The scene is reminiscent of the encounter between God and Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, when God reaches down to touch and Adam reaches up to touch, and the spark leaps the gap.
So it is that we fantasy writers must look to the universe and give reasons for revisiting the Moon, heading for Mars, and moving out toward the cosmos.
Space
travel to me answers the age-old question: What are we doing here? What is life all about? Where are we going?
George Bernard Shaw, many years ago, believed that the human race was headed in a direction that it could not quite comprehend but would nevertheless hurl ourselves headlong into that unplumbed future.
My own belief is that the universe exists as a miracle and that we have been born here to witness and celebrate. We wonder at our purpose for living. Our purpose is to perceive the fantastic. Why have a universe if there is no audience?
We are that audience.
We are here to see and touch, describe and move. Our job, then, is to occupy ourselves with paying back the gift. This must be at the center of the stories, novels, and films that we fantasy writers create tomorrow.
When we first landed on the Moon on that night in July 1969, I was asked to appear on The David Frost Show.
I eagerly accepted because I wanted to explain that space travel was about mankind’s possible immortality.
David Frost, however, laughed at the whole encounter, and I walked off the show.
At 8:30 P.M., London time, we landed on the Moon. The following dawn Neil Armstrong emerged from the craft to footprint the lunar soil.
Fleeing The David Frost Show at midnight, I crossed London to do a Telstar show with Walter Cronkite, who allowed me to speak the truths I felt were inherent in our escape from Earth.
I stayed up, did a dozen shows, cried all night with joy, because it was the most important night in my life, and for all the people on Earth.
At around nine in the morning, I walked back across London, totally exhausted but totally happy.
In front of my hotel, I saw a small tabloid newspaper with a headline which read NEIL ARMSTRONG WALKS AT SIX A.M.... BRADBURY WALKS AT MIDNIGHT.
MARS: TOO SOON FROM THE CAVE, TOO FAR FROM THE STARS (2000)
QUESTION: You and Mars. How did it all happen?
ANSWER: Imagine if you will a kid of some nine years seated by the wide-open door of a summer night in 1930. Leafing through his collection of Buck Rogers comic strips with Buck and Wilma on the Red Planet, the boy picks up and reads yet another chapter of The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Maybe not on the floor, but nearby, are some scattered photos of the mysterious world by the Lowell Observatory. Leaving these treasures behind, the boy steps out and moves across the front lawn to gaze up into the Illinois night sky and find that special red fire burning in the dark. After a long moment, the boy slowly raises his arms, then points his hands at that crimson point of light. Now he shuts his eyes, and his lips move silently, and now at last he speaks:
“Mars,” he whispers, “oh, Mars, take me home.”
And his soul slips out of his body and sails swiftly and silently toward Mars.
And never comes back.
Who was that strange and needful young kid on that summer-night lawn in that empty year 1930?
You with the questions. Me with the answers, of course. Ray Bradbury, born August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, destined to travel to Mars and never return from that year on.
QUESTION: Why should we care about Mars at all? The argument runs, does it not, that we have enough problems to solve on Earth without rushing off to another world for even bigger problems. Yes?
ANSWER: No. I was forced into considering all this when I worked on an astronomical program for the Smithsonian’s planetarium. They objected to my saying the Big Bang, as theory, happened 10 billion years ago. Well, I said, when did the Big Bang occur? Twelve billion years ago, they replied. Prove it, I said. Well, that ruined our creative relationship, for of course they couldn’t prove it. Then I got to thinking about the Cosmos, the Universe, and came up with my own ramshackle theory that perhaps the Universe was never created, that it’s been here forever and will remain here forever. Impossible, yet here we are, a miracle of impossibility. My notion is just as valid as theirs. Neither can be proven. But the bigger the power of our telescopic vision, the more immense the Universe becomes. There is no far side, there is no circumference. Now, how in hell, I said, can only a tiny Big Bang create a cosmos that is a billion billion light-years in acreage? It couldn’t. Therefore our environment has miraculously been here forever. You mustn’t think on it, it’ll drive you bonkers.
QUESTION: You’re dragging your celestial feet. How does all this tie in with Mars as preoccupation?
ANSWER: I go with Bernard Shaw here. He has one of his characters in Don Juan in Hell say that he is compelled to become something. He, as a member of the human race, is on his way to a seemingly impossible goal. He does not know what the goal is, but he must go, he must seek, he must find, himself. His destiny is in his genes. He can no more ignore this call, this summons, than he can ignore the beating of his heart. So it is with Man’s becoming more than he now is. Not Superman, assuredly, for that name has been contaminated with misuse. But a creature with a superb destiny.
QUESTION: And can you half guess at that destiny?
ANSWER: There is no one reading this exchange who hasn’t at one time or another said, What’s it all about? If there is no God, as some say, why are we here? Why have we been created, to function in what way? The problem lies partly in our anthropomorphic vision of God, which diminishes the aspect of Creation. As soon as you say He or Him, you put Creation in a matchbox and file It, Him, He, on a shelf. The Universe is certainly large enough not to be so misfiled. It “thinks,” therefore we are. The Cosmos has need of us. It cannot exist without an audience. Why bother to have a theater if there are no attendees? Why put on a show if no one buys tickets? Why give a grandiose concert if no one comes? Ridiculous. We fill the vacuum with attention. We see, we hear, we touch, we know; therefore the Universe exists. It is the old saying revisited: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see or hear it, does it fall? Yes, no, maybe? The Universe demands our eyes, our ears, our hands to see, hear, touch, and then for our mouths to speak the wonders.
QUESTION: And Mars is a part of this process?
ANSWER: It is the way station on our journey to our greater selves and our possible immortality.
QUESTION: Big words. Do you mind if I scoff?
ANSWER: Scoff! And while you scoff, we will be gone a-journeying.
QUESTION: Give me more reasons for this time of going away, yes?
ANSWER: We are representatives of the Life Force. Our hidden genetics propel us up, upward, and out. We cannot resist the impulse to footprint Mars as we did the Moon. And when we arrive there, what shall we say to the mysterious mothering universe? “We are here! Behold, we have cast our seed upon a windless wind in a lonely place that we shall make less lonely. Do we rest now?” To which the Cosmic response must be, “No.” There can be no rest, but always moving on. For to rest means to stop, and to stop might well mean a fall back into the dust. In the words of Cabal at the end of Things to Come, “Which shall it be?” The stars or the grave? It is a million-year journey. Sleepless at dawn, arise and go.
QUESTION: Your summation of our Martian venture might well be what?
ANSWER: The unknown celestial environment cries out to be known. We are the delegates of cognition whose task it is to witness and celebrate. The Cosmos thrives through us. The dead stuffs of planetary time are roused to life because we say it’s so. We pitiful worms have dreamed a cocoon of metal, glass, and fire and have come forth as homely moths and then fine papillons to cross space and annul Time. Our conscious mind wonders at this. Our secret mind knows. It speaks. We listen and dream ourselves better cocoons.
QUESTION: How can we prepare ourselves for the long voyage home, a home we know not where?
ANSWER: By an act of forgiveness. We must forgive all our wars and dissolutions, all our criminal sins and terrible exploitations. We must cleanse ourselves as best we can and try to take along the sinless good as proper baggage, never forgetting our history of struggle, failure, and struggle again, encouraging the crippled earthworm to become the gossamer flight. We have been
given eyes to see what the light-year worlds cannot see of themselves. We have been given hands to touch the miraculous. We have been given hearts to know the incredible. Can we shrink back to bed in our funeral clothes? Mars says we cannot. The interstellar drifts echo and reecho this. We sit up in our coffins to abandon the Earth’s mortuary tomb, knowing that we are the betweens. Too soon from the cave, too far from the stars. We must ignore the whispers from the cave that say, “Stay.” We must listen to the stars that say, “Come.”
As the celestial nomads, we have traveled half a million or a million years looking back at the cliffs from which we sprang, looking up at a heaven that seems almost within reach.
We are seemingly trapped in midstride. Free of the protection of the solid rock in which we hid to invent fire, now we stand unprotected in an invisible rain that showers from the universe and will either cleanse us or melt us to nothing.
Jesus in the desert alone with temptation was a single divine presence. We, this year, with the Millennium commencing, are multitudinous lemmings driven by wireless voices to hurl ourselves into Internet seas where tides of mediocrity surge, pretending at wit and will but signifying nothing.
All of which means we must stop being so hypnotized and transported by the various technological aspects of our society. We are being driven by people who say we must constantly be on the Internet and we must participate in e-mail and get hundreds of pieces of e-mail that we really don’t need. We must stop paying attention to digital motion pictures that are nothing but explosions of sound and light.
When I lectured to a group of special-effects people a few years ago, I witnessed two hours of their technical expertise before going on to speak. I then said to them, “I love fireworks as much as anyone else in this world. My idea of something great is being in Paris on Bastille night, July 14, each year, by the Eiffel Tower and seeing the explosions of brilliant color and celestial constellations put up by the fireworks people. The problem is, when the wind blows, the fire is swept away, the color is gone from the clouds, the sky is empty. What you people have done and are doing is fireworks, which I love, but there is no content, there is nothing there when the wind blows. To use another metaphor: You cook up a brilliant Chinese dinner, and an hour later we’re hungry again.”
