The Los Angeles club was a very good thing for Bradbury. Among the members at the time were selling fantasy authors like Henry Kuttner and Arthur K. Barnes, and later, Robert A. Heinlein and Leigh Brackett. When Bradbury graduated from high school in 1938 he shed his theatrical ambitions and even his dreams of becoming an artist. A few of his attempts at stenciled illustrations were published. Now he seriously gave priority to the notion of becoming a writer, and the local writing members and frequent visiting professional au-thors found Bradbury a veritable leech, insatiable in his quest for the formula to successful professional writing.
However, not only did sales elude the youthful Bradbury, but even among the amateur science-fiction fan magazines, which then rarely rejected anything, he received a surprising-ly negative response. There was only one thing to do. In the early Summer of 1939, Ray Bradbury mimeographed his own periodical, futuria fantasia. The first issue featured a cover by Hannes Bok, who was then virtually unknown, and a story by Ray Bradbury under the pen name Ron Reynolds.
More significantly, most of the issue was devoted to pro-moting a movement known as Technocracy, Inc. Under the direction of Howard Scott, Technocracy briefly gained ground during the depths of the Depression. Hugo Gernsback turned out two issues of a magazine titled technocracy review (February and March, 1933); wrote an editorial Wonders of Technocracy in the March, 1933, wonder sto-ries, and in the same issue published a story The Robot Technocrat by Nat Schachner. He presented the idea objec-tively and then dropped it, made uncomfortable by the com-pany he was keeping.
The technocratic masterminds had a theory that the Amer-ican economic system would collapse by 1945. They were prepared to step in with an appointive hierarchy of scientists, who would run the country with complete scientific pre-ciseness and infallibility. They estimated that under their system there would be the equivalent of $20,000 annually for every individual in the country, redeemable in energy certifi-cates. People would work four hours a day, five days a week. The country would be split into one hundred zones and an industrial complex allocated to take care of the needs of each zone. Bradbury said then: "I think Technocracy combines all of the hopes and dreams of science fiction. We've been dream-ing about it for years—now, in a short time it may become a reality." Bradbury today is excoriated for his antiscientific attitude. His fear of science misused is real and evident. This attitude was not present in 1939 when he idealistically forecast that a country run completely according to the dictates of a scien-tific technate was a good thing. The fact that there were no provisions for elections in this system did not bother him because he felt, at that time, that a "limited dictatorship" was desirable.
Within weeks after publishing the first issue of futuria fantasia, Ray Bradbury attended the First World Science Fiction Convention, held in New York over the July 4th weekend in 1939. On July 7th he went up to see Farns-worth Wright, the editor of weird tales, with a dual pur-pose. First, to examine possibilities of selling stories to that magazine and, second, to show Wright samples of the art-work of Hannes Bok, whose specialty was a baroque style ideally suited for the weird tale. The latter mission was a complete success. Wright enthusiastically purchased Bok's work and Bradbury was the instrument of that artist's ap-pearing on the professional scene.
From the long-range viewpoint, the most important thing Bradbury accomplished during his New York visit was to meet Julius Schwartz for the first time. Schwartz was then the leading literary agent specializing in science fiction and fantasy. The Fall, 1939, issue of futuria fantasia contained Ray Bradbury's story Pendulum, published anonymously. Bradbury induced Henry Hasse, an enthusiast who had previ-ously sold a number of science fiction stories on his own, to help him rewrite it. This Schwartz dutifully attempted to market as a collaboration, hoping Hasse's reputation would ring up a sale, but nothing happened. In the summer of 1941, Julius Schwartz and writer Edmond Hamilton decided to rent an apartment together in Los Ange-les for the months of July and August. Schwartz would vacation and Hamilton would pound the typewriter. The first afternoon, Schwartz strolled fifty yards from the apartment on Norton Street to the corner of Olympic, to be stopped by the call: "Paper, Mister?" He turned to discover that the news-boy was Ray Bradbury. Bradbury sold newspapers every afternoon on that corner, his main source of income between the years 1938 and 1942.
Bradbury was relentless. Before and after his newspaper stint he was everlastingly underfoot at the Schwartz-Hamilton apartment. The situation became all but impossible when on July 18, 1941, news arrived that Pendulum had been purchased for $27.50 by super science stories. This story, which appeared in the November issue of that magazine, told of a scientist of the future, who in demonstrating a new discovery, accidentally kills two dozen of the world's leading savants. As punishment, he is imprisoned in a giant swinging pendulum. The motion renders him almost immortal and he watches the centuries pass, ultimately to dissolve into dust when invaders from outer space stop the action of the pendu-lum. In both writing and plotting, the story was below the minimum level of acceptability, even for that period. Credit for the discovery of Bradbury (despite the fact that he published, without pay, a short nonfiction bit in script seven months earlier) belongs to Alden H. Norton, who had taken over the editorship of super science stories only a week previously from Fred Pohl. Norton went on to become associate publisher of Popular Publications.
Another collaboration with Henry Hasse, Gabriel's Horn, was going the rounds and would eventually sell to captain future, but at the moment Bradbury's chief consideration was how to accomplish sale number two. He dug back into the files of FUTURIA fantasia and in its fourth and final issue found The Piper under his pen name Ron Reynolds. Back he was on the doorstep of Schwartz's apartment. It was a hot day and both of them sat down on the curb, revising The Piper according to Schwartz's instruction. Whenever they took a break, Bradbury would have a hamburger and a malted milk, the staples of his diet in those days.
The Piper was the first sale Bradbury made on his own and his first tale of Mars. Well written, it appeared in thrilling wonder stories for February, 1943, and told of the last civilized Martian who lures a primitive race out of the hills through music to destroy the Jovians who are exploiting the planet The original version in futuria fantasia, while inferior, was much closer to the style Bradbury would eventually adopt Instead of Jovians, the exploiters of Mars were Earth-men. The description of their cities is very close to The Martian Chronicles. The history of this story reveals that in attempting to ape the methods of the selling writers Bradbury made a mistake. He would have made it quicker and better on his own.
Bradbury had no one to tell him this. He rented an office with a typewriter and a desk, and for eight hours a day ground out stories, none of which sold. He eventually burned three million words of manuscript and in desperation sheered away from science fiction and tried to get into the pages of weird tales. To this end he enlisted the help of Henry Kuttner, who actually wrote the last two hundred words of The Candle. This very weak tale of death wish and retribu-tion was bought by weird stories for $25 and published in its November, 1942, issue.
Promotion to Satellite, a short story of an Italian who dies in space saving members of the crew of his ship and whose body is permitted to become a satellite circling Earth as a monument to his heroism, was the next sale and this ap-peared in thrilling wonder stories for Fall, 1943. This story almost came off and showed early traces of the later, more successful, Bradbury.
Up to now, Bradbury had been trying to imitate other science-fiction writers. In The Wind in weird tales, March, 1943, he chose as his model Ernest Hemingway and the bulk of a longish short story of a man threatened and finally absorbed by the wind is related in trim dialogue so character-istic of the master. Hemingway remained a major stylistic influence on Bradbury thereafter.
The following May, 1943, issue of weird tales contained his short story The Crowd, clearly a variant of Edgar Allan Poe's Man of the Crowd, dealing with those people wh
o seem to spring from nowhere when an accident occurs.
The Scythe, appearing in weird tales for July, 1943, was a chilling allegory of the Grim Reaper, but Bradbury really rang the bell with The Ducker in the November, 1943, issue. The story of Johnny Choir, who thought that real war was a children's game and came through unscathed, was Bradbury's first tapping of the rich mine of childhood memories that was to make him famous. Reader response was so immense that a sequel featuring the same character, Bang! You're Dead, appeared in the September, 1944, weird tales. The magazine requested and ran his biography, and Bradbury was off to his first big reputation. The slow, discouraging progress in selling science fiction forced him to redouble his efforts on fantasy. The top market in the science-fiction world of 1942 was astounding science-fiction, and its editor consistently got first look at every Bradbury story and just as consistently turned it down. He finally invested $45 in a near-fantasy submitted as Every-thing Instead of Something which was published in the Sep-tember, 1943, astounding science-fiction as Doodad. The story, a transparent take-off on van Vogt's Weapon Shops idea, concerned a store that sold gadgets from other time periods capable of doing virtually anything. The hero uses them to defeat a gangster in as pitiful a piece of fantasy as ever appeared in astounding.
Astounding science-fiction's companion magazine, un-known fantasy fiction, next bought one of Bradbury's weird tales. Ironically, the publication collapsed before the story could be published, and The Emissary eventually ap-peared in Bradbury's first hard-cover collection, Dark Carni-val, published by Arkham House in 1947. The contrast in quality to Doodad is incredible. In The Emissary, the story of an invalided boy whose dog regularly brings a kindly young woman to visit and who finds the animal has succeeded one last time in his mission, after she is dead and buried, Brad-bury created a minor classic in terror.
So, Bradbury reluctantly poured most of his energies into the weird, horrible, and terrifying. Drawing primarily on memories of childhood, he sold a continuous stream of outre, grotesque, bizarre tales with titles like The Sea Shell, Re-union, The Lake, The Jar, The Poems, The Tombstone, and, probably most memorable of all, The Night, a realistic por-trayal of the gradually rising tension and fear engendered by the waiting and then the searching for a child out too late and overdue.
One such story, The Long Night, fell into the detective story category, and Julius Schwartz submitted it to Popular Publications' new detective. On buying it, editor W. Ryer-son Johnson told Schwartz: "This Bradbury is beyond question the most promising writer I have ever read. He's going places and let me see more." Schwartz passed the message on to Bradbury, who began alternating weird tales with detective stories, eventually selling nearly a score of them to detec-tive tales, detective fiction, detective book magazine, dime mystery, and new detective. One, Wake for the Dead, in the September, 1947, dime mystery, was science fiction, built around the concept of a completely automatic coffin. Another, The Small Assassin, has become a Bradbury classic, concerning a baby that murders both of its parents.
Occasional Bradbury science fiction appeared. I, Rocket in the May, 1944, amazing stories was an effective interplane-tary adventure told from the viewpoint of the rocket ship. A little earlier, King of the Grey Spaces in the December, 1943, famous fantastic mysteries, was a sensitive story of a young boy trained and finally selected from among many to go to space.
The most dependable market for Bradbury's science fiction was the action-adventure pulp planet stories. At first he conformed to adventure formula, even doing a revival of Robert E. Howard's Conan-style adventure in Lorelei of the Red Mist, (Summer, 1946), in collaboration with Leigh Brackett. The notion of a morgue spaceship, to pick up bodies after interplanetary wars, was unique, but his use of the theme in two stories, Morgue Ship (Summer, 1944), and Lazarus, Come Forth (Winter, 1944), was undistinguished. Then it happened. A story submitted to planet stories as The Family Outing appeared in the Summer, 1946, issue of that magazine as The Million Year Picnic. In cash it was worth only $32, but in reader reaction incalculably more. This story of the last family from Earth, sailing down a river on Mars to become the first of a new race of Martians, was not only the first of his Martian Chronicle stories to see print, but also one of the best.
Far more remarkable, but almost forgotten until reprinted as Frost and Fire in his Doubleday Collection R Is for Rocket (1962), was The Creatures That Time Forgot (planet stories Fall, 1946). This was Bradbury's second longest story, nearly 22,000 words in length, and had all the earmarks of an epic. Somewhere, somehow, the 26-year-old Ray Bradbury had been confronted by the "realization of mortality." In this story, which he originally called Eight Day World, he envisaged a group of humans stranded on a radio-active planet, where the entire process of human growth and life were speeded up to only eight days.
"Birth was quick as a knife," wrote Bradbury. "Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty."
Bradbury's friend Edmond Hamilton based a short story, The Ephemerae (astounding science-fiction, December, 1938), on a human race whose life-span was but seventy days, but even if this was the spark that ignited The Creature That Time Forgot, no apologies were in order. At times, the efforts of the proponents to fight their way to a spaceship that offers escape and a normal life before they die of old age descends to the action level of the pulps, but the allegory is so powerful that the overall effect is memorable.
The year previous, Bradbury's hopes had been raised by the sale of a nonfantasy, The Big Black and White Game, to the American mercury (August, 1945). Then published by Lawrence Spivak, the American mercury was a prestige magazine and, though its rates were very low compared to most other general magazines, they were the highest Brad-bury had ever received. Again, drawing from childhood, Bradbury attempted a mainstream theme of interracial ten-sion at a ball game. The story was selected for inclusion in Martha Foley's The Best Short Stories of 1946.
This, together with the power displayed in Bradbury's science fiction, was an augury. The April 13, 1946, issue of collier's carried his short story, One Timeless Spring, and the April, 1946, issue of charm, The Miracles of Jamie.
mademoiselle published The Invisible Boy, a touching tale of a witch woman trying to conquer loneliness with spells that never work, in its November, 1945, issue. The same magazine rang all bells with Homecoming in its Octo-ber, 1946, number, a story selected for inclusion in the 0. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories for 1947. Homecoming tells of the gathering of a family of witches, vampires, and dybbuks, and the teen-age boy among them who has been born human and is patronized by his more "fortunate" relatives. Here is expressed the yearning of children for some of the magical attributes of the creatures of superstition and fancy, brilliantly defined, with the hint that Bradbury's inti-mation of mortality was derived in his early youth from folklore.
An underrated story is Defense Mech in planet stories for Spring, 1946, which really is an early try, and a nearly successful one, at the theme made famous in Mars Is Heav-en, except that here a single mentally disturbed space traveler suffers from the hallucination that he is viewing Earth scenes on Mars. Zero Hour, in planet stories for Fall, 1947, was billed by the editors as "one of the best science-fiction stories we have ever seen. Perhaps you will think it the best!" It is another classic in the tradition of Sredni Vashtar by Saki, Thus I Refute Beelzy by John Collier; and Mimsy Were The Borogoves by Henry Kuttner, reflecting the gulf in under-standing between parents and children and the resultant an-tagonism. Up to then, Bradbury had rarely received more than a cent a word for his stories, but now the rate on the science fiction climbed to two cents a word, planet stories paid that for Pillar of Fire, a total of $250
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