Seekers of Tomorrow

by Sam Moskowitz

  for one of Bradbury's strangest tales. A zombie climbs from its coffin, the last cadaver in a world that burns all its dead. Here we learn of the Mars of The Martian Chronicles. Here, too, the books have been burned and the burning of this "living dead man" will obliterate the last memories of Edgar Allen Poe, Am-brose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other masters of fantasy. When the authorities finally appre-hend and burn this last dead man, Pillar of Fire becomes an enthralling prelude to The Exiles (the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, Winter-Spring, 1950), in which ghosts of great writers of the past, hiding on Mars, are expunged when the last memory of them is gone. Mars Is Heaven followed in planet stories for Fall, 1948. A possible influence on Bradbury here was Stanley G. Weinbaum's Martian Odyssey, in which a predatory plant conjures up visions of the most desired objects of its prey in order to lure them to their deaths. Earthmen land on Mars to find everything just like a midwestern town, complete to brass band. They find their dead relatives waiting to welcome them and then, while asleep in their memories of childhood, they are killed. It is certainly one of the most original meth-ods of repulsing an interplanetary invasion ever conceived.

  In May, 1947, Ray Bradbury's first hard-covered collec-tion, Dark Carnival, made up primarily of his weird tales, was published by Arkham House. Bradbury sent a copy to Julius Schwartz with an inscription which read: "For Julie, in fond remembrances of Norton Street—The Piper'—The Moon Festival in Chinatown—Lil Abner—'Are You Kidding?'—That old song, circa 1941: 'Daddy'—The beach—The burlesque— And then New York and George Brunis—God, what a beauti-ful night!—and because you sold almost every story in this book for me—With luff, from Ray Bradbury." Six months later, when Schwartz sold The Black Ferris to weird tales on January 2, 1948, their business relationship was ended. Schwartz was a specialist in science fiction. He wrote to Bradbury and candidly told him that as an agent he had taken him as far as he was able. From this point on he would be retarding, not helping to advance his client.

  On his own, Bradbury was already clicking with the new yorker and harper's. A few years later coronet would condense Mars Is Heaven and esquire would reprint it in full, esquire would also reprint The Earth Men, The Spring Night, and Usher II, all from the science-fiction pulps. Brad-bury had long been selling below his market. Bradbury could no longer be ignored. Newspaper and magazine critics were generous, but in the fantasy and science-fiction field opinion was mixed.

  It was common for critics of Bradbury to state that all he had to sell was emotion. This is considerably removed from the truth, which reveals a substantial Bradbury influence on science fiction. Richard Matheson was unquestionably in-debted in style, mood, and approach to Bradbury. His most famous story, Born of Man and Woman, is a variant on Bradbury's use of childhood horror. Charles E. Fritch closely imitated Bradbury in a series of stories in the early 1950's. Judith Merril, who established her reputation with That Only Mother, a story of a mother who can see nothing wrong with her mutated, limbless child, published in astounding science-fiction for June, 1948, certainly owes some inspiration to Bradbury, whose touching vignette, The Shape of Things, in thrilling wonder stories for February, 1948, deals with a woman who can see nothing wrong in her child, born in the shape of a triangle. James Blish, who went on to win a Hugo in 1959 with A Case of Conscience, a novel of the dilemma of a priest on a planet where creatures exist without original sin, should bow respectfully in the direction of Bradbury's In This Sign (The Fire Balloons), published originally in imagi-nation, April, 1951, which tells of priests who go to Mars and discover Martians without original sin.

  Bradbury has won several lawsuits—including one directed against Playhouse 90, for its A Sound of Different Drummers because of its similarity to Fahrenheit 451 —for appropriating ideas from his works. Obviously, there must have been some-thing more substantial than emotion and mood borrowed. Most significant of all, astounding science-fiction, which got first look at most Bradbury stories, including Mars Is Heaven, Zero Hour, Pillar of Fire, The Million Year Picnic, and The Earth Men, and rejected them all as not being the right type, now sometimes runs precisely that sort of story. See, for example, The First One by Herbert D. Kastle in its July, 1961, number, dealing with the aloneness of the first man back from Mars and the gap he finds between his family and himself. The Martian Chronicles (1950) and the collection The Illustrated Man (1951) gave Bradbury acceptance among general readers for his science fiction. The question has fre-quently been raised as to why the highly original and skillful weird tales in Dark Carnival and later, most of them reprint-ed in The October Country, failed to gain similar acclaim. The answer seems to be that there are many extraordinarily brilliant practitioners in the field of the off-trail, horror, and supernatural: men and women with superb command of the language and remarkable originality—John Collier, Roald Dahl, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, A. E. Coppard, Algernon Blackwood, Theodore Sturgeon, Walter de la Mare, Saki, M. R. James, W. F. Harvey, E. F. Benson, May Sinclair, and Lord Dunsany, to name a portion. Bradbury can stand above a few of them, with most of them, and below some of them, but in that kind of competition he cannot lead.

  The reverse is true in science fiction. There, his ideas appear strikingly original and his style is scintillating. In style, few match him, and the uniqueness of a story of Mars or Venus told in the contrasting literary rhythms of Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe is enough to fascinate any critic. Mainstream themes and mainstream writing in a science-fiction setting are Bradbury's contributions to fiction. In this he is singularly original and magazines like collier's have not hesitated to run such stories as There Will Come Soft Rains (May 6, 1950), graphically depicting atomic disaster by indirection, or To the Future (May 13, 1950), on the attempt of a couple to escape from a 1984-type future to the relative freedom of modern Mexico City. So, too, the Saturday evening post featured The World the Children Made (Sep-tember 23, 1950), concerning a playroom in three-dimensional TV whose pictures resolve into fourth-dimen-sional reality, or The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (June 23, 1951), in which a prehistoric monster rises from his sleep in the muck of the Atlantic to respond to the notes of a foghorn.

  One charge brought against Bradbury is true, that his stories raise issue on purely emotional levels and offer no logic to support the stand he takes. It is often difficult to determine which issues he artificially adopts for the sake of the story and on which he is sincere.

  The problem was resolved by the publication in book form of Fahrenheit 451 (Ballantine Books, 1953), the closest Bradbury has ever come to writing a novel. A lengthened version of The Fireman, which ran in galaxy science fic-tion for February, 1951, this story presents, in some detail, the basis of Bradbury's grievances. Because of this, this story of a future America where the job of a fireman is not to put out fires but to burn books, reads a bit more slowly than Bradbury's shorter works, but it is by all odds one of his best and most revealing.

  Between the lines, it tells us that Bradbury's use of racial prejudice in Way in the Middle of the Air (other worlds, July, 1950), and its sequel, The Other Foot (new story, March, 1951), is merely contrived and not heartfelt and, moreover, in Fahrenheit 451 he displays his adamant opposi-tion to non-ethnic minority groups that in his view are a major factor in censorship of newspapers, books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and television, a subject upon which he is most vehement. It offers scarcely a word on religion which was the core of In This Sign and The Man (thrilling wonder stories, February, 1949), so we may reasonably conclude that his use of this material was for impact value and not through conviction. It tells us why he fears science, but does not tell us when he came to fear science. A good theory is that it happened this way. Few things affected Ray Bradbury as traumatically as the Nazi book burnings. His wrath and indignation at this action, his conviction that civilization is today "burning" books; if not literally, then through neglect, recurs constantly in Fahrenheit 451. A psychologist might say that since writ-ing offered Brad
bury his one hope of immortality, the de-struction or loss of public interest in the vehicles necessary to convey his thoughts virtually threatens his soul. The very idea is the theme of The Exiles, where the spirits of great authors of the past vanish one by one as the final copies of their books are burned as the last person who remembers them dies.

  In 1942, Technocracy, Inc., placed advertisements in 100 American newspapers demanding an end to U. S. aid to the allies fighting Nazi Germany. This was the signal for a number of exposes of Technocracy, several of which were summarized by fantasy reporter, June 1942 (an early title of science fiction times), calling the fans to task for supporting the movement.

  Among the points fantasy reporter underlined were the following:

  1. Fascist dictator of Italy, Mussolini had publicly "adopt-ed" the aims of technocracy previously and was ap-plauded for it by technocrats.

  2. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's early edition of Adolph Eich-mann, was quoted as saying that

  "condemnation of tech-nocracy is simultaneously condemnation of German genius of invention." The technocracy which Ray Bradbury had so idealistically supported was now allied with the burner of books. Science was after all merely the instrument, not the savior, of man-kind. In the wrong hands it could destroy the world. Atomic bombs and German rockets a few years later added the terror to this view which we later find reflected in his works.

  By any standards, Fahrenheit 451 is only a short novel, surpassing in length Henry James' Turn of the Screw, one of the longer classic short stories by only 10 pages. Even in so short a compass, Bradbury could not sustain the same poetic tempo that characterized his short stories, but lapsed into long periods of straight narrative, competent but undistin-guished. His inability to sustain his style over length had evidenced itself previously in the novelette The Creatures That Time Forgot.

  He thought he could fake it by assembling a group of predominantly nonfantasy short stories from the saturday evening post, charm, mccall’s, cosmopolitan, and every-woman, seed a single character through them, connect the pieces with interim chapters, and call it in big letters on the jacket "a novel." This was Dandelion Wine (Doubleday, 1957), and while it contained some extremely well written, perceptive, and sensitive short stories, it wasn't a novel.

  Bradbury wasn't a quitter. The next try, Something Wick-ed This Way Comes (Simon and Schuster, 1962), tried another approach—expanding the short story, Nightmare Carousel (mademoiselle, January, 1962), to novel length. Combining elements of boyhood memories and carnival nostalgia, Bradbury uncovered the sinister side of this small-town entertainment, focused upon a merry-go-round that made its riders younger when it was reversed and older when it moved forward. Here he succeeded in writing the entire book at a high level of craftsmanship, but he forgot that a novel is more than words and finished with an absurdly drawn-out short story.

  Several times there had been talk of putting Fahrenheit 451 on Broadway as a legitimate play but each time the idea had fallen through. A few of Bradbury's stories had been adapted as one act plays. A Scent of Sarsaparilla was set to music by Charles Hamm, with narration by Anthony Boucher, as a feature of The 12th World Science Fiction Convention in September, 1954, in San Francisco: the story of a henpecked husband who finds such comfort in the objects of a happier past in his attic that he vanishes into that simpler period. Extremely effective were a number of Bradbury stories adapted for television. At the threshold of his writing career, Bradbury made the choice to sidetrack his theatrical aspirations. A stay in Ireland writing the script for Moby Dick renewed his interest Sever-al years after the completion of Moby Dick he began to include playwriting as part of his work itinerary. The fruit of this was The Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics, a collection of four one-act plays about Ireland published by Dial in 1963.

  Frustrated in earlier attempts to get his plays produced, Bradbury obtained nationwide publicity when three of his plays, possibly with his own financing, under the heading of "The World of Ray Bradbury," opened October 8, 1964, at the Coronet Theater Los Angeles. The plays were all futuris-tic fantasies: The Veldt (originally The World the Children Made, Saturday evening post, September 23, 1950), about the three-dimensional play room that proves real; The Pedestrian (the reporter, August 7, 1951), of an era when a man walking the streets at night will be regarded as an eccentric who should be arrested; and To the Chicago Abyss, depicting the attitudes of after-the-atomic-war society. The intent was to expand the number of plays and take them around the country in repertory. To get them produced Bradbury had to organize The Pandemonium Theater Com-pany himself. Reaction was unexpectedly good, with especial-ly strong support from columnist Cecil Smith writing in the October 26, 1964, los angeles times, who said:

  "Unques-tionably, the most exciting theatrical event of the year here was the opening a couple of weeks ago of three short fantastic plays by Ray Bradbury under the collective title The World of Ray Bradbury,'

  which are fascinating and horrifying capacity audiences nightly at the Coronet The-ater." At almost the same time, he was reported working on the film script of The Martian Chronicles for what was said to be a ten-million-dollar production by the producing-acting team of Alan Pakula and Bob Mulligan for Universal Films.

  It was significant that achieving a critical theater success with three of his science-fiction plays, even if it proved limited, and in connecting with the single biggest motion picture offer of his career for one of his own stories, it was Bradbury's science fiction that turned the trick. Bradbury is today an important writer on the American scene but his emphasis on science fiction seems to be a thing of the past. His stories in that genre are usually created for a special event, such as the special Ray Bradbury issue of the mag-azine OF

  FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION (May, 1963), for which he wrote To the Chicago Abyss, and not as a regular part of his writing schedule. In the period between 1955 and 1965, he had fewer stories included in science-fiction antholo-gies than any other major figure in the field, according to A Checklist of Science-Fiction Anthologies, compiled by Walter R. Cole (1964). His literary output during that time was not even mainstream, it was conformist, whether written for playboy or a literary journal. It was good, skillful work, but like his weird material, it was bracketed by legions of other good, skillful writers. When a new book of his is reviewed, all too frequently the few items of science fiction are singled out and most of the rest given a polite nod. The only books of Bradbury's that the future is not likely to "burn" are those that follow closest to the style of The Martian Chronicles. His "messages" get across only when clothed in the vestments of science. H. G. Wells and Jules Verne both had to learn that lesson. It is now Bradbury's turn.

  21 ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Among science-fiction writers who have gained their emi-nence since 1940, possibly Ray Bradbury is the only one as familiar to the general public as Arthur C. Clarke. This is a popularity that has been rewarded in terms of economics as well as prestige. Clarke's suspenseful novel, A Fall of Moon-dust, published in 1961, achieved the unprecedented distinc-tion of being the first interplanetary story ever used by Reader's Digest Condensed Book Library. The hundreds of thousands of subscribers to that immensely successful book club chewed their fingernails as they read of the scientifically tense battle to save the occupants of a moon ship buried deep in the treacherous sands of a lunar crater. A Fall of Moondust was a good book, certainly one of the better science-fiction novels of the year, and it deserved the book club selection, yet it is doubtful if it would ever have been considered were it not for the fact that Clarke had nine years previously enjoyed a Book-of-the-Month-Club choice (July, 1952) for his exposition of popular science, The Exploration of Space.

  The always substantial publicity attendant on a Book-of-the-Month-Club nod gave Clarke literary status. Book pub-lishers who had ignored his fiction previously now were delighted to feature it on their lists. Not only did Clarke's science-fiction books receive principal reviews, but they were evaluated as seri
ous efforts. A Fall of Moondust was possibly the most profitable of all Clarke's works of fiction, but his standing as an important writer was established when the new york times and other highly regarded sources of liter-ary criticism gave lead and praise-saturated reviews to his Stapledonian concepts in Childhood's End, published by Bal-lantine Books in 1953.

  Almost as far back as the family tree can be traced, all of the Clarke family had been farmers. When Arthur was born, December 16, 1917, in his grandmother's boarding house, in Minehead, Somerset, England, it was reasonable to suppose he would follow in the tradition.

  That this would not prove to be the case began to evidence itself as early as the age of 10 when his father presented him with a series of cigarette cards of prehistoric animals and the boy became deeply interested in the subject of paleontology, collecting fossils at a furious rate. Before Arthur was 12 his father had died and his mother had to struggle to keep the farm going and her son in school. She received small help from the boy, whose interest had shifted from paleontology to astronomy. To implement this switch he constructed his own telescopes out of old Meccano parts.

  Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, had also patented the photophone, a device by which sound waves vibrated a beam of reflected sunlight and the receiver changed the varying light intensity back into sound. Clarke had built his own photophone transmitter from a bicycle headlight, and also played with audio modulation of sunlight by mechanical means by the time he was 13.

  In 1927, Clarke discovered amazing stories, which served as a literary hypodermic, injecting him with an imaginative drug that required increasingly larger dosage as he grew older, until the day that he received an entire crate of wonder stories for 5 cents a copy stood out with such memorableness that it was to be recorded unfailing in each autobiographical sketch he wrote.