It’s hard to say for what piece of writing Ray Bradbury will be “best remembered for.” Fahrenheit 451, his tale of a world where books are banned (and burned) is the default choice, but there’s also The Martian Chronicles (a book of loosely-connected short stories about the human exploration and colonization of the red planet) and The Illustrated Man (a collection of stories framed around an encounter with a man whose entire body is covered with tattoos that tell stories, except for one bare patch on his shoulder that tells the viewer’s future…)
But unless you are a superfan or someone who reads the credits, you may not know that Bradbury wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s film Moby Dick or that the classic ‘50s monster movie The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was inspired by his short story “The Foghorn.” Or that another short story, “The Jar,” was the basis for one of the most memorable episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. (It’s the one where this country bumpkin buys a gallon-sized jar filled with… something, and becomes a sort of celebrity until…)
Bradbury was often called the country’s “best science fiction writer” although he himself did not consider his stories science fiction:
“…I've written only one book of science fiction [Fahrenheit 451].
All the others are fantasy. Fantasies are things that can't happen,
and science fiction is about things that can happen… I deal in
metaphors. All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths,
and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament....
If you write in metaphors, people can remember them.... I think
that's why I'm in the schools."
Nonetheless, Bradbury did write about spaceships and robots and time travel, but he never dwelled on the mechanics and physics of how these things worked. His emphasis was always on what happens to the people using them. His stories could be whimsical (“The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” “A Medicine for Melancholy”) or quite dark (“The Veldt,” Marionettes, Inc."). Some of his most memorable stories contained no fantastic elements at all and would not be out of place in The New Yorker (“Gotcha!”). But they were all written with a lyrical craft that very few other genre writers have ever achieved.
I was surprised to hear Bradbury described as “a noted conservative;” reading his stories and essays I always got the impression his sentiments skewed toward the liberal end of the spectrum because unlike many (if not most) of his contemporaries, his stories often featured people of color and he portrayed in positive ways, with insight into their place in the real world. (Among them are “The Big Black and White Game,” The Other Foot” and “The October Game.”)
With some 27 novels and more than 600 stories—plus whatever posthumous writings are to come—Ray Bradbury leaves us with a rich legacy, perhaps the best example of how SF can transcend the stigma of “genre literature.”
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