Ray Bradbury Miscellanea

Bradbury's first book from a major publisher, The Martian Chronicles from Doubleday in 1950. That little logo saying "science fiction" was something that Bradbury fought against - not because he was opposed to science fiction, but because he considered The Martian Chronicles to be fantasy rather than SF.

But it was a battle he did not win, and the label continued to stick despite the fact that most of his work was not SF. (Bradbury maintained that Fahrenheit 451 was his only science fiction book, because he considered that it showed a possible world rather than the impossibility of The Martian Chronicles.)

(Click the image to enlarge.)

Kingsley Amis on Something Wicked

From the 1960s onwards, one of the most influential British literary commentators on science fiction was the novelist and critic Kingsley Amis. Best known for his novel Lucky Jim, Amis was particularly fond of the social satire strand of SF as exemplified by Pohl and Kornbluth. Amis delivered a series of lectures on science fiction while working in the US, and these were published in 1960 as New Maps of Hell, a book which did much to help contemporary science fiction regain a level of respectability which it had largely lost thanks to the garish pulp magazines and monstrous giant ant movies of the '50s.

In 1963, Amis was tasked with reviewing Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, recently released in a first edition from Ruper Hart-Davis (pictured, left), for the Observer newspaper. The review appeared on 24 February 1963.

Unfortunately, Something Wicked did not strike the right note with Amis. After outlining what he saw as the difference between science fiction and fantasy - the one built on logic and extrapolation, the other built on "whimsy" - he turned to an assessment of Bradbury. "Except at his very best (in Fahrenheit 451, for instance), he has always tended to overwrite, to load every rift not with ore but with pyrites", he writes, implying that Bradbury is already past his best. This assessment seems to have become accepted wisdom in the UK from around this time.

Amis then summarises the plot of the novel. He finds most of Bradbury's plot choices to be largely arbitrary or unmotivated:

A carnival turns up from somewhere under the management of Mr Dark, who is death or the devil or somebody. He operates a carousel which adds to or subtracts from your age somehow, so that a small boy becomes 200 years old and his aunt regresses to childhood. A freak show includes a Fat Man who grew fat through lusting too much or something, and an ex-lightning-rod salesman squashed into dwarfism because he was really a small man in some way. There is a witch, halfheartedly modernised, who travels by balloon instead of broomstick.

 The review is amusing, but doesn't admit of any possibility of symbolism or magic as organising principles in a fantasy story, and suggest a reviewer who is hostile to the genre as much as he is hostile to the work under review.

As for the science fiction genre, in 1981 SF writer J.G.Ballard reviewed an anthology Amis had newly compiled, entitled The Golden Age of Science Fiction. In the twenty-odd years since New Maps of Hell, according to Ballard, Amis had shifted from a position of championing the genre of SF to being quite hostile to much of it. You can read Ballard's pithy and perceptive comments here.

By Definition

Ray Bradbury writes across many genres. I've never counted up how many stories are SF, how many fantasy, how many horror, how many "mainstream" - but I would estimate that only a small percentage are out-and-out science fiction. Bradbury himself claims that only one of his novels is science fiction: Fahrenheit 451. The Martian Chronicles, on the other hand, he considers to be fantasy. Yes, it uses the gimmicks, hardware and aliens familiar from the science fiction genre, but the overall situation of the book he considers to be impossible, and hence fantasy.

Ironic, then, that The Martian Chronicles was the book that first branded him with the science fiction label.

Bradbury's views on his own writing were being clearly expressed way back in the 1950s, and probably earlier. In 1951, the year after The Martian Chronicles was published, he was interviewed by Harvey Breit for the New York Times.

Breit systematically asks Bradbury for his definitions of SF and fantasy. Bradbury makes his distinctions clear, with this description of science fiction:

Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together [...] Science fiction is a logical or mathematical projection of the future.

And as for fantasy?

It's the improbable. Oh, if you had a leprechaun or a dinosaur appearing in the streets of New York - that's highly improbable.

In light of these definitions, it is quite clear why Bradbury continues to characterise Chronicles as fantasy and 451 as science fiction. It is evident that Bradbury's take on SF is that it is primarily about warning us about the future ("If This Goes On...", to borrow a short story title from Robert Heinlein.

Of course, 1951 was also the year of publication of The Illustrated Man, a collection of mostly SF short stories, most of which take the line of "if this goes on". In the Times interview, Bradbury says, "The mechanical age is crushing people. People are confused", and this attitude is reflected in various ways in some of the stories in The Illustrated Man and in Fahrenheit 451. It is this warning about the future that earned Bradbury another label he has struggled to shake off: as someone who is anti-science and anti-technology.

Interestingly, the Times interview ends with Bradbury showing his optimistic side: "When we move out into space, what a revolution!" he declares.

(Source: "Talk with Mr Bradbury", New York Times, 5 Aug 1951, p182)