Ray Bradbury

From LoveToKnow Sci-Fi

Ray Bradbury: American Classic

Ray Bradbury is a classic. And perhaps more importantly, he is one of very few writers whose reputation is based more on their short fiction than on their novels.

For most of his career, Bradbury produced very few novels; Farenheit 451 being a notable early exception. The Martian Chronicles is really a series of related short stories, and his gorgeous Dandelion Wine is assembled from segments that had been originally published as short stories.

The Uncategorizable Ray

While Ray Bradbury is considered one of the authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, it's not completely clear that what he writes is science fiction at all. Fahrenheit 451, his most famous novel, is the only one he considers to be true science fiction, and a case could be made that it is really a throw-back to an earlier form of literature, the morality play.

The Prefame Years

Born in 1920 in small town Illinois, which he memorializes in Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury was the archetypical writer-wannabe, cranking out shorts on an old manual typewriter with carbon paper, and sending them off to the pulps, hoping for a check for $25 or $50 in return instead of the usual rejection.

He recreates this time of his life for us perfectly in a trio of novels he wrote between 1985 and 2003; Death is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics, and Let's All Kill Constance. In these novels, which are murder mysteries, the unnamed protagonist is a thirty-ish writer living in Venice, California in the early '50s. He becomes embroiled in mysterious happenings that center around a fading screen legend. The Venice of the fifties, and the characters that inhabit the boardwalk, make for a moody, almost 'noir' setting, and the characters, without being hard-bitten and cynical, would not be completely out of place in a Bogart movie. And yet, Bradbury is rarely thought of as a mystery writer.

The Science Fiction Fifties

In the 'fifties, Ray Bradbury published two novels and four collections of short stories that cemented his position in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is a tale in the vein of Brave New World and 1984; a tale of an unpleasant future in which independent thought is suppressed to the point where books are banned and, when discovered, burned. The title comes from the temperature at which paper will catch fire. The protagonist, a 'fireman' or professional bookburner, is challenged by rebellious book lovers, and comes to question his own commitment to his calling and ultimately recant and join the rebellion against mindless acceptance and passivity.

The Martian Chronicles (1950) are considered by Bradbury to not be science fiction at all, but rather fantasy, since the tales of settlers colonizing Mars were impossible by the science of the day. They are rather in the same category as the Wellesian trips to the moon and C. S. Lewis' Silent Planet series. Sadly, his travels to Mars were scheduled to begin in 1999; we are falling farther behind every year.

Also in the fifties, Bradbury published Dandelion Wine (1957), a novel that is neither science fiction, fantasy nor mystery, but simply a strangely beautiful remembrance of life in a small Illinois town. This town is revisited in 1962's Something Wicked This Way Comes, with a slight horror twist of an evil carnival, a novel that almost seems to prophesize the coming of Steven King, master of such small town settings and characters.