Hey dudes, Ray Bradbury passed recently, as readers of the lauded Celebrity Deathlist will know. Anyway, Cardiff Central Library's got a blog going now and being on the social networking media team I'm supposed to start submitting stuff for it. So I've knocked up this one as my first effort. Thought you might like. It is suitably pompous, as only I can be.
The author Ray Bradbury passed away recently at the age of 91. He was ever a keen supporter of libraries and viewed literacy as the key weapon to fight societies ills. Indeed, Bradbury’s most famous work Fahrenheit 451 was written on a rented typewriter in a library.
“Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
Ray Bradbury’s stories harked to the small town of his depression era childhood, making a virtue of a sense of place, nostalgia and community. His writing style was sparse yet sublime, drawing on the roots of American oral folk tradition. He brought to mind such writers as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck and the best of Edith Wharton married with a gift for drawing the reader into a beautiful shared reverie of nostalgia.
And yet he was a science fiction writer. Indeed, he was undoubtedly one of the great masters of ‘Golden Age’ science fiction. But while many of his peers in the fifties and sixties championed a restless colonisation of space and a triumphant endless expansion of the borders of science, Ray Bradbury instead saw progress and speed as a threat to everything he held dear. He warned of the alienating dangers of progress and technology and of ecological destruction. He had a horror of the isolating effect of mass media and the way it dictated thought. He resisted his works being published in e-book format and said, “We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now."
His most famous work remains ‘Fahrenheit 451’, first published in 1953. The title derives from the temperature at which paper burns, in a society in which reading is forbidden and firemen set torch to books with flamethrowers. It is frequently misread as being about a fascistic government imposing book-burning, but in Bradbury’s nightmare world it is the people themselves who have decided to abandon thought and reflection in favour of a smothering and anodyne world of mindless television and soulless music. It is not a sin of form, but of the total omission of content. People are no longer capable of thinking or feeling and only a few hold out in secret societies, passionately reading and rereading their beloved, forbidden books as the world whirls to destruction around them. “There are worse crimes than burning books, one is not reading them,” he said. If you do read one Bradbury, read this one. Plus it has killer robot dogs as a bonus.
His next greatest work comprises a collection of short stories linked by theme; ‘Martian Chronicles’ (original title The Silver Locusts in the U.K) deals with the colonisation and eventual abandonment of Mars. Poetic and savagely satirical the book features a gold rush of humanity to exploit the planet, disturbing the spirits of the Martians residing there. The tales contained within vary from small-town nostalgia to gleefully gruesome grand-guignol horror. Some are sad, some are funny and all are haunting. One memorable instance being a tale where the disenfranchised African-Americans of the Jim Crow South club together to escape in their own rockets to Mars, leaving their cracker masters behind – who feel lost without them.
Alongside these two works, it is the unceasingly high quality of his short stories in the collections ‘Dark Carnival’ and ‘The Illustrated Man’ – a tale from which pictures spacemen on a hellish world of endless rain who cannot look up for fear of drowning. His best writing especially concerned youth and its world of endless summer. ‘Dandelion Wine’ compresses an entire adolescent lifetime into one glorious summer as a young boy fantasises strange tales and incidents woven into the small-town reality around him. It is an ode to his childhood home of Waukegan, Illionis and is considered his most personal work.
It would be a mistake however to view Ray Bradbury purely as a peddler of nostalgia, many of his tales had a hard edge of horror in them too. His most direct literary descendant is undoubtedly Stephen King who shares Bradbury’s fascination in supernatural horror being visited upon small America. Bradbury’s novel ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ is set in a carnival and is a bone-chilling tale. His short stories ‘Skeleton’ of a man being filleted by a bone-surgeon until he is a human jellyfish and ‘The Small Assassin’ about a murderous baby are especially chilling reads.
Ray Bradbury helped bring high literature to science fiction and fantasy. Until his arrival it had been looked down upon as more or less Cowboys and Indians in space. He not only showed the critical world how science fiction writing could be sublime but he also inspired his peers to aim higher. How high he stands in American literature can be seen in President Obama being one of the many voices paying tribute.
Many of Ray Bradbury’s books are available to borrow from Cardiff libraries and in an age of being bombarded with sound and vision from all angles Bradbury’s urgent plea for a slower, more thoughtful world has lost none of its aching potency. And he reckoned libraries rocked, his words:
“Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.”
Thanks for the stories, Ray.
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