Oo, thank you for posting this! I made my way to the Wiki entry for “The Illustrated Man” and finally rediscovered the story I’ve thought of on and off for years.
I remembered a detail - a man was caught as not being who he claimed to be because he didn’t adjust his trousers as he sat down. I thought it maybe involved time travel. Sure enough, it was “The Fox and the Forest” about a couple escaping a dystopian, war-filled future via a time-travel trip to the past, and the pursuer who catches up with them.
He really was a science fiction writer. The only people who don’t call him one are the people who say that science fiction can be good, can’t be literature, can’t include fine writing, or use the odious phrase “transcends the genre.” Bradbury was absolutely part of the sf community for most of his life. I don’t know when he made the comment you allude to or what the context was. There are idiots within the field who would exclude him and at times he rightly reacted to that. I really don’t care. If science fiction can be good, then it includes Ray Bradbury. If you don’t think science fiction can be good and have to define good work by taking it out of the field, then nothing you say matters.
Or they have a very narrow definition of “science fiction,” and they reject him for not being scientific or “hard” or Campbellian enough.
I did come across an article (“Did Ray Bradbury Even Write Science Fiction?”) that includes the unattributed claim, “One way to sum Bradbury up is to notice that he is just about the only American science fiction writer to claim, proudly, the label “fantasy” for his books. Fahrenheit 451 … was his only “real” SF book, he said.”
I read The Martian Chronicles when I was 10. I haven’t read it since but I remember the reflection of martians in a puddle and what it meant. He even wanted to be buried on Mars. The fool actually believed we would one day land there. He believed in mankind even knowing our darkest possibilties and still held to the Toynbee Convector view of life. He was an indefatigable optimist. How he could be in the face of NASA funding cuts and massive subsidies for oil companies I’ll never know. That’s not even counting reality TV.
But oh did he know our darkest. The next book I read was and remains my favorite, Something Wicked This Way Comes. He knew somehow of both the secret longings of boys and old men. He knew of a small town America now fading in the rear view and it is a place I miss. He knew the thrill of Carnivals and night excursions on young hearts. He knew how hard those whose youth is fading hold to those dusty remnants they hide away like treasure inside them. He even knew what my father had in his pockets. He broke my heart describing Wills fathers collection of odd bits he carried. They were my Dads, a man in all ways, who nevertheless kept boyhood in his pockets somehow.
It wasn’t the last time he broke my heart. He knew my wish and wrote it in The Wish of Long After Midnight, my favorite of short story collections. That was another time of many but this last I just can’t forgive him for. I knew it was coming and I thought I had steeled myself. I thought I only liked the man as I would any author who exposed all the best and worst of life and revelled in it’s joys like a kid in a pile of leaves or poked at the snake which slithered out with a long stick. I was wrong. This hurts worse than I thought it would. Damn it to hell Ray, I wanted you to live forever.
It may say June on the calendar, but tonight it is October, clear and chill, and a train whistle calls in the distance.
[QUOTE=Something Wicked This Way Comes]
Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt.
[/QUOTE]
I think pretty much everybody knows his Martian Chronicles and his TV series from TV - I need to get my collection of Bradbury out of the barn and scan it in, I can switch scanning plans. [and I get to reread old favorites as I correct the scans:D]
Aw. This is sad. But not really, as he lived a very full and remarkable life. Ray Bradbury was the one who got me hooked on science fiction. He was an amazing writer/storyteller (sci fi or non). Quite the character.
Coincidentally, I currently have The Stories of Ray Bradbury checked out from the library. There’s a hundred short stories in there. And the dvd of Ray Bradbury Theater. I remember when that was on Sci Fi channel a long time ago. Kinda cheesy, but great fun. I will read/watch these in honour of his life.
My favorite story about Ray Bradbury (who I share a birthday with) was when he was guest of honor at the ConFederation worldcon.
At major cons, there often is security to make sure non-members wander into things like the art show or dealer’s room. Bradbury was heading for the art show without his badge. The security guy at the door stopped him and insisted he show his badge. Bradbury dug through his things and took it out.
Security guard: “You see. That wasn’t so hard Mr. Brad-- . . Oh, shit!”
Later, people at the con were seem wearing buttons saying, “Bradbury, Schmadbury, you still have to show your badge.”
When I read his most extensive collection I was quite surprised that more than half of what he wrote was not even close to being science fiction. I’m not trying to mince words about if its good its literature. I mean many of his works have no science fiction elements in them at all. He really didn’t try to pigeon hole himself into a genre.
I went through this in a recent thread. You never know when someone is using “science fiction” to mean the entire extended field, to mean the marketing category that is science fiction, to mean the difference between science fiction and fantasy, to mean Star Trek, or to mean that sub-literate zap gun masturbation crap.
But I’ve been hanging around the field since the St. Louis Worldcon of 1969, which was just about the time when Kurt Vonnegut was beginning his successful campaign to get out of the science fiction ghetto and be accepted as a “real” writer. There’s never been a moment when saying someone wasn’t really a science fiction writer didn’t explicitly mean that they were instead a good writer. Nobody is ever so bad that they can’t be considered a science fiction writer, you know.
Yeah, I’m sensitive on the subject. Fortunately, for those entire forty-plus years there have been people who have been trying to educate the world on the value of really good science fiction, meaning the whole extended field. Success has been very spotty, and waxes and wanes. And that has caused good writers in the field to distance themselves at times from the term “science fiction.” Bradbury, far more than Vonnegut, came up through the field. He was a fan, and published a fanzine, and joined fan groups and later groups of professional writers, and went to conventions, and published in the field’s magazines. He was still one of Us in a way that Vonnegut chose not to be. Fantasy itself is a huge field that takes in far more than pseudo-medieval kings on dragonback crap. If you want to argue that much of what Bradbury wrote was fantasy rather than science fiction, that could be a great discussion. I’d argue that The Martian Chronicles are pure sf, BTW. (“Are” because it’s a collection of short stories, not the title of a novel, no matter how it’s marketed.)
When I say sf I mean f&sf. When you say it - I don’t know what it means. I apologize if that makes me too quick to take offense.
The only point I was trying to make in my posts, was that the author himself felt uncomfortable being referred to as a ‘science fiction’ writer. He mentioned it often enough in interview after interview, that he seemed to not wish to be defined solely that way.
That is all, I wasn’t trying to slight one of my favorite authors, just trying to acknowledge the way he saw himself.
No. I meant that much of his work was not SF by any definition. Much of it was. He had a wide range. Thats what struck me when I delved deep into his work. I almost only read SF. I was pleasantly surprised by a lot of his other works.
Remember this is the guy who wrote the screen play to John Houston’s Moby Dick.
As a side note, no one’s found Mr. Electrico, the carnival magician who tapped young Ray with an electrified sword that fateful Labor Day 1932 in Waukegan, IL, and ignited his passion for writing. One reason? There were (at least) 3 different carnivals in town that day, including one tiny enough to escape much recording by anyone interested in that kind of thing.
I find it kind of fitting that we don’t know who this magician was, that he (so far) remains a mysterious stranger passing through town with a carnival, and whose greatest magic was kindled in that child’s heart.
I think I was in Fifth Grade, 10 years old, and in the SciFi section of the library, saw a book with an Egyptian sarcophagous on the cover. Being a fan of horror movies & into a Mummies/Egypt kick at the time, I picked it up & read the titular story which was NOT about mummies but about something better- a Grandmother!
“I Sing the Body Electric!”
Except for “Christus Apollo” and “Tomorrow’s Child”, I recall no other stories in that book. But ISTBE is for me Ray’s Masterpiece. Serling did a passable but truncated version for The Twilight Zone while NBC around 1982 did a fine, but too-literally titled TV-movie “The Electric Grandmother”.
