I’ve read some science fiction which tries to do prediction as its goal, and it is pretty much awful. Science fiction is “if this thing happens, is invented, etc., what are the impacts?”
Sure some “predictions” work out, but that’s because sf is like firing a machine gun at a target and ignoring the bullet holes not in the bullseye.
I may be interpreting this incorrectly, but Astounding only published one of Bradbury’s stories, though a few Probability Zeros. Not for lack of trying on Bradbury’s part. A check shows that he and Campbell corresponded a good deal, though they did not hit it off, which is hardly surprising.
In the early 1950s, thanks to the bomb and the V2 tests at White Sands, mainstream high class magazines like the Saturday Evening Post started publishing some sf. Bradbury’s work did not assume the reader knew the conventions of the field, and were probably more salable.
It would be a different book to be sure, but it is pretty easy to imagine Stephen King writing a version of Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.
To me, science fiction isn’t so much about presenting a possible future as presenting a plausible future. If I come out of a story thinking, “Sure, that could happen”, then it’s done its job.
The best of Asimov’s robot stories was The Bicentennial Man, which was written much too late to be included in I, Robot, but I really feel like it should have been added to more recent editions.
It’d be VERY easy. King not only praised SWTWC in his book on horror fiction, Danse Macabre, he stole Bradbury’s character from it , The Lightning Rod Salesman, for The Dead Zone.
In my teen years I thought I realized how little Bradbury I read. I got an unabridged Bradbury collection and read it front to back. I don’t remember most of it because unlike what seems like many of you I don’t retain books I read 40 years ago. I knew he wrote the softest of soft science fiction but I was surprised when I found that so many of his stories weren’t close to being science fiction. I found it interesting that Bradbury would be stuck in the science fiction section when Vonnegut wasn’t.
Hugh Hefner was huge nerd. He loved science fiction, so it’s not surprising that he ran it.
He also published Bradbury’s “A Sound of THunder”, although it was its first publication.
Over the years he published the works of several SF writers, including Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. George Langelaan’s The Fly first appeared in Playboy. In fact, they eventually published a few paperback anthologies of SF that had appeared in Playboy and a hardcover one
I have the hardcover edition of Playboy SF - very good. They also did one of stories of horror and the supernatural.
Fahrenheit 451 first appeared as a novella called “The Fireman” in the February 1951 Galaxy. I’m holding it in my hand now.
And of course Bob Guccione of Penthouse and his wife Kathy Keeton were even bigger nerds. I once had the issue of Omni with George Martin’s Sandkings in it. Not very likeable people, but they did create purportedly well-paying forums for sf publication back in the day.
To address some of the points made in this thread:
I figured someone would reference Martin Prince’s line in The Simpsons. I’ve always wanted to ask the writers of that episode why Martin would diss Ray Bradbury…not only one of the greatest speculative fiction writers of all time, but someone who championed reading and education.
I wouldn’t call everything Bradbury wrote “horribly depressing” at all. He wrote horror and tragedy, but also warmth, hope, beauty and wonder. Just look at “I Sing The Body Electric”, which I was introduced to through the 1982 TV-movie The Electric Grandmother. (There was also a Twilight Zone episode of that, but I preferred the TV-movie. I never liked the Zone version because I thought it needlessly changed character names and genders and lopped off the wonderful ending where Grandma came back to tend to the children in their old age…then I found out, not too long ago, that the Zone screenplay actually came first, and Bradbury reworked it into the short story later. I still prefer The Electric Grandmother, though. Then there’s “Bless Me, Father, For I Have Sinned”, a poignant Christmas tale that resonates with me as a Catholic. And of course, The Halloween Tree and Something Wicked This Way Comes (and its underrated Disney film adaptation), both of which end on warm notes despite dealing with such topics as evil, unfulfilled wishes (and how they can be fulfilled in ways that turn on you), and death.
And as far as Bradbury not seeming to know what nuclear war would really be like…look at Fahrenheit 451. An atomic war in that novel is presented as “the cities will be rubble, but everywhere outside the cities will be okay.” And it ends with Guy Montag and some other characters walking back to the city’s ruins to help survivors…walking right back into the fallout zone! It makes a bit more sense when you consider that the F451 we know was published in 1953, and its first draft, the novella “The Fireman”, was published in 1950. That was only five to eight years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I’m assuming the widespread aftereffects of nuclear weapons weren’t generally known at that point. It also made a little more sense in “The Fireman” when the war was described as only “semi-atomic”. But by the time the first film adaptation was made in 1966, the lasting dangers of nuclear weapons were common knowledge, so it makes sense that they left out the war in that version. If they ever did make another big-screen adaptation (I’ll pass over that HBO version from 2018 that was only an adaptation in name only, and seemed more like William Gibson than Ray Bradbury), they’d probably have to do the same thing…I can’t see them portraying a post-nuclear future as a hopeful ending in the post-Day After, post-Threads, post-When The Wind Blows era.
Because obviously Martin belongs to the old-school class of math and physics obsessed nerd who likes hard sci-fi and doesn’t even rate Bradbury and other soft sci-fi as real science fiction.
I rather dislike that “old-school” tag.. (of course I realize it wasn’t personally directed).
I like my SF to be scientifically accurate. It’s just a different matter of taste. Though I love Cordwainer Smith and Jack Vance too… there is a place for poetry.
Heh, yeah, I read it several times as a teenager, and then reread it recently after a gap of thirty years or so. I had completely forgotten that there was a nuclear war in it, and I’d been vaguely thinking of it as a 1960s-era book all that time. On rereading, I was … nonplussed by the ending until I checked the copyright date. (Realizing it was specifically a McCarthy era book caused several other things to make more sense, as well.)
