Tag Archives: Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s Real World Dystopia

Ray Bradbury’s death on June 5 reminds us of his uncanny gift for inventing a future that is much like our modern day reality.

Bradbury’s body of work beginning in the early 1940s introduced us to ATMs, wall mounted flat screen TVs, ear-piece radios, online social networks, self-driving cars, and electronic surveillance. Bravely and presciently he also warned us of technologically induced cultural amnesia, social isolation, indifference to violence, and dumbed-down 24/7 mass media.

An especially thoughtful opinion from author Tim Kreider on Bradbury’s life as a “misanthropic humanist”.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

IF you’d wanted to know which way the world was headed in the mid-20th century, you wouldn’t have found much indication in any of the day’s literary prizewinners. You’d have been better advised to consult a book from a marginal genre with a cover illustration of a stricken figure made of newsprint catching fire.

Prescience is not the measure of a science-fiction author’s success — we don’t value the work of H. G. Wells because he foresaw the atomic bomb or Arthur C. Clarke for inventing the communications satellite — but it is worth pausing, on the occasion of Ray Bradbury’s death, to notice how uncannily accurate was his vision of the numb, cruel future we now inhabit.

Mr. Bradbury’s most famous novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” features wall-size television screens that are the centerpieces of “parlors” where people spend their evenings watching interactive soaps and vicious slapstick, live police chases and true-crime dramatizations that invite viewers to help catch the criminals. People wear “seashell” transistor radios that fit into their ears. Note the perversion of quaint terms like “parlor” and “seashell,” harking back to bygone days and vanished places, where people might visit with their neighbors or listen for the sound of the sea in a chambered nautilus.

Mr. Bradbury didn’t just extrapolate the evolution of gadgetry; he foresaw how it would stunt and deform our psyches. “It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you,” says the protagonist of the prophetic short story “The Murderer.” “First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy.”

Anyone who’s had his intended tone flattened out or irony deleted by e-mail and had to explain himself knows what he means. The character complains that he’s relentlessly pestered with calls from friends and employers, salesmen and pollsters, people calling simply because they can. Mr. Bradbury’s vision of “tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, ‘Now I’m at Forty-third, now I’m at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first” has gone from science-fiction satire to dreary realism.

“It was all so enchanting at first,” muses our protagonist. “They were almost toys, to be played with, but the people got too involved, went too far, and got wrapped up in a pattern of social behavior and couldn’t get out, couldn’t admit they were in, even.”

Most of all, Mr. Bradbury knew how the future would feel: louder, faster, stupider, meaner, increasingly inane and violent. Collective cultural amnesia, anhedonia, isolation. The hysterical censoriousness of political correctness. Teenagers killing one another for kicks. Grown-ups reading comic books. A postliterate populace. “I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths,” says the fire captain in “Fahrenheit,” written in 1953. “No one wanted them back. No one missed them.” Civilization drowned out and obliterated by electronic chatter. The book’s protagonist, Guy Montag, secretly trying to memorize the Book of Ecclesiastes on a train, finally leaps up screaming, maddened by an incessant jingle for “Denham’s Dentrifice.” A man is arrested for walking on a residential street. Everyone locked indoors at night, immersed in the social lives of imaginary friends and families on TV, while the government bombs someone on the other side of the planet. Does any of this sound familiar?

The hero of “The Murderer” finally goes on a rampage and smashes all the yammering, blatting devices around him, expressing remorse only over the Insinkerator — “a practical device indeed,” he mourns, “which never said a word.” It’s often been remarked that for a science-fiction writer, Mr. Bradbury was something of a Luddite — anti-technology, anti-modern, even anti-intellectual. (“Put me in a room with a pad and a pencil and set me up against a hundred people with a hundred computers,” he challenged a Wired magazine interviewer, and swore he would “outcreate” every one.)

But it was more complicated than that; his objections were not so much reactionary or political as they were aesthetic. He hated ugliness, noise and vulgarity. He opposed the kind of technology that deadened imagination, the modernity that would trash the past, the kind of intellectualism that tried to centrifuge out awe and beauty. He famously did not care to drive or fly, but he was a passionate proponent of space travel, not because of its practical benefits but because he saw it as the great spiritual endeavor of the age, our generation’s cathedral building, a bid for immortality among the stars.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Technorati.[end-div]

Ray Bradbury – His Books Will Not Burn

“Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.” [From Fahrenheit 451].

Ray Bradbury left our planet on June 5. He was 91 years old.

Yet, a part of him lives on Mars. A digital copy of Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”, along with works by other science fiction authors, reached the Martian northern plains in 2008, courtesy of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander spacecraft.

Ray Bradbury is likely to be best-remembered for his seminal science fiction work, Fahrenheit 451. The literary community will remember him as one of the world’s preeminent authors of short-stories and novellas. In fact, he also wrote plays, screenplays, children’s books and works of literary criticism. Many of his over 400 works, dating from the 1950’s to the present day, have greatly influenced contemporary writers and artists. He had a supreme gift for melding poetry with prose, dark vision with humor and social commentary with imagined worlds. Bradbury received the U.S. National Medal of Arts in 2004.

He will be missed; his books will not burn.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

By many estimations Mr. Bradbury was the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream. His name would appear near the top of any list of major science-fiction writers of the 20th century, beside those of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein and the Polish author Stanislaw Lem. His books have been taught in schools and colleges, where many a reader has been introduced to them decades after they first appeared. Many have said his stories fired their own imaginations.

More than eight million copies of his books have been sold in 36 languages. They include the short-story collections “The Martian Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man” and “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” and the novels “Fahrenheit 451” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

Though none won a Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Bradbury received a Pulitzer citation in 2007 “for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.”

His writing career stretched across 70 years, to the last weeks of his life. The New Yorker published an autobiographical essay by him in its June 4th double issue devoted to science fiction. There he recalled his “hungry imagination” as a boy in Illinois.

“It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another,” he wrote, noting, “You rarely have such fevers later in life that fill your entire day with emotion.”

Mr. Bradbury sold his first story to a magazine called Super Science Stories in his early 20s. By 30 he had made his reputation with “The Martian Chronicles,” a collection of thematically linked stories published in 1950.

The book celebrated the romance of space travel while condemning the social abuses that modern technology had made possible, and its impact was immediate and lasting. Critics who had dismissed science fiction as adolescent prattle praised “Chronicles” as stylishly written morality tales set in a future that seemed just around the corner.

Mr. Bradbury was hardly the first writer to represent science and technology as a mixed bag of blessings and abominations. The advent of the atomic bomb in 1945 left many Americans deeply ambivalent toward science. The same “super science” that had ended World War II now appeared to threaten the very existence of civilization. Science-fiction writers, who were accustomed to thinking about the role of science in society, had trenchant things to say about the nuclear threat.

But the audience for science fiction, published mostly in pulp magazines, was small and insignificant. Mr. Bradbury looked to a larger audience: the readers of mass-circulation magazines like Mademoiselle and The Saturday Evening Post. These readers had no patience for the technical jargon of the science fiction pulps. So he eliminated the jargon; he packaged his troubling speculations about the future in an appealing blend of cozy colloquialisms and poetic metaphors.

Though his books, particularly “The Martian Chronicles,” became a staple of high school and college English courses, Mr. Bradbury himself disdained formal education. He went so far as to attribute his success as a writer to his never having gone to college.

Instead, he read everything he could get his hands on: Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway. He paid homage to them in 1971 in the essay “How Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated From Libraries.” (Late in life he took an active role in fund-raising efforts for public libraries in Southern California.)

Mr. Bradbury referred to himself as an “idea writer,” by which he meant something quite different from erudite or scholarly. “I have fun with ideas; I play with them,” he said. “ I’m not a serious person, and I don’t like serious people. I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.”

He added, “My goal is to entertain myself and others.”

He described his method of composition as “word association,” often triggered by a favorite line of poetry.

Mr. Bradbury’s passion for books found expression in his dystopian novel “Fahrenheit 451,” published in 1953. But he drew his primary inspiration from his childhood. He boasted that he had total recall of his earliest years, including the moment of his birth. Readers had no reason to doubt him.As for the protagonists of his stories, no matter how far they journeyed from home, they learned that they could never escape the past.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Ray Bradbury, 1975. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]

Fahrenheit 2451? Ray Bradbury Comes to the eReader

Fahrenheit 2,451 may well be the temperature at which the glass in your Kindle or Nook eReader is likely to melt. This may give Ray Bradbury mixed feelings.

In one of his masterworks, Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury warned of the displacement and destruction of books by newer means of distribution such as television. Of the novel’s central idea Bradbury says, “It’s about the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news, the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids… We’ve moved in to this period of history that I described in Fahrenheit 50 years ago.”

So, it’s rather a surprise to see his work in full digital form available through an eReader, such as the Kindle or Nook. More over at Wired on Bradbury’s reasoning.

[div class=attrib]From Wired:[end-div]

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is now officially available as an e-book. Simon & Schuster are publishing both the hardcover and digital editions in the United States for a deal reportedly worth millions of dollars, according to the Associated Press.

Bradbury has been vocal about his dislike for e-books and the internet, calling it “a big distraction.” In order to get him to relent, the publisher had to both pay a premium price and play a little hardball.

Bradbury’s agent Michael Congdon told the AP that renewing the book’s hardcover rights, whether with Simon & Schuster or any other publisher, had to include digital rights as well.

“We explained the situation to [Bradbury] that a new contract wouldn’t be possible without e-book rights,” said Congdon. “He understood and gave us the right to go ahead.”

Unfortunately for hard-core Bradbury fans, according to Simon & Schuster’s press release [PDF], only Fahrenheit 451 is currently being released as an e-book. The deal includes the mass-market rights to The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, but not their digital rights.

Like the Harry Potter books before them, samizdat digital copies of Bradbury’s books edited by fans have been floating around for years. (I don’t know anyone who’s actually memorized Fahrenheit, like the novel’s “Book People” do with banned books.)

Bradbury is far from the last digital holdout. Another K-12 classic, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, is only available in print. None of Thomas Pynchon’s novels are available as e-books, although Pynchon has been characteristically quiet on the subject. Nor are any English translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and only a few of Marquez’s story collections and none of his classic novels are even available in Spanish. Early editions of James Joyce’s books are in the public domain, but Finnegans Wake, whose rights are tightly controlled by Joyce’s grandson, is not.

Most of the gaps in the digital catalog, however, don’t stem from individual authors or rightsholders holding out like Bradbury. They’re structural; whole presses whose catalogs haven’t been digitized, whose rights aren’t extended to certain countries, or whose contracts didn’t anticipate some of the newer innovations in e-reading, such as book lending, whether from a retailer, another user, or a public library.

In light of Bradbury’s lifelong advocacy for libraries, I asked Simon & Schuster whether Fahrenheit 451 would be made available for digital lending; their representatives did not respond. [Update: Simon & Schuster’s Emer Flounders says the publisher plans to make Fahrenheit 451 available as an e-book to libraries in the first half of 2012.]

In a 2009 interview, Bradbury says he rebuffed an offer from Yahoo to publish a book or story on the internet. “You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Fahrenheit 451. Courtesy of Panther.[end-div]