Seekers of Tomorrow (48 page)

So, Bradbury reluctantly poured most of his energies into the weird, horrible, and terrifying. Drawing primarily on memories of childhood, he sold a continuous stream of outre, grotesque, bizarre tales with titles like
The Sea Shell, Re-union, The Lake, The Jar, The Poems, The Tombstone,
and, probably most memorable of all,
The Night,
a realistic por-trayal of the gradually rising tension and fear engendered by the waiting and then the searching for a child out too late and overdue.

One such story,
The Long Night,
fell into the detective story category, and Julius Schwartz submitted it to Popular Publications' new detective. On buying it, editor W. Ryer-son Johnson told Schwartz: "This Bradbury is beyond question the most promising writer I have ever read. He's going places and let me see more." Schwartz passed the message on to Bradbury, who began alternating weird tales with detective stories, eventually selling nearly a score of them to detec-tive tales, detective fiction, detective book magazine, dime mystery, and new detective. One,
Wake for the Dead,
in the September, 1947, dime mystery, was science fiction, built around the concept of a completely automatic coffin. Another,
The Small Assassin,
has become a Bradbury classic, concerning a baby that murders both of its parents.

Occasional Bradbury science fiction appeared.
I, Rocket
in the May, 1944, amazing stories was an effective interplane-tary adventure told from the viewpoint of the rocket ship. A little earlier,
King of the
Grey Spaces
in the December, 1943, famous fantastic mysteries, was a sensitive story of a young boy trained and finally selected from among many to go to space.

The most dependable market for Bradbury's science fiction was the action-adventure pulp planet stories. At first he conformed to adventure formula, even doing a revival of Robert E. Howard's Conan-style adventure in
Lorelei of the Red Mist,
(Summer, 1946), in collaboration with Leigh Brackett. The notion of a morgue spaceship, to pick up bodies after interplanetary wars, was unique, but his use of the theme in two stories,
Morgue Ship
(Summer, 1944), and
Lazarus, Come Forth
(Winter, 1944), was undistinguished. Then it happened. A story submitted to planet stories as
The Family Outing
appeared in the Summer, 1946, issue of that magazine as
The Million Year Picnic.
In cash it was worth only $32, but in reader reaction incalculably more. This story of the last family from Earth, sailing down a river on Mars to become the first of a new race of Martians, was not only the first of his Martian Chronicle stories to see print, but also one of the best.

Far more remarkable, but almost forgotten until reprinted as
Frost and Fire
in his Doubleday Collection
R Is for Rocket
(1962), was
The Creatures That Time Forgot
(planet stories Fall, 1946). This was Bradbury's second longest story, nearly 22,000 words in length, and had all the earmarks of an epic. Somewhere, somehow, the 26-year-old Ray Bradbury had been confronted by the "realization of mortality." In this story, which he originally called
Eight Day World,
he envisaged a group of humans stranded on a radio-active planet, where the entire process of human growth and life were speeded up to only eight days.

"Birth was quick as a knife," wrote Bradbury. "Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Manhood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty."

Bradbury's friend Edmond Hamilton based a short story,
The Ephemerae
(astounding science-fiction, December, 1938), on a human race whose life-span was but seventy days, but even if this was the spark that ignited
The Creature That Time Forgot,
no apologies were in order. At times, the efforts of the proponents to fight their way to a spaceship that offers escape and a normal life before they die of old age descends to the action level of the pulps, but the allegory is so powerful that the overall effect is memorable.

The year previous, Bradbury's hopes had been raised by the sale of a nonfantasy,
The Big Black and
White Game,
to the American mercury (August, 1945). Then published by Lawrence Spivak, the American mercury was a prestige magazine and, though its rates were very low compared to most other general magazines, they were the highest Brad-bury had ever received. Again, drawing from childhood, Bradbury attempted a mainstream theme of interracial ten-sion at a ball game. The story was selected for inclusion in Martha Foley's
The Best Short Stories of 1946.

This, together with the power displayed in Bradbury's science fiction, was an augury. The April 13, 1946, issue of collier's carried his short story,
One Timeless Spring,
and the April, 1946, issue of charm,
The Miracles of Jamie.

mademoiselle published
The Invisible Boy,
a touching tale of a witch woman trying to conquer loneliness with spells that never work, in its November, 1945, issue. The same magazine rang all bells with
Homecoming
in its Octo-ber, 1946, number, a story selected for inclusion in the 0. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories for 1947.
Homecoming
tells of the gathering of a family of witches, vampires, and dybbuks, and the teen-age boy among them who has been born human and is patronized by his more "fortunate" relatives. Here is expressed the yearning of children for some of the magical attributes of the creatures of superstition and fancy, brilliantly defined, with the hint that Bradbury's inti-mation of mortality was derived in his early youth from folklore.

An underrated story is
Defense Mech
in planet stories for Spring, 1946, which really is an early try, and a nearly successful one, at the theme made famous in
Mars Is Heav-en,
except that here a single mentally disturbed space traveler suffers from the hallucination that he is viewing Earth scenes on Mars.
Zero
Hour,
in planet stories for Fall, 1947, was billed by the editors as "one of the best science-fiction stories we have ever seen. Perhaps you will think it the
best!"
It is another classic in the tradition of
Sredni Vashtar
by Saki,
Thus I Refute Beelzy
by John Collier; and
Mimsy Were The Borogoves
by Henry Kuttner, reflecting the gulf in under-standing between parents and children and the resultant an-tagonism. Up to then, Bradbury had rarely received more than a cent a word for his stories, but now the rate on the science fiction climbed to two cents a word, planet stories paid that for
Pillar of Fire,
a total of $250

for one of Bradbury's strangest tales. A zombie climbs from its coffin, the last cadaver in a world that burns all its dead. Here we learn of the Mars of
The Martian Chronicles.
Here, too, the books have been burned and the burning of this "living dead man" will obliterate the last memories of Edgar Allen Poe, Am-brose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other masters of fantasy. When the authorities finally appre-hend and burn this last dead man,
Pillar of Fire
becomes an enthralling prelude to
The Exiles
(the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, Winter-Spring, 1950), in which ghosts of great writers of the past, hiding on Mars, are expunged when the last memory of them is gone.
Mars Is Heaven
followed in planet stories for Fall, 1948. A possible influence on Bradbury here was Stanley G. Weinbaum's
Martian Odyssey,
in which a predatory plant conjures up visions of the most desired objects of its prey in order to lure them to their deaths. Earthmen land on Mars to find everything just like a midwestern town, complete to brass band. They find their dead relatives waiting to welcome them and then, while asleep in their memories of childhood, they are killed. It is certainly one of the most original meth-ods of repulsing an interplanetary invasion ever conceived.

In May, 1947, Ray Bradbury's first hard-covered collec-tion,
Dark Carnival,
made up primarily of his weird tales, was published by Arkham House. Bradbury sent a copy to Julius Schwartz with an inscription which read: "For Julie, in fond remembrances of Norton Street—The Piper'—The Moon Festival in Chinatown—Lil Abner—'Are You Kidding?'—That old song, circa 1941: 'Daddy'—The beach—The burlesque— And then New York and George Brunis—God, what a beauti-ful night!—and because you sold almost every story in this book for me—With luff, from Ray Bradbury." Six months later, when Schwartz sold
The Black Ferris
to weird tales on January 2, 1948, their business relationship was ended. Schwartz was a specialist in science fiction. He wrote to Bradbury and candidly told him that as an agent he had taken him as far as he was able. From this point on he would be retarding, not helping to advance his client.

On his own, Bradbury was already clicking with the new yorker and harper's. A few years later coronet would condense
Mars Is Heaven
and esquire would reprint it in full, esquire would also reprint
The Earth
Men, The Spring Night,
and
Usher II,
all from the science-fiction pulps. Brad-bury had long been selling below his market. Bradbury could no longer be ignored. Newspaper and magazine critics were generous, but in the fantasy and science-fiction field opinion was mixed.

It was common for critics of Bradbury to state that all he had to sell was emotion. This is considerably removed from the truth, which reveals a substantial Bradbury influence on science fiction. Richard Matheson was unquestionably in-debted in style, mood, and approach to Bradbury. His most famous story,
Born of Man and Woman,
is a variant on Bradbury's use of childhood horror. Charles E. Fritch closely imitated Bradbury in a series of stories in the early 1950's. Judith Merril, who established her reputation with
That Only Mother,
a story of a mother who can see nothing wrong with her mutated, limbless child, published in astounding science-fiction for June, 1948, certainly owes some inspiration to Bradbury, whose touching vignette,
The Shape of Things,
in thrilling wonder stories for February, 1948, deals with a woman who can see nothing wrong in her child, born in the shape of a triangle. James Blish, who went on to win a Hugo in 1959 with
A Case of Conscience,
a novel of the dilemma of a priest on a planet where creatures exist without original sin, should bow respectfully in the direction of Bradbury's
In This Sign (The Fire
Balloons),
published originally in imagi-nation, April, 1951, which tells of priests who go to Mars and discover Martians without original sin.

Bradbury has won several lawsuits—including one directed against
Playhouse 90,
for its
A Sound of
Different Drummers
because of its similarity to
Fahrenheit 451
—for appropriating ideas from his works. Obviously, there must have been some-thing more substantial than emotion and mood borrowed. Most significant of all, astounding science-fiction, which got first look at most Bradbury stories, including
Mars Is Heaven, Zero Hour, Pillar of Fire, The Million Year Picnic,
and
The Earth Men,
and rejected them all as not being the right type, now sometimes runs precisely that sort of story. See, for example,
The First One
by Herbert D. Kastle in its July, 1961, number, dealing with the aloneness of the first man back from Mars and the gap he finds between his family and himself.
The Martian Chronicles
(1950) and the collection
The Illustrated Man
(1951) gave Bradbury acceptance among general readers for his science fiction. The question has fre-quently been raised as to why the highly original and skillful weird tales in
Dark Carnival
and later, most of them reprint-ed in
The
October Country,
failed to gain similar acclaim. The answer seems to be that there are many extraordinarily brilliant practitioners in the field of the off-trail, horror, and supernatural: men and women with superb command of the language and remarkable originality—John Collier, Roald Dahl, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, A. E. Coppard, Algernon Blackwood, Theodore Sturgeon, Walter de la Mare, Saki, M. R. James, W. F. Harvey, E. F. Benson, May Sinclair, and Lord Dunsany, to name a portion. Bradbury can stand above a few of them, with most of them, and below some of them, but in that kind of competition he cannot lead.

The reverse is true in science fiction. There, his ideas appear strikingly original and his style is scintillating. In style, few match him, and the uniqueness of a story of Mars or Venus told in the contrasting literary rhythms of Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe is enough to fascinate any critic. Mainstream themes and mainstream writing in a science-fiction setting are Bradbury's contributions to fiction. In this he is singularly original and magazines like collier's have not hesitated to run such stories as
There Will Come
Soft Rains
(May 6, 1950), graphically depicting atomic disaster by indirection, or
To the Future
(May 13, 1950), on the attempt of a couple to escape from a 1984-type future to the relative freedom of modern Mexico City. So, too, the Saturday evening post featured
The World the Children Made
(Sep-tember 23, 1950), concerning a playroom in three-dimensional TV whose pictures resolve into fourth-dimen-sional reality, or
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
(June 23, 1951), in which a prehistoric monster rises from his sleep in the muck of the Atlantic to respond to the notes of a foghorn.

One charge brought against Bradbury is true, that his stories raise issue on purely emotional levels and offer no logic to support the stand he takes. It is often difficult to determine which issues he artificially adopts for the sake of the story and on which he is sincere.

The problem was resolved by the publication in book form of
Fahrenheit 451
(Ballantine Books, 1953), the closest Bradbury has ever come to writing a novel. A lengthened version of
The Fireman,
which ran in galaxy science fic-tion for February, 1951, this story presents, in some detail, the basis of Bradbury's grievances. Because of this, this story of a future America where the job of a fireman is not to put out fires but to burn books, reads a bit more slowly than Bradbury's shorter works, but it is by all odds one of his best and most revealing.