Seekers of Tomorrow (49 page)

Between the lines, it tells us that Bradbury's use of racial prejudice in
Way in the Middle of the Air
(other worlds, July, 1950), and its sequel,
The Other Foot
(new story, March, 1951), is merely contrived and not heartfelt and, moreover, in
Fahrenheit 451
he displays his adamant opposi-tion to non-ethnic minority groups that in his view are a major factor in censorship of newspapers, books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and television, a subject upon which he is most vehement. It offers scarcely a word on religion which was the core of
In This Sign
and
The Man
(thrilling wonder stories, February, 1949), so we may reasonably conclude that his use of this material was for impact value and not through conviction. It tells us
why
he fears science, but does not tell us
when
he came to fear science. A good theory is that it happened this way. Few things affected Ray Bradbury as traumatically as the Nazi book burnings. His wrath and indignation at this action, his conviction that civilization is today "burning" books; if not literally, then through neglect, recurs constantly in
Fahrenheit 451.
A psychologist might say that since writ-ing offered Bradbury his one hope of immortality, the de-struction or loss of public interest in the vehicles necessary to convey his thoughts virtually threatens his soul. The very idea is the theme of
The Exiles,
where the spirits of great authors of the past vanish one by one as the final copies of their books are burned as the last person who remembers them dies.

In 1942, Technocracy, Inc., placed advertisements in 100 American newspapers demanding an end to U. S. aid to the allies fighting Nazi Germany. This was the signal for a number of exposes of Technocracy, several of which were summarized by fantasy reporter, June 1942 (an early title of science fiction times), calling the fans to task for supporting the movement.

Among the points fantasy reporter underlined were the following:

1. Fascist dictator of Italy, Mussolini had publicly "adopt-ed" the aims of technocracy previously and was ap-plauded for it by technocrats.

2. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's early edition of Adolph Eich-mann, was quoted as saying that

"condemnation of tech-nocracy is simultaneously condemnation of German genius of invention." The technocracy which Ray Bradbury had so idealistically supported was now allied with the burner of books. Science was after all merely the instrument, not the savior, of man-kind. In the wrong hands it could destroy the world. Atomic bombs and German rockets a few years later added the terror to this view which we later find reflected in his works.

By any standards,
Fahrenheit 451
is only a short novel, surpassing in length Henry James'
Turn of the
Screw,
one of the longer classic short stories by only 10 pages. Even in so short a compass, Bradbury could not sustain the same poetic tempo that characterized his short stories, but lapsed into long periods of straight narrative, competent but undistin-guished. His inability to sustain his style over length had evidenced itself previously in the novelette
The Creatures That Time Forgot.

He thought he could fake it by assembling a group of predominantly nonfantasy short stories from the saturday evening post, charm, mccall’s, cosmopolitan, and every-woman, seed a single character through them, connect the pieces with interim chapters, and call it in big letters on the jacket "a novel." This was
Dandelion Wine
(Doubleday, 1957), and while it contained some extremely well written, perceptive, and sensitive short stories, it wasn't a novel.

Bradbury wasn't a quitter. The next try,
Something Wick-ed This Way Comes
(Simon and Schuster, 1962), tried another approach—expanding the short story,
Nightmare Carousel
(mademoiselle, January, 1962), to novel length. Combining elements of boyhood memories and carnival nostalgia, Bradbury uncovered the sinister side of this small-town entertainment, focused upon a merry-go-round that made its riders younger when it was reversed and older when it moved forward. Here he succeeded in writing the entire book at a high level of craftsmanship, but he forgot that a novel is more than words and finished with an absurdly drawn-out short story.

Several times there had been talk of putting
Fahrenheit 451
on Broadway as a legitimate play but each time the idea had fallen through. A few of Bradbury's stories had been adapted as one act plays.
A Scent
of Sarsaparilla
was set to music by Charles Hamm, with narration by Anthony Boucher, as a feature of The 12th World Science Fiction Convention in September, 1954, in San Francisco: the story of a henpecked husband who finds such comfort in the objects of a happier past in his attic that he vanishes into that simpler period. Extremely effective were a number of Bradbury stories adapted for television. At the threshold of his writing career, Bradbury made the choice to sidetrack his theatrical aspirations. A stay in Ireland writing the script for
Moby Dick
renewed his interest Sever-al years after the completion of
Moby Dick
he began to include playwriting as part of his work itinerary. The fruit of this was
The
Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics,
a collection of four one-act plays about Ireland published by Dial in 1963.

Frustrated in earlier attempts to get his plays produced, Bradbury obtained nationwide publicity when three of his plays, possibly with his own financing, under the heading of "The World of Ray Bradbury," opened October 8, 1964, at the Coronet Theater Los Angeles. The plays were all futuris-tic fantasies:
The
Veldt
(originally
The World the Children Made,
Saturday evening post, September 23, 1950), about the three-dimensional play room that proves real;
The Pedestrian
(the reporter, August 7, 1951), of an era when a man walking the streets at night will be regarded as an eccentric who should be arrested; and
To
the Chicago Abyss,
depicting the attitudes of after-the-atomic-war society. The intent was to expand the number of plays and take them around the country in repertory. To get them produced Bradbury had to organize The Pandemonium Theater Com-pany himself. Reaction was unexpectedly good, with especial-ly strong support from columnist Cecil Smith writing in the October 26, 1964, los angeles times, who said:

"Unques-tionably, the most exciting theatrical event of the year here was the opening a couple of weeks ago of three short fantastic plays by Ray Bradbury under the collective title The World of Ray Bradbury,'

which are fascinating and horrifying capacity audiences nightly at the Coronet The-ater." At almost the same time, he was reported working on the film script of
The Martian Chronicles
for what was said to be a ten-million-dollar production by the producing-acting team of Alan Pakula and Bob Mulligan for Universal Films.

It was significant that achieving a critical theater success with three of his science-fiction plays, even if it proved limited, and in connecting with the single biggest motion picture offer of his career for one of his own stories, it was Bradbury's science fiction that turned the trick. Bradbury is today an important writer on the American scene but his emphasis on science fiction seems to be a thing of the past. His stories in that genre are usually created for a special event, such as the special Ray Bradbury issue of the mag-azine OF

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION (May, 1963), for which he wrote
To the Chicago Abyss,
and not as a regular part of his writing schedule. In the period between 1955 and 1965, he had fewer stories included in science-fiction antholo-gies than any other major figure in the field, according to
A Checklist of
Science-Fiction Anthologies,
compiled by Walter R. Cole (1964). His literary output during that time was not even mainstream, it was conformist, whether written for playboy or a literary journal. It was good, skillful work, but like his weird material, it was bracketed by legions of other good, skillful writers. When a new book of his is reviewed, all too frequently the few items of science fiction are singled out and most of the rest given a polite nod. The only books of Bradbury's that the future is not likely to "burn" are those that follow closest to the style of
The Martian Chronicles.
His "messages" get across only when clothed in the vestments of science. H. G. Wells and Jules Verne both had to learn that lesson. It is now Bradbury's turn.

Among science-fiction writers who have gained their emi-nence since 1940, possibly Ray Bradbury is the only one as familiar to the general public as Arthur C. Clarke. This is a popularity that has been rewarded in terms of economics as well as prestige. Clarke's suspenseful novel,
A Fall of Moon-dust,
published in 1961, achieved the unprecedented distinc-tion of being the first interplanetary story ever used by
Reader's Digest Condensed Book Library.
The hundreds of thousands of subscribers to that immensely successful book club chewed their fingernails as they read of the scientifically tense battle to save the occupants of a moon ship buried deep in the treacherous sands of a lunar crater.
A Fall of Moondust
was a good book, certainly one of the better science-fiction novels of the year, and it deserved the book club selection, yet it is doubtful if it would ever have been considered were it not for the fact that Clarke had nine years previously enjoyed a Book-of-the-Month-Club choice (July, 1952) for his exposition of popular science,
The Exploration of Space.

The always substantial publicity attendant on a Book-of-the-Month-Club nod gave Clarke literary status. Book pub-lishers who had ignored his fiction previously now were delighted to feature it on their lists. Not only did Clarke's science-fiction books receive principal reviews, but they were evaluated as serious efforts.
A Fall of Moondust
was possibly the most profitable of all Clarke's works of fiction, but his standing as an important writer was established when the new york times and other highly regarded sources of liter-ary criticism gave lead and praise-saturated reviews to his Stapledonian concepts in
Childhood's
End,
published by Bal-lantine Books in 1953.

Almost as far back as the family tree can be traced, all of the Clarke family had been farmers. When Arthur was born, December 16, 1917, in his grandmother's boarding house, in Minehead, Somerset, England, it was reasonable to suppose he would follow in the tradition.

That this would not prove to be the case began to evidence itself as early as the age of 10 when his father presented him with a series of cigarette cards of prehistoric animals and the boy became deeply interested in the subject of paleontology, collecting fossils at a furious rate. Before Arthur was 12 his father had died and his mother had to struggle to keep the farm going and her son in school. She received small help from the boy, whose interest had shifted from paleontology to astronomy. To implement this switch he constructed his own telescopes out of old Meccano parts.

Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, had also patented the photophone, a device by which sound waves vibrated a beam of reflected sunlight and the receiver changed the varying light intensity back into sound. Clarke had built his own photophone transmitter from a bicycle headlight, and also played with audio modulation of sunlight by mechanical means by the time he was 13.

In 1927, Clarke discovered amazing stories, which served as a literary hypodermic, injecting him with an imaginative drug that required increasingly larger dosage as he grew older, until the day that he received an entire crate of wonder stories for 5 cents a copy stood out with such memorableness that it was to be recorded unfailing in each autobiographical sketch he wrote.

He must have seemed a strange teen-ager to fellow stu-dents of Huish's Grammar School in Taunton, but by his fifteenth birthday he had adjusted to the point where he was writing fantasies for the school paper and making his mark as an assistant editor. As early as that it was obvious that all his life he would be torn between the fascinating realities of science and the siren call of imaginative literary day dreams. Today, with the American Rocket Society and the British Interplanetary Society, respected scientific institutions, recog-nized as factors in the advancement of research through their handsome journals, it has been forgotten they were both launched by science-fiction editors, writers, and readers. The American society was pioneered by David Lasser, editor of wonder stories, in New York on March 21, 1930. The British Interplanetary Society was founded by P. E. Cleator, a science-fiction enthusiast, in October, 1933, in Liverpool, England. Clarke discovered the existence of the English organization through science-fiction correspondents and joined it during the summer of 1934 as an associate member. This seemingly simple act of enthusiasm was to turn out to be the most profound and far-reaching decision of his life. Without the money for higher education, Clarke found himself with the urgent necessity of earning a livelihood. He took a civil service examination for position as auditor in His Majesty's Exchequer and Audit Department. It was the Depression and openings were scarce. Over 1,500 people competed for the available positions, and Clarke, who came out twenty-sixth in ratings, managed to secure a post in London. He moved to London in 1936 and rented a room in a house that was so tiny that it became the standing joke of his acquaintances. When he entertained a visitor, he had to open the window and sit partly outside the room, otherwise there wasn't any space for the two of them and the bed. The other alternative was to leave the door open and have one sit in the hall.

A London branch of the British Interplanetary Society was formed on October 27, 1936, at the offices of Professor A. M. Low, 8 Waterloo Place, Piccadilly. Low was a respected inventor and the editor of armchair science, as well as the author of a number of books of popular science and juvenile fantasies. Behind this was a desire to move BIS headquarters to London. Cleator resigned in protest as president of the organization and Low ascended to his position. Arthur Clarke was made treasurer of the society and began to work active-ly for the group.