From Margaret Atwood via The Paris Review:
At the end of February 2012, I was sitting in a bar in the Chicago Hilton, discussing Ray Bradbury. I was staying at the Hilton, and in a moment of Bradburian weirdness, I had been put into the suite where President Obama saw on TV that he had just won the U.S. presidential election.
On that occasion, the immense, many-roomed suite must have been full—of family, of security folks, of political staffers—but I was in it all alone, and it was not the best place to be while dwelling on things Bradburian. It was too easy to imagine that there was someone in the next room. Worse, that someone might be my evil twin, or myself at a different age, or it might contain a mirror in which I would cast no reflection. It took some self-control not to go in there and look.
In February, however, the Chicago Hilton was not crawling with secret servicemen talking into their sleeves but with four thousand writers, would-be writers, students of writing, and teachers of writing, all of whom were attending the conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs where I was to give the keynote address, and every single one of whom would have known who Ray Bradbury was.
. . . .
I was greatly looking forward to meeting a writer who had been so much a part of my own early reading, especially the delicious, clandestine reading done avidly in lieu of homework, and the compulsive reading done at night with a flashlight when I ought to have been sleeping. Stories read with such enthusiasm at such a young age are not so much read as inhaled. They sink all the way in and all the way down, and they stay with you.
But then Ray Bradbury died. He was ninety-one, but still—as with everyone who has always been in your life and is then not there any more—his death seemed impossible. People don’t die as such in his work, or they don’t die in the ordinary way. Sometimes they melt—the Martian in the story of that name dissolves, like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, one of Bradbury’s influences. Sometimes they are done to death by aliens, as in The Martian Chronicles story “The Third Expedition.” Sometimes they are hunted down by mechanical hounds for the crime of reading books, as in Fahrenheit 451. Sometimes people don’t entirely die: revenants and vampires are not unknown in Bradbury’s work. But Bradbury’s people seldom just expire.
Any writer who delves as deeply into “horror” writing as Bradbury did has a complex relationship with mortality, and it’s not surprising to learn that as a child Ray Bradbury was worried he would die at any moment, as he tells us in “Take Me Home,” a sidebar in the June 2012 New Yorker science-fiction issue. “When I look back now,” he says—in what, ironically, was going to be his last published piece—“I realize what a trial I must have been to my friends and relatives. It was one frenzy after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another. I was always yelling and running somewhere, because I was afraid life was going to be over that very afternoon.”
But the flip side of the mortality coin is immortality, and that interested him as well. At the age of twelve—as he told us on his website—he had a definitive encounter with a stage magician called Mr. Electrico. This was in the age of traveling circuses and the like, and Mr. Electrico had a unique act: he sat in an electrified chair, thus in turn electrifying a sword he held, with which he in turn electrified the spectators, making their hair stand on end and sparks come out of their ears. He electrified young Bradbury in this manner, while shouting, “Live forever!” The child had to go to a funeral the next day, a close encounter with death that led him to seek out Mr. Electrico once more to find out how this “living forever” thing was to be done. The old carny showed him around what used to be called the freak show—complete with a tattooed man who was later to morph into the Illustrated Man—and then told him that he, Ray, contained the soul of Mr. Electrico’s best friend, who had died in World War I. You can see how all this would have made an impression. Right after his baptism by electricity at the hands of Mr. Electrico, Bradbury started writing, and he didn’t stop until his own death.
. . . .
I had to break off in order to attend a poetry event. At the party afterward, I told a writer friend that Bradbury had died. “He was the first writer I read all of,” he said. “When I was twelve or thirteen. I read every single book—I sought them out. I read them cover to cover.” I said I thought that a lot of writers—and a lot of readers—had most likely had the same experience. And that they would be writers and readers of the most diverse kinds—poets and prose writers, all ages, all levels of brow, from low to high.
What accounts for Bradbury’s reach—his scope, his influence? And—dreaded question, but one that critics and interviewers are always asking—where would you locate him on the map of literature?
My own view is that in his best work, Bradbury sinks a taproot right down into the deep, dark, gothic core of America. It’s no accident that he was descended from Mary Bradbury, convicted as a witch in 1692, during the notorious Salem witchcraft trails, for, among other things, assuming the form of a blue boar.
Link to the rest at The Paris Review
Ray Bradbury and Forrest J. Ackerman were best friends. They worshipped at the feet of Ray Harryhausen. They knew everyone in early sf fandom. If Bradbury was not an sf writer, nobody was.
The only thing that made him “nervous” about sf was that he did not generally write only that. He wrote a lot of fantasy, horror, weird tales, literary fic, film scripts, etc., as well as science fiction. He wrote for money and worked to the specs of many markets. But even his nonfiction is solidly within the modern sf tradition — which he helped shape from the get-go, as a pimply minor.
Atwood, OTOH, is constantly fleeing the sf world when no one pursueth.
+100
In those days writers didn’t specialize (or were pigeonholed) like in recent times. Many of the genre luminaries jumped around from fantasy to horror to SF to mysteries to comics to what is now marketed as YA and even non-fiction. Block, Leiber, DeCamp, Bester, Williamson, Brown, Kuttner, Pratt, the brothers Binder, and yes, Bradbury. And that’s just some that did it under one name. The ones with pen names were legion.
In those days writing to market meant writing what the gatekeepers wanted the way the gatekeepers wanted it. Or else. It took courage to make waves.
As soon as I saw this, I somehow knew there was going to be Atwood-bashing. I am obviously clairvoyant.
atwood, the one hit wonder wh imagines a world where women are used as pregnancy slaves, male fantasy. Really, paris review.
Would rather have those who write and who love Bradbury/ sci fi, write about bradbury’s or anyones ‘place’.
Felix wrote a better perspective than the article. HE should be in paris review. Oh, sorry, he’s not twee enough. Which is not the same as being intelligent.
Also find it offensive for I knew bradbury, that the title of this piece is ‘obituary.’ The ‘obit’ is far more about atwood than about bradbury.
sorry. born in a bad mood today
There are visionaries and there are whiners. Sometimes, the two are very close, but I would place Mr. Bradbury on the visionary side. Ms. Atwood is a fine author, I love her books, but not on my visionary list.
Democritus, your balanced opinion is appreciated. And agree, visionary belongs to Bradbury.
There is always this.
Where to locate Bradbury on the map of literature?
Really?
How about the top ranks of Science Fiction, lady?
Would it kill you to admit it exists. Or that you write it?
Jeeze, it’s the 21st century out there, ye literary snobs!
SF is real and not going away.
Partly due to Bradbury and his peers.
The article is in The Paris Review.
Atwood knows her audience. I’m sure she’s a chameleon and can write in many modes. And she knows perfectly well who Bradbury is.
If I had to guess, I’d think not talking about SF would keep some of the readers around long enough to find out about her friend – they might learn something.
Many in her audience also know perfectly well who she is.
To be fair, the OP has more on that:
He did that in the early days.
Not so much later because a fair amount of what the genre is is because of him. Denying the genre is denying his main legacy.
So I suppose if you ignore what he contributed to SF there won’t be much else to explain his importance and he’d then be hard to pigeonhole.
Okay, here’s the thing that bugs me:
SF is the literature of ideas and a most of the best SF doesn’t just depend on a scientific element, but they also explore it and its ramifications/consequences.
With that in mind, the field went through three phases that roughly correspond to the three major Ages:
In the early days stories tended to be didactic, strongly focused on the idea, and mostly peopled by types rather than characters. Lots of great stories in this era but they tended to be mostly what today we term high concept. Examples would be GLADIATOR, THE DISAPPEARANCE, WHEN WORLD COLLIDE, AFTER WORLDS COLLIDE, ARMAGEDDON 2419, THE MAN WHO AWOKE, and earlier works like TIME MACHINE, THINGS TO COME, etc.
Then came Campbell-the-editor and Heinlein. Suddenly, marketable SF needed characters with personality, flaws, agendas. Over time, we got The golden age with examples like THE END OF ETERNITY, THE CAVES OF STEEL, THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, SHADOWS IN THE SUN, DORSAI, and countless enduring classics.
And that is when Bradbury showed up writing unmistakable SF shrouded in mood and style and it sold. At that point it was clear to all that the genre had access to all literary tools. No artificial editorial limits. That opened the door to the NEW WAVE authors, the DANGEROUS VISIONS anthologies, and more sophisticated works like DUNE, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, THE GODS THEMSELVES…
Im my case it is a bit ironic that Bradbury is not among my favorites. (But I did like THE SOUND OF THUNDER.) I’m just not all that into highly stylish or moody narratives. 🙂
But he was one of the very first writers I sampled when I began my “studies” of the field and it annoys me when his place in the field is diminished. It diminishes his legacy and it diminishes the field.
He wrote SF and was an SF writer. What you do is what you are.
Thanks for the background; I wasn’t aware of that history. Lately, I find myself caring less and less about genre specs when it comes to looking around for things to read. I either dig it or I don’t, whatever it is, and I’m more likely to find new stuff playing author hopscotch (if-you-like-Neil-Gaiman-you-may-like…) than genre hopscotch.
Felix – another fan of Philip Wylie!
I really wish somebody would take a proper crack at Worlds Collide. Preferably on one of the streaming services to cover in detail the phases of the story.
In particular the post-disaster conflict.
I went to San Diego Comic Con in the 90s, back before it was so movie- and TV-oriented. In the autograph room, I saw long lines for the Artist of the Moment (probably Jim Lee and the other big guns around his time). Meh. Wasn’t interested. Then I saw two white-haired men standing by a table talking to one another. Dick Giordano, editor of DC Comics, and Ray Bradbury. I immediately went to them and got them to sign my program and chatted for a few minutes. Happiest con moment of my life, meeting two of my heroes. I grew up on DC comics and Ray Bradbury–well, what more is there to say?
The excerpt misses the writer’s name: Margaret Atwood.
Thanks for noting my error, Alicia. Fixed.
Wasn’t nitpicking: the writing attracted me, I went to look, and my brain went Ah!
So I came back and shared.
You do an amazing job – I can sometimes add my little bit.