Instantly we’re aboard a frozen ship, thousands of degrees
below absolute zero, built with refrigerating capacity that can withstand the
most excoriating rays of the sun itself. The ship edges ever closer to the sun,
seven-thousand degrees, ten-thousand degrees, ever higher, until the icicles of
the ship itself melt, leaving the vessel within a hare’s breath of meltdown, incineration,
decompression, or god knows what else. And just when the ship seems on the
verge of collapse, the Captain sticks his hand inside a metal glove, and out
from the ship’s hull comes a giant replica of this glove that’s kinetically
connected to the Captain’s hand. The captain literally scoops up part of the
sun with his hand as we would a piece of earth, and puts his piece of sun into
a sealed container as we might put sod into a plant pot. Here’s Bradbury:
“The Cup dipped into the sun. It scooped up a bit of the
flesh of God, the blood of the universe, the blazing thought, the blinding
philosophy that set out and mothered a galaxy, that idled and swept planets in
their fields and summoned or laid to rest lives and livelihoods.”
There are a few lines afteward, but The Golden Apples of the Sun fundamentally ends with one of the most
indelible images in any work of fiction I’ve ever read – as unforgettable as any
myth or Bible story. Yet after the captain scoops up the sun, the story is practically
over. There is no musing about whether or not this is a good or bad development,
no personalities involved, nothing except for a terrifyingly beautiful image. To
have that image, and then not see what comes afterward is like a literary
blue ball. Is there any point to the story?
…and then it occurs to you to go back to the sentences
written just before the unforgettable image:
“My God, we'll say, we did it! And here is our cup of
energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities
and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children and bake our
daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand
years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of science and
religion: Drink! Warm yourselves against the night of ignorance, the long snows
of superstition, the cold winds of disbelief, and from the great fear of darkness
in each man.”
And herein lies a much bigger problem than lack of memorable
characters or fully-fleshed ideas. If Ray Bradbury were simply a great purveyor
of images, it would be worth the time to read so much more of his output than I
actually have. But in the stuff I’ve (attempted to) read, which I can’t imagine
is so much less than many of those people who celebrate his work, Bradbury seemed
to take it for granted that learning and technology was always on the side of
goodness and light, and with enough proper application could tame the baseness
of human nature itself. It purported to be a genuinely humanistic outlook, but
it was just another form of transhumanism which states that technology will
never let us down.
In this way, he occupied almost precisely the opposite point
of view from Kurt Vonnegut, the other pop-culture ‘hero-author’ of their day. Both
writers acquired millions of fans who read their books not simply for
entertainment but as a kind of secular scripture. Their most devoted readers would
not merely see Bradbury and Vonnegut as enlightening authors, but as a
kind of enlightment itself. Both writers provided their fans with an entire
worldview– which is all the more confusing when one realizes that their
opposite points of view were fundamentally taken as gospel by the same readers.
But when one lives in 2012 America, Vonnegut and Bradbury don’t seem as far
apart as all that. It’s very easy to see that either point of view is absolutely
preferable to the combination of religious darkness and blind faith in American
power that many rightly fear may engulf our country much more than it already
has. But had we lived in the Soviet Union, I can’t imagine we wouldn’t see a
certain similarity in Bradbury’s view of technological progress or Vonnegut’s
view of human nature’s current state to the Communist Party’s official view. Context
is all.
Not that it necessarily matters, but as it happens, Bradbury
was fundamentally a conservative. He certainly would not be much of a
conservative by present day standards, but he was a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian
and one of his favorite movie was Ayn Rand’s screen treatment of her book, The
Fountainhead. Unlike the socialist Vonnegut, he believed very deeply in the
importance of self-reliance and optimism, and it’s difficult to imagine that
his rosy view of mankind didn’t color his books as much as Vonnegut’s view.
I’m clearly the wrong person for science fiction and
fantasy. I listen to my brother Ethan and dozens of friends enthuse for hours upon
end about their favorite books of conceptual fiction. They patiently indulge my
crippling blind spot and tell me that the right book simply hasn’t come along –
some of them are even nice enough to loan me books of their own, and I wish I
could repay their debt by telling them that I ever find the books they’ve
loaned me worth the trouble they’ve taken to convince me. But for whatever
reason, there are so few books of conceptual fiction that do anything for me. Whenever
I work up the willpower to read the spectacular scenes of sci-fi and fantasy, I
first wonder to myself – what is there on this page that wouldn’t be 100 times
more effective in a good movie or TV show? Perhaps my visual imagination is
limited, but I could give hundreds of examples of this problem: I barely made
it to page 100 of Game of Thrones, yet I watch the TV show with ever growing fascination.
At times I still despair that I ever gave 12-or-so hours of my life to J.R.R.
Tolkein, yet I have real affection for the Lord of the Rings movies. Hell, I
could even just compare Ray Bradbury, whose work leaves me cold, to Star Trek,
the existence of which would be impossible without Bradbury’s entire ethos and
whose every episode I gobble up hungrily.
I then wonder, does reading really mean so little to us
anymore that we have to create cinematic scenes in our books in order to make
them worth reading? Even the most well-read among us – and surely there are some
who are still much better read than me – read very little fiction in comparison
to what people gobbled up 70 years ago (let alone 170). We’ve long since
transferred our loyalty to the movies, to television, to internet content – and
it’s to these mediums which we turn for truly enlightening entertainment. But
there are certain things which only books can do – and one of them is to
explain ideas, something which Ray Bradbury did admirably. But another is to
get inside the heads of other people, to literally read their thoughts. It’s
probably easier to grasp ideas from a single well-written piece of non-fiction
than any amount of speculative fiction on the same issue. But to this day,
nothing beats fiction at explaining people to each other – their thoughts, their
personalities, their souls.
Currently I’m reading books of fiction by two Italian
writers from the beginning of the 20th century, Giovanni Verga and
Italo Svevo. Svevo is a brilliant elucidator of ideas, and Giovanni Verga is a
creator of spectacular scenes. But both keep these more sensational gifts as a great
condiment to the main course, which is to understand the people who populate
their stories. Writers like them, like Chekhov, like Bellow, like Tolstoy, are primarily
interested explaining the human-ness of their characters. Does this automatically
make them better writers? Certainly not, but it does give them a kind of ‘home
field advantage’ in that they do what fiction has time and again been proven to
do better than anything else.
It takes a very different kind of writer to be particularly
attracted to the idea and spectacle drivenness of sci-fi/fantasy than to create stories that realizes the
full implications of the characters who populate them. I have
to wonder if the popularity of so much fiction with a lack of memorable characters means that we’re less curious
about one another in our era than we were in some previous ones. Surely that
isn’t out of the question in this era when facebook and twitter can let us know
virtually anything we want about each other. When we can learn anything we want
about another person at the click of a button, what reason is there to go out of our way to find it?
Ultimately, the problem of most science fiction and fantasy
is the problem of most realist authors too. Life is too complicated, too rich,
too dynamic to be contained in a single genre. Sci-fi and fantasy limits
existence as much and as little as any other genre, no more, no less. The
problem is not this genre, the problem is genre itself.
This narrowness isn’t the only reason for which many major critics
condescended to Bradbury, but it is one of them. Critics have ripped Bradbury
apart for years for all sorts of reasons – some deserved, some entirely not. On
the one hand, they said he wrote bad prose, and that was nonsense – Bradbury wrote
gorgeously in a prose style that any number of writers would kill to recapture.
They talked down to Bradbury for writing a fiction of ideas yet refused to talk
down similarly to realists who wrote a fiction that was similarly one-dimensional.
On the other hand, Bradbury’s work is limiting; it’s almost polemic disguised
as fiction. It’s one thing to write about ideas, but if your books traffic in ideas,
you should explore the implication of every idea to its fullest potential. Ray
Bradbury had fantastic ideas, but he usually stopped following his thoughts before
the ideas became a reality.
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