A perspective, over at National Review. Two things struck me about the piece, one of which has nothing to do with Bradbury per se:
While he is a great advocate for NASA and space travel, his greatest fictional works address the recurrent theme of much of the modern age’s more significant literature: the separation of spirit and imagination from technological achievement and the dangers that attend this divorce.
Note that James Person assumes that NASA and space travel are synonymous. This is a mind set that we have to break if we are to move forward in space. Here’s the other:
All too soon it was time to take our leave. Hamner, ever the gracious Virginia gentleman, shook hands with Bradbury and quietly expressed his thanks again for that long-ago piece of advice. As Bradbury turned to me, I shook his hand and said quietly, “Ray Bradbury, live forever!” Tears sprang into his eyes — he is a man who cries for joy at every kindness — and his mouth moved soundlessly for a moment, searching for words. Quickly he raised my hand to his lips and gave it a quick kiss. “God bless you, Jim,” he said. “God bless you — and I wish the same for you!”
What a contrast with Asimov, who was a notorious deathist (a major theme of The Bicentennial Man). Asimov is gone now, as he wished, and Bradbury is still with us, as he apparently continues to wish.
It’s not clear though, whether things like this will increase, or decrease his remaining time with us. If it’s the end of him, not a bad way to go.
In the sixth grade, my class had an assignment to write to our favorite author. I chose Madeline L’Engle. She hand-typed a little message to me (with typos!) on the back of a pamphlet that showed the family trees of the characters and interesting information about her books. (Which is important, there are basically two sets of timelines, and interesting characters who cross between them. )
Anyway, another person in my class wrote to Asimov, who wrote back a very rude letter to him, his teacher, and the librarian! He just wasn’t a very nice person.
How in the world did someone have the time and the money and connections to put into making that video? That’s the great thing about a free society – people go out and do things you just can’t imagine them being able to do.
Makes me think maybe I shouldn’t have put off writing that great SF novel I’ve been mentally making notes on for decades.
Asimov’s “deathism” in The Bicentennial Man was never explored in more than wishy-washy, “it’s something that makes us human” terms, and it wasn’t even really given a positive spin: possible immortality wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, just something that unavoidably bred resentment among mortals.
If you want to see Asimov express a pro-death philosophy then you have to go to Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire: there the antagonists (and some of the protagonists) live greatly extended lifespans… with the consequences that they are much less willing to risk those lives, much less willing to subsume their lifes’ work into larger cooperative projects, and therefore much more stagnant as a society.
And the “less willing to risk those lives” theory sounds entirely plausible. If the first trips to Mars have a 1% chance of cutting 40 years off your life, you might agree that’s worth it.. but if they have a 1% chance of cutting 400 years off your life, aren’t you going to be tempted to wait a mere century or two for someone else to shake out the system defects?
My biggest problem with Bradbury has always been his greatest work: The Martian Chronicles.
Simply put, I hate how that book ends, what with the humans giving up on Mars and returning to Earth because the home planet blows itself up in a nuclear war.
This ending runs counter to the American spirit and frontier identity. If settlers in the Old West suddenly heard that NYC blew up, or came under French dominion, they’d have kept heading West. Going back to Earth after a nuke war would be the LAST thing I’d do, let alone contemplate, if I’d just spent the previous twenty years of my life on Mars.
Simply put, I hate how that book ends, what with the humans giving up on Mars and returning to Earth because the home planet blows itself up in a nuclear war.
Oh great, another SF classic I won’t have to ready anymore. Thanks for the spoiler! 😉
Young people clearly risk their lives (extreme sports, etc.) with more abandon than older folks. If it is true that having more of one’s life ahead of you makes you conservative, young people would be barricaded in their bedrooms cowering, and us old coots would be skydiving and drag racing.
Like almost all of Bradbury’s work, The Martian Chronicles isn’t really SF — it’s fantasy. And if you’re worried about a spoiler in a book that was published decades ago, it’s your own fault for not having read it sooner… 🙂
“It’s not clear though, whether things like this will increase, or decrease his remaining time with us.”
“This” certainly could form the basis for a refreshingly new approach to STE outreach…
Bradbury is definitely a fantasy author. But I like him.
I’ve always had the impression that Asimov was a pretty decent guy, especially in relation to his fans.
Anyone interested in Bradbury or radio drama should check out the 1984, Peabody Award-winning series, “Bradbury 13.”
http://tiny.cc/k84yq
“I hate how that book [Martian Chronicles] ends, what with the humans giving up on Mars and returning to Earth because the home planet blows itself up in a nuclear war.”
Did we read the same book? The last story in ‘Martian Chronicles’ is ‘The Million-Year Picnic.’
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The Million-Year Picnic (October 2026/2057)
A family saves a rocket that the government would have used in the nuclear war and leaves Earth on a “fishing trip” to Mars. The family picks a city to live in and call home. They go in and Dad burns tax documents and other government papers on a camp fire, explaining that he is burning a way of life that was wrong. The final thing to go on the fire is a map of the Earth. Later, he offers his sons a “gift” in the form of their new world. He introduces them to Martians: their own reflections in a canal.
The “deathism” in Bicentennial Man isn’t so bad, IMO- it doesn’t so much say that immortality is Bad as it takes for granted that an immortal being can’t be part of a race of mortals unless he becomes mortal himself. That could be an interesting idea if seriously pursued- what *would* relations be like between a race that had to confront death and one that didn’t?- but Asimov provides an answer rather than exploring the question.
I don’t even necessarily disagree with him, if you accept his premise that one group (robots) is inherently immortal and the other (humans) isn’t and can’t be made so. I can imagine a lot of resentment, the same as in Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children”. Different premises, of course, make for different conclusions…
RNB wrote at 3:28 pm
That’s a great story. So’s the one about the last two people on Mars, the guy and the really (weight challenged) girl.
Really a fantastic collection of stories.
“Asimov is gone now, as he wished…”
I still remember (but don’t have, I was waiting for a haircut while reading it) an item of Asimov’s in Penthouse some years back, wherein after a critical look at cryonics, he explicitly said he did not want ti for himself, even if he was sure it would work. The only exact words that remain with me, was the last sentence; “As for me, I prefer oblivion.”
I didn’t really like The Martian Chronicles except I did like the last story that RNB talks about, where we finally have characters that aren’t obsessed with Earth or fuckups in some say (IIRC — haven’t read the stories in a while). Anyway they move to Mars properly, like homesteaders, instead of acting like exiles or temporary visitors. That was good.
Otherwise I was never a big fan of Bradbury’s style. Something about it just put me off.
“the separation of spirit and imagination from technological achievement…”
Am I the only one who doesn’t agree with this, that there is no spirit or imagination in technological achievement?
“it doesn’t so much say that immortality is Bad as it takes for granted that an immortal being can’t be part of a race of mortals unless he becomes mortal himself.”
I just now saw the parallel between that and Christianity.
Krugman is a big Asimov fan. It’s his reason for entering the field of economics according to one quote I’ve read.
The irony of Asimov’s work is that it struggles against itself. For example, in Foundation you have this big plan that forsees the future right? (I’m trying to minimize spoilers) But despite coming to fruition for a while, there nevertheless are key individuals that at the right junctions take initiative to see the plan through. There might be a compelling message there about incentives and social vs. individual forces – that’s what makes psychohistory so fun and Asimov so brilliant. Unfortunately, he never offers a solid conclusion beyond the inevitable “humanity’s will subsumed into a single consciousness” BS that was the ideal of the era. I’ve never been able to figure out how that’s any different than what Hitler proposed.
Science fiction is all about the ideal and the potential built out of a foundation of human archetypes. The fact that sci-fi’s best never quite resolved the self/other dichotomy is only reflective of the problems society at large had with this. Ray Bradbury, on the other hand, seems to focus on simple themes – often emotional. Not pushing the boundaries like some others, it’s easy to see why he’s more comfortable in this life.
Well, in any event Asimov is a good example of the 20th century American identity crisis. From cowboys to collectivists.
“I just now saw the parallel between that and Christianity.”
As a student of the Bible, Asimov would have been quite cognizant of it.
Asimov’s politics (in his fiction) can be confusing to unravel. In the Caves of Steel series, you get a real feeling that he prefers the more individualistic Spacers to the collectivist City dwellers. He does demonstrate how far a technocratically planned society could go on Earth, but he also attacks it as too fragile (at least at the extremes). There’s a counter argument to the pro-Spacer view that says that the Spacer lifestyle was very attractive but fatally decadent. Probably some mix of all of the above.
I’ve discussed with other libertarians whether or not the Spacers were in any sense “libertarians”, and I think the answer is not really. They do have very strong civil liberties protections in place, but the stories regularly make it clear that the state is still quite powerful in the Outer Worlds. I think Asimov was left-wing enough to have trouble imagining a small government in our future.