How science shaped the stories of Ray Bradbury

Jonathan R. Eller, contributor

(Image: Dan Tuffs/Getty)

Sci-fi and fantasy author Ray Bradbury's experiences of the Atomic and Space Ages are evident in his curious stories of Earth's destruction and life on Mars, says biographer Jonathan R. Eller

RAY BRADBURY, the science fiction and fantasy author behind such classics as Fahrenheit 451, infamously claims to remember the details of his own birth. In 1920, he was born into an era of rapid scientific discovery - the advances of which inspired his long and fruitful writing career.

Bradbury's earliest encounters with science were at the tender age of 10, when he read all he could understand of astronomer Percival Lowell's ideas on the existence of intelligent life on Mars. His high-school astronomy class provided a basic understanding of the solar system and a context, of sorts, for Lowell's Martian canals. These few grains of outdated speculation and chalkboard science laid the groundwork for much to follow.

In time, the science of the mind intrigued Bradbury as much as the science of space and time, and advances in the study of human nature sparked his initial successes with dark fantasy. After exploring Freud and Jung's work in psychology he moved quickly onto Karen Horney's pioneering studies of neuroses.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, he capped these readings with new studies of aggressive behaviour, including psychologist Fredric Wertham's Dark Legend - an account of a 17-year-old boy who killed his own mother - and later science historian Jacob Bronowski's The Face of Violence, a discussion of violence in society.

From this core material Bradbury refined his writing about the passions and terrors of childhood that linger in adult life - themes that are evident in his nostalgic novel Dandelion Wine, and the terrifying Something Wicked This Way Comes.

The early years of the so-called atomic age that followed the first test of nuclear weapons soon brought atomic science to the forefront of Bradbury's prose. The final stories in his 1950 work The Martian Chronicles describe Earth's destruction as a result of atomic war, and the slim hope of a new start on the Red Planet. The similar war that closes Fahrenheit 451 radiated out into some of his best short stories, such as The Last Night of the World - a chilling portrayal of a couple's routine behaviour on the day before Earth is set to be destroyed.

Yet Bradbury soon realised that technologies capable of ending life on Earth could also lead to space flight, giving hope to his evolving belief that mankind's destiny was in the stars. The full flowering of rocketry accompanying the space age led him to embrace a new genre of writing - the scientific essay - to celebrate these milestones.

Bradbury was particularly inspired by anthropologist Loren Eiseley's ability to convey sensation in his work through rhythmic and metaphor-rich prose, and he went on to craft his own writing style in essays aimed at lay readers. These included two Life magazine articles in the 1960s: "Cry the Cosmos" and "An Impatient Gulliver Above Our Roofs", which played a key role in maintaining public support for NASA's Apollo space programme.

For all his fascination with technological progress, Bradbury remains wary of using it himself. He avoided flying for decades, and never learned to drive after witnessing a fatal car crash. His concerns are clear in Fahrenheit 451, in which a lead character is killed by a futuristic automobile.

The subject closest to Bradbury's heart, though, is cosmology. He followed astronomer George Ellery Hale's dream of a 200-inch (5.1-metre) telescope on mount Palomar - the site of the California Institute of Technology's observatory - with the same excitement he had once felt for Lowell's dreams of Mars.

Yet the telescope's great advances in tracing the history of the universe back to the big bang failed to shift his early views on the greatest question of all. Bradbury remains uncomfortable with the beginnings and endings inherent in the big bang, holding instead that the universe has been here forever. He remains certain that mankind will physically explore the galactic "island universes" that the Hale telescope and its successors have revealed.

Bradbury summed up his own role in this exploration in a 1975 seminar: "That's my business - to find the metaphor that explains the space age, and along the way write stories." And so he has, for more than seven decades.

Jonathan R. Eller is a professor of English and co-founder of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. His new book, Becoming Ray Bradbury, is published by University of Illinois Press

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