This is a collection of short stories by Ray Bradberry, which I borrowed from the library.
So you want to know about the future? A few pointers:
1. Everyone in space goes mad. There is no reason for this, it’s just, you know—spaaaaaaace.
2. When people go mad, they get really philosophical. Cause, you know, that’s what everyone does when they go mad.
3. Speaking of which, people in the future have lost the ability to think and act in a halfway reasonable way, especially when their life is at risk. Or someone else’s. Why would we not do suicidal things? Spaaaaaace.
4. You might think that futuristics societies with affordable rocket ships and time travel machines and dome cities on Venus would mean they have things like alcohol and cigars (spoiler: they have to travel back in time to get those). Or that they would have hats to keep off the rains of Venus when they land there and have to treck for days through the jungle (nope: hats not invented yet). Or better yet, the ability to land their rocket ship next to a city instead of in the middle of nowhere. No, they don’t have any of those things.
5. There are no space ships—only rocket ships.
6. There is no difference at all between Earth and the other planets. They are virtually the same in every way. They all have trees and breathable air and people who live there already. Why would they be any different than Earth??
7. You’d better get used to using landline telephones and phonographs if you want to survive in the future.
8. And old-fashioned sexism. There’s a dab of that here and there too.
9. Nobody is happy in the future. They’re either discontent that they live in a house that makes everything for them, or discontent that they’re in space instead of home, or discontent that they’re at home instead of space. Or the one guy who’s traveling back and forth between home and space is alternately discontent in a different way in each place. Or you’re a martian, and you invade Earth, and it’s so nice that…that makes you discontent too? Sure. There are no exceptions. Everybody needs to be discontent and mad.
Some of the stories towards the end I actually liked quite a bit, but unfortunately, the majority of the stories are monotonous. They’re just about malaise/discontent/madness in space/another planet/earth.
And unfortunately there are lots of non-starter premises. The same company that invents time travel machines has a problem on their hands when people don’t come back from their vacation. Which totally makes sense, since it’s not like they can master time…and have people come back to right when they left…nope.
Or another premise: it turns out that as the works of famous authors are burned on Earth, at some point that author shows up on Mars and begins to have a state of suffering as his works are burned. But when the last work is burned then the author dies. Wait, what exactly made them appear on Mars? Who knows, we don’t need to explore that. Also, it’s stated that when humans step onto Mars, that will drive them to Jupiter. Wait, how does this work? How do they know this? “Silence,” says Ray, “No one needs to ask questions like that here. The characters just know.”
These stories make the most sense if you look at them as surrealism. I think you’re not supposed to really question how things came to be up until the beginning of the story or how the story makes sense in a coherent universe. Unfortunately for me, Bradbury’s flavor of surrealism just never sat well with me. Maybe it would for others though.
Also, I will say, Bradberry has a unique way of handling the problem of when to challenge reader expectations: he just doesn’t. Or another way of handling explaining strange premises: again, just don’t. Everyone on earth has the same dream one night of the world ending. Why? Dunno, don’t care. How? Dunno, don’t care. Instead let’s just focus intently on the characters doing the same thing that they do every night. Because that’s exactly what people would do if the world was ending…? In fact, that’s the very last thing.
And that brings me to another big problem I have with Bradbury’s stories. The characters don’t make sense. They just don’t act like real people that I know. Their rationale is flimsy, very transparently invented to fit the mood the author wants to portray with the story, which is, unfortunately, always the same mood: “future” malaise. Some future malaise can be great on a story if it’s implemented right and isn’t spread out over every single story. But this?
Having read Fahrenheit 451 and loved it, I was hoping for more of the same love to be fulfilled here. Unfortunately, that was not the case. It did have a lot of the same poetic description and capturing certain moods and using beautiful allegories, but in the stories I disliked, these were all so over-done that it was sickening. I really wanted to like this. It’s really too bad. His style was so perfectly balanced in 451. Oh well. Maybe I can still find something else he’s written that is better than this.
Another kicker was to realize that most of these stories aren’t really science fiction. A handful are just straight-up fantasy, nothing science fiction about them. And many of them were only science fiction on façade, not really. They premises often had little to do with any hard science. And mostly regarding things that I’m sure Ray must have been aware of in the 50s—he just didn’t care.
So, enough criticism. To end on a high note, I’ll summarize a few stories—all in the later half—that I did like.
Marionettes, Inc: what if your wife was too cold toward you, or conversely, too smothering? If you had lived that way for 10 or 20 years, what might you do to escape? Would you pay $10,000 to Marionettes Incorporated to get a live facsimilie of yourself? And if you did…what might happen? If your marionette is just like you, it might have feelings and such…as well as free will to change the game up on you. This story was delightfully terrifying.
City: what if mankind has already been all over the universe and forgotten about it? What if we have already made enemies and they are waiting to take revenge on us? It’s an entire empty city that the earth-men discover and it is spooky as hell.
Zero Hour: Martians, hidding in underground tunnels all over Earth, are going to take over the world through our kids. Because kids have suspension of disbelief and because parents don’t take kids seriously, they can play at their “make-believe” game of invaiders—that actually isn’t make-believe—helping the Martians overthrow their parents so they can have later bedtimes and go to more movies on the weekends. This story was pretty funny.
Rocket: if you were a poor man with a large family and you were all sick for space, what lengths might you go to? What experience might you have in doing so? This has an ethical flair to it.
Besides those, in the first half, Other Foot and Highway were alright. The other ten stories…not so much. I noticed that half of his stories that I liked were basically straight-up horror. So, is Ray Bradbury a talentless hack? No, I wouldn’t say that. I would say that I don’t like his style of surrealism but I do like his stories that aren’t that—his horror, his realism (which I would classify the Rocket as), and his humor. These stories are in the minority in this collection. But I might buy this book if it was on sale for the handful of stories that I did like. Oh well.
