Ray Bradbury

Steve's trenchant evaluation of Bradbury's work is well worth reading, particularly in light of the scifi author's recent death. For the sake of convenience, I'll quote it in full:

Bradbury is not known as a Christian writer, but in a number of his pieces (e.g., "The Man," "The Messiah," "The Gift," The Fire Balloons," "Kristin," "Christus Apollo") he explores the theme of the cosmic Christ.
Bradbury is a humanist who uses Christian symbolism and eschatology as a vehicle to express SF yearning. Although the SF genre was not coined in America, America is where it took hold. Why is that? It has often been said that SF is a hitech setting for the Western. But that merely pushes the question back a step.
America was founded by the Pilgrims. For them, the New World was the Promised Land, which was in turn, the new Eden. This is not to deny that, for the Pilgrims, the Promised Land was as well a type of heaven.
Bradbury’s cosmic Christ is a profanation of the Pilgrim vision. Space travel, the westward expansion, the whole pioneering ethos transposes the Pilgrim vision to a secular key.
This raises questions about the core identity of the SF genre. Is it inherently profane, neutral, or religious? Is Bradbury’s recycling of Christian motifs merely opportunistic, or is the secular outlook insufficient to underwrite the SF vision?
In general, SF presents two opposing eschatological visions: a technocratic utopia or else a technocratic dystopia. But in either case, the worldview is usually godless. The utopian outlook represents the triumph of optimistic humanism whereas the dystopian outlook represents the plight of man in an indifferent or hostile universe.
Some Christians claim that science is, in fact, an artifact of Christian civilization and the cultural mandate (Gen 1:28). This claim is difficult to weigh. It is true that high technology is an artifact of the Christian West. But is that owing to a Christian worldview, or incidental to the role of the Church in the rise of Western civilization?
It may be said that the heathen divinization of nature inhibited the growth of science. Yet belief in wood and water nymphs never hindered men from felling trees or damning rivers. It could also be argued that modern science, in its effort to banish occult forces from nature, not merely desacralized the natural world, but secularized the world so that divine agency was disallowed and nature was all that's left.
But besides the descriptive question is the prescriptive or proscriptive question. Is the SF genre neutral, well-suited or ill-suited to rendering the Christian vision? If we take the parables of Christ as an index, then I’d suggest that SF is generally too remote from reality to be an ideal vehicle.
Although there is a value in contrasting the real world with alien worlds and alternative dimensions, the real world is the world that God has crafted and redeemed. And our creative vocation is, in the words of Ruskin, to trace the finger of God.
Although SF is associated with futuristic science, Bradbury is more retrospective and pastoral than prospective and technological. As with Plato, Bradbury’s popular appeal lies in his power as a mythmaker. That is, at once, his point of strength and weakness. His golden prose seduces the unwary into believing the unbelievable—like a snake entrancing a bird before swallowing it whole.
The problem with reducing Christian theology to mere symbolism, and then transferring the symbolism to outer space, is that if the Christian story is deemed to be unhistorical, then why go on living and waiting in a gingerbread castle for a prince would will never come to rescue the princess? No magic kiss will awaken us from our amphibious existence.
Isn’t Bradbury’s cosmic castle just as airy-fairy as he takes the Christian castle to be? Space travel, extraterrestrial colonization, life on other planets, and such like, do not represent a serious extrapolation of hard science. Why exchange one myth for another? And for the Christian reader, the Gospel is not an outdated metaphor, or metaphor at all, in which case there’s no motive to board Bradbury’s spaceship and launch out into cosmic mythology.

A tale of two writers

Ray Bradbury and Christopher Hitchens died within a few months of each other. Both men were gifted wordsmiths. Both men wrote about the human condition. But there the comparison ends.

Despite his linguistic virtuosity, most of Hitchens’ prolific output will be quickly forgotten. One reason is that so much of his writing is about politics. That’s inherently ephemeral. And, frankly, it’s not that interesting to begin with.

Unlike Bradbury, Hitchens was admired as an earnest and eloquent writer, but his writings will never be loved. Hitchens’ subject-matter is confining, because he writes about the real world. What is or was, not what might have been. The tyranny of the actual.

In addition, the world he writes about is a fallen world, without hope of redemption. The never-ending cycle of depravity. So his material is ultimately depressing. Imprisoning. Like Solzhenitsyn writing about life in a penal colony. Or describing the wallpaper in a mental ward.

Bradbury put his verbal dexterity to a very different use. He articulates an inarticulate yearning in the hearts of many readers. A yearning for lost youth. As well as a longing for unrealized possibilities.

His aliens worlds are scientifically absurd, but that’s not the point. They’re just a vivid literary device to explore alternate timelines. What might have been–in another life, in another world.

In that respect, his otherworldly material is far more appealing than Hitchens’ worldly material. Of course, some of Bradbury’s writings are political allegories. To that extent they’re concerned with the real world. But that’s not where his core appeal lies.

Still, there’s something ultimately unsatisfying about Bradbury’s vision. If Hitchens’ work is unsatisfying because it’s too realistic, Bradbury’s work is unsatisfying because it’s too unrealistic. Within his secular outlook, Bradbury’s possibilities are impossible possibilities. They tantalize the mind, taunting us with iridescent dreams of something forever out of reach.

An unenviable choice between Hitchens’ dyspeptic reality and Bradbury’s imaginary Eden. After escaping for a few hours into Bradbury’s fairy-tale world, we must return to Hitchens’ shard-glass reality. 

Only the Christian outlook does justice to both. On the one hand, reality is ultimately edifying inasmuch as reality is ultimately redeemed. What was lost is found.

On the other hand, our reality is one of God’s infinite possibilities, while our sheer possibilities are God’s infinite realities. All timelines play out in the immutable reality of God’s omniscient mind.

Bradbury’s writing also illustrates the symbiosis between life and art. Bradbury’s particular vision is inconceivable apart from the time and place of his birth and upbringing. His specific background makes all the difference.

TAKE ME HOME

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/04/120604fa_fact_bradbury#ixzz1x1g6C1pp

Ray Bradbury's Virtual Reality Universe

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north19.html

Ray Bradbury

Much-beloved sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury has died. His science fiction wasn’t very scientific–as he'd be the first to admit. It owed its popularity to his poetic, nostalgic style.

I’m not deeply read in Ray Bradbury. But my impression is that Bradbury peaked early. He basically had to great novels in him (The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine), plus some memorable short stories. The Illustrated Man is really an anthology of disparate short stories. 

The Martian Chronicles was written in 1950, and Dandelion Wine in 1957. He lived for another 55 years, but his creative imagination ran dry after that. Not that he didn’t keep writing stuff. But he couldn’t recapture his early triumphs.

Dandelion Wine was a tribute to his halcyon boyhood. But that was a one-time exercise.

He was about 30 when he published The Martian Chronicles, and about 37 when he published Dandelion Wine. Although he died at 91, his best work was written before he hit 40 (although some short stories may be exceptions).

By contrast, Cordwainer-Smith–another science-fiction writers–was doing some of his best work when he died at 53. He clearly had more great stuff in the pipeline.

So what happened to Bradbury? Why did the stream of inspiration run so low in the last five decades of his life? My guess is that his talent was bigger than his worldview.

I’m reminded of Arthur Miller. He died at in 2005, at 89. Wrote many plays. But he’s only remembered for one play: Death of a Salesman–which he penned in 1949, when he was about 34.

I’m also reminded of how Ruskin lost his love of nature after he lost his faith. When he no longer saw the nature world through the eyes of faith, it lost that hierophanic dimension.

Or, consider Sagan’s Contact. I’m thinking of the movie. You have a big build-up. But when we’re finally transported to the alien planet and encounter the alien intelligence, it’s so banal. Such a letdown. That’s because a fictitious alien can’t be any greater than Sagan’s utterly human imagination.

As a Christian, I like to periodically revisit certain places after a long absence. I’m returning to the same place, but in another sense, it’s not the same. Comparing past and present, the same place acquires new meaning with the passage of time. As we age, we have more sense of God’s providence in our lives, for we have more life to compare past and present. We’re further into the narrative arc of God’s story for our lives. The hidden wisdom of God’s purpose in our lives becomes more evident with the passage of time. What seemed bad at the time is better in retrospect. What seemed forgettable at the time is memorable in hindsight. What appeared to be mundane at the time becomes numinous as we look back on God’s subtle guidance. There is always more to find, not by exploring different places, but by exploring the same place at different times of life.

In contrast to Bradbury, Cordwainer-Smith, a convert to Christianity in middle age, was going from strength to strength when he died. As an atheist, Bradbury projected significance onto the world. But a Christian elicits significance from the world.