I heard about Ray's death this morning, and it's knocked me for a loop, and for second loop because so many people are asking me to write something about Ray and what he meant, for them, right now. And it's too soon, but they need it.
I'm writing something now. But I wanted to put this up. I wrote it a couple of years ago as an introduction to the PS edition of
The Machineries of Joy and it was reprinted in the
Times. If you want to quote me, you can take anything you like from this, and add that he was kind, and gentle, and always filled with enthusiasm, and that the landscape of the world we live in would have been diminished if we had not had him in our world.
And that I am so glad that I knew him.
...
Ray Bradbury: The
Machineries of Joy
I can imagine all
kinds of worlds and places, but I cannot imagine a world without Bradbury. Not
Ray Bradbury the man (I have met him. Each time I have spent any time with him
I have been left the happier for it) but Bradbury the builder of dreams. That
Bradbury. The man who took an idea of the American Midwest and made it magical
and tangible, who took his own childhood and all the people and things in it
and used it to shape the world. The man who gave us a future to fear, one
without stories, without books. The man who invented Hallowe’en, in its modern
incarnation.
There are authors
I remember for their stories, other authors I remember for their people. Bradbury is the only author I remember
who sticks in my heart for his times of year and for his places. He called a book
of short stories The October Country. It’s the perfect Bradbury title. It gives us a time (and not
just any time, but the month that contains Hallowe’en, when leaves change
colour from green to flame and gold and brown, when the twigs tap on windows
and things lurk in the cellars) and it makes it a country. You can go there.
It’s waiting.
Places: the green
meadows of Green Town Il. in Dandelion Wine; the red sandy expanses
broken by crumbling canals that could only be Bradbury’s Mars; the misty Venice
Beach of Death is a Lonely Business. All of them, and so many more, locations that linger.
It is hard for me
to talk about the stories without thinking of Ray Bradbury the person: I
remember his 70th birthday, twenty years ago, in the Natural History
Museum. A decade later I had the
honour to present him with the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master
Award and I have never seen a room of people cheer and clap with more joy than
they did that night. More important than either of those things though, for me,
was that I got to say thank you, in person, to someone whose fiction helped
make me who I am.
The first Ray Bradbury story that I read
was called “Homecoming”, and it
changed me. I was seven years old. The story was in a collection of SF I had borrowed
from a friend’s father.
“Homecoming” is about a normal human boy, Timothy, who lives surrounded
by all the creatures of the night.
I identified more with Timothy, the boy being brought up by a loving
family of vampires and monsters than I had ever identified with any fictional
character before. Like him, I wanted to be brave, to not be scared of the
things in the darkness. Like him, I wanted to belong.
I read The
Silver Locusts next, a collection of stories now more often known by its
alternative title, The Martian
Chronicles. The book was
sitting on a book case at home. I do not know to whom it had originally
belonged. I thought the
book was like nothing else I had
encountered(although I was young enough and literal enough that I kept waiting
for the locusts to turn up). I fell in love with “Usher II”, the story that
sent me to Poe, as Martian settlers, representing the repressive anti-fiction
movement on Earth that Bradbury had created in his novel Fahrenheit 451, arrive at a scary house on Mars and are murdered by
robots controlled by an aficionado of horror and the fantastic. The murders
were in the style of Poe stories,
“The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Murders In the Rue Morgue”, and
culminated in “The Cask of Amontillado”. It was after reading this story that I
resolved that I would one day read Poe, become a writer, find a Scary House,
and own a robotic Orang-Utan that would do my bidding. I have been fortunate in
achieving at least three of these goals.
The first
Bradbury books I bought with my own money were from a travelling bookshop,
which would set up once a term in a room in my school. I was about eleven. The
books were Dandelion Wine and the The Golden Apples of the Sun.
So much about
Ray’s writing was important to me, so much of it helped form me. I read all I
could. Finding a Bradbury book was an occasion of excitement, never of
disappointment. But I never thought of emulating it. I never consciously wanted
to copy him. Although I discovered, re-reading Bradbury as an adult, that I
had, almost beat for beat, copied one of Ray’s stories as a very young man,
that it had crept deeply enough into my mind in childhood that, writing what I
thought was my own story, I wrote it again. (Which story of mine this was, and
which story of Ray’s had burned its way so efficiently into my back-brain, I
will leave as an exercise for bibliographers.)
Ray Bradbury was
not ahead of his time. He was perfectly of his time, and more than that: he
created his time and left his mark on the time that followed. He was one of two
men to come from Waukegan, a small town in Illinois about 30 miles from
Chicago, who made art that allowed America to define itself from the 1940s
until the 1960s. (The other son of Waukegan, of course, being comedian Jack
Benny.) And for over sixty years Bradbury has made art, and he still makes art,
and sets cats among pigeons, and he gets people talking.
Bradbury’s best
short story collections have themes and they have patterns. They are arguments
and they are conversations. The
Machineries of Joy is a reminder of a Bradbury who, while too many fine
writers were still writing for the pulps, had liberated himself, and was
writing for the slicks. He had been one of the first writers to have made the
transition from the world of people who read that sort of thing to the world at
large. The tales in The Machineries of Joy are, with a few exceptions,
stories in which genre elements are muted or absent. A collection of
stories, some fantasies, some not.
(Many of the ones that are not, still feel like fantasies, while several of the
more fantastic tales feel extraordinarily real.) Priests debate and argue about
space travel, and an old woman seals her house from Death, and we ask (as
Bradbury made us ask and ask and ask again) Who are the Martians? and we
wonder, was the man on the bridge in Dublin really a beggar...?
Ray Bradbury at
his best really was as good as we thought he was. He colonised Hallowe’en, just
as the Silver Locusts colonised the red deserts and glass towers of Mars. He
built it, as he built so much, and made it his. So when the wind blows the
fallen autumn leaves across the road in a riot of flame and gold, or when I see
a green field in summer carpeted by yellow dandelions, or when, in winter, I
close myself off from the cold and write in a room with a TV screen as big as a
wall, I think of Bradbury...
With joy. Always
with joy.
Neil Gaiman
