- Carv's Thinky Blog - http://christiancarvajal.com -

The Master of Miracles

"Tossing away the cigarette he'd been smoking, he mashed it precisely under one heel. Then he straightened his well-shaped body, tossed his brown hair back, closed his eyes, swallowed, and relaxed his fingers at his sides.

"With nothing of effort, just a little murmur of sound, Smith lifted his body gently from the ground into the warm air.

"He soared up quickly, quietly--and very soon he was lost among the stars as Smith headed for outer space..."

--Ray Bradbury, "Chrysalis," 1946

You'll see plenty of tributes to Mr. Ray Douglas Bradbury today, though maybe none so tearful and heartfelt as this one. I owe the man so much. I can still remember the day--God, I must have been five or six--when my mom caught me watching a Star Trek rerun and put Mr. Bradbury's S Is for Space in my hand. "Here," she said. "You might like this." Might like it? Holy cats, there was a naked astronaut right on the cover! This was clearly a book for grown-ups, far more challenging than Dr. Seuss or Encyclopedia Brown. S Is for Space is an anthology of Bradbury stories from the 1940s, first collected in 1966, only two years before I was born. Can it really have taken the world at large so many years to notice Mr. Bradbury's genius? I read that first story, "Chrysalis," with a hunger I never even knew I possessed. And when I reached the end, the passage I quoted above, oh, it wasn't just Smith who blasted up into space. My young brain went with him.

What a talent we've lost. "The Master of Miracles." That's what his publisher called Mr. Bradbury on the cover of my paperback edition of S Is for Space, and that's exactly right. I tell people he was my first exposure to literary science fiction, but that's not true, not really. Mr. Bradbury didn't write science fiction, he wrote future fantasy. I'm not sure he knew a great deal of science. "Science fiction is a depiction of the real," he explained. "Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal...It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time—because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power."

And oh, what myths! With the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe, I can't think of a better, more prolifically, consistently wonderful story writer in the English language. In "A Sound of Thunder" (please don't judge it by that unwatchable movie), one misstep on a time travel hunting excursion has disastrous results. In "The Veldt," Mr. Bradbury and his "Happylife Home" basically invent the concept of virtual reality. "The Fireman" and "The Pedestrian," later remixed and renamed Fahrenheit 451, are two of our greatest cris de coeur against conformity and anti-intellectualism. And then there's "All Summer in a Day." God, remember that one? It scared me more than any horror story I ever read. In that story, Mr. Bradbury imagines a habitable Venus where the rain lets up only once for a couple of hours every seven years. School bullies, jealous of the fact that little Margot saw the sun from her previous home on Earth, lock her in a closet just as the clouds are about to part. It chills me now to think of it. I refer to the Pacific Northwest as "Bradbury's Venus," and I'm sad when people fail to get the reference. That story, and so many others just as perfect, colonized my brain the way folksy Midwesterners colonized Mr. Bradbury's planets.

And it wasn't just those inimitable short stories. The Halloween Tree was one of my favorite novels as a kid, and I reread Something Wicked This Way Comes only a month ago. The Master wrote plays, including a lovely piece called The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit--later expanded into a charming but little-seen movie. He wrote teleplays and movie screenplays varying from Moby Dick to Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland. Many of his stories were adapted for a regular series, The Ray Bradbury Theater, on HBO and USA Network.

But look, all of that is on Wikipedia. You'll see it in every obituary. What you won't see is a shy teenage boy in Nowhere, Oklahoma who borrowed decades-old typewriters from his mom's friends, occasionally swiping time on shiny IBM Selectrics in the offices he cleaned for a living, tapping away in a desperate quest to write something, anything rich enough to bear comparison to Mr. Bradbury's work. Thirty years later, I've never succeeded. Oh, I'm a perfectly decent writer, I have no false modesty about that, but no one can ever be Bradbury good. He's the diamond at the core of Clarke's Jupiter, untouchably, perfectly brilliant. Those obituaries won't describe the stacks of books, whole library wings, I've plowed through over the years trying to find genre literature even remotely comparable to Mr. Bradbury's most fuzzily imagined toss-offs. Mr. Bradbury, and my mom, introduced me to speculative fiction, and now, like so many young dreamers the world over, I just keep coming back to it, unconvinced of the need for any other kind of fiction.

He was still writing! His most recent short story, "Juggernaut," was published only three years ago. But now the Master of Miracles has departed for deep space, traversing the starscape forever, leaving our world that much sadder and emptier. Except somewhere...in a backwater town, maybe, on the edge of despair in America's heartland, a little boy or girl will find a battered old copy of S Is for Space or R Is for Rocket or The Illustrated Man in a mostly-abandoned library, and after that first spectacular brainquake, the next great American talent will take fire. Mr. Bradbury, we'll owe you for that Promethean spark for centuries to come. Find your silence. I will never get over that gift you gave my life so many years ago.

Rest in peace, sir. Farewell.

[1]