Way in the Middle of the Air

My first grown-up novel was Abington Free Library's copy of The Martian Chronicles. I don't know if that was my first encounter with Ray Bradbury; at around the same young age I also read his short story, "The Fog Horn", in the literary treasury my Mom used for her middle school English classes. Both works are as beautiful, imaginative and heart-breaking as anything else ever written. The Martian Chronicles depicts the human colonization of Mars, the extinction of Martian culture, and the eventual destruction of human civilization in a nuclear war. "The Fog Horn" is about a lonely sea monster falling in love with a lighthouse. I cannot overstate how cool and influential these stories are when you come across them as a kid.

The first halfway decent thing I ever wrote (a short story about a kid who foresees nuclear apocalypse while posing for his yearbook photo), and all the terrible-to-middling short stories I wrote in high school and college, were attempts at Ray Bradbury stories. Most of the scripts I write now are attempts to find my own way to places Mr. Bradbury showed me when I was growing up. He proved, decisively and very early in my life, that you could write about rocket ships, time travel, and robots, and still say as much about humanity as any dozen more realistic stories.

Even better than that, the guy was in love with writing itself. His prose is an adrenaline rush, whether he's writing about a haunted house on Mars or a small town in Illinois. He wrote the best science fiction ever, but he also wrote horror stories, disguised memoirs, and detective stories. He threw genres together like a painter making new colors (The Martian Chronicles alone is a rainbow of alternate history, dystopian sci-fi, gothic horror, and more). He wrote every day and credited writing with his long life. He died last night at 91, and from what I've read he never slowed down.

Most people will never be as good or work as hard as he did, but his imagination and his output are constellations by which to navigate. He wrote one short story in which the narrator sees an old friend who used to be a talented young writer but fell out of the habit. Bradbury's narrator (whom I don't think Bradbury even attempted to depict as anyone other than Bradbury himself) is so angry about this that he immediately hops in a time machine, goes back to when the washed-up old ex-writer was still a talented young writer, and kicks the young man's ass until he promises to keep writing. The story's a great motivational tool, and I doubt I'm only young writer who uses it as such.

My copy of The Martian Chronicles is in a box somewhere, but my favorite story therein is "Night Meeting", which is about a lone human meeting a lone Martian on the road during a night drive. From the human's standpoint, the Martians and their cities are all long dead, and from the Martian's standpoint, the human colonists haven't arrived yet and their towns haven't been built. So the Martian tells the human about the wonders of the Martian city, a place of wine-filled canals and ravishing women of flame, and the human tells the Martian about the Earth towns springing up all over the red planet, and the two part as friends, each bewildered by a glimpse of a weird, dreamlike world neither one of them would have found on his own.

Mr. Bradbury has boarded a rocket for parts unknown. But, bless him, he and his works are also still here, like that Martian on the road and the otherworldly city he calls home.