/*Bradbury Speaks*/
PREDICTING THE PAST, REMEMBERING THE FUTURE (2001)
It was finally Walter Bradbury at Doubleday, no relation, who one night said, “What about all those Martian stories you’ve published in the pulp magazines? Wouldn’t they make a sort of ramshackle novel if you tied them together in a tapestry and called them The Martian Chronicles? Go back to the YMCA, write me an outline, and if I find it’s good enough, I’ll advance you seven hundred fifty dollars.”
I stayed up all night at the YMCA, created Mars on my portable typewriter, and showed it to him the next day.
He said, “Here’s your seven hundred fifty dollars!”
So The Martian Chronicles was born.
Mainly, I might add, influenced by Winesburg, Ohio. I read that book when I was twenty-four and thought how wonderful if someday I could write something as fine but locate it on Mars. I made an outline for my possible book but forgot it. Now Walter Bradbury was suggesting a tapestry of those stories, and I recalled Sherwood Anderson’s influence.
The rest is history. The book was published to few reviews. In the thirties, forties, and fifties, it was rare for a science-fiction or fantasy book to appear. Readers had to wait months or years, subsisting on H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Then, in the fifties and sixties, more and more novels about the future and outer space appeared. Soon a revolution occurred in American education. For the first time in history, students educated teachers.
They came into the classroom with books by Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and occasionally myself, and gave them to the teacher in place of apples.
The teacher glared at these novels and said, Science fiction—what’s that?
The kids said, Try the first chapter.
The teachers read the first chapter and said, Not bad, then read on and finally began to teach.
Today the novels of these authors and myself are in all the schools and colleges of America.
Much of this was provoked, of course, by our successful Moon landing. When Apollo 11 printed the lunar soil, it imprinted all our lives.
Gateways opened to wider fields. Since that time the most successful Hollywood films have been science fiction or fantasy.
So I’ve come a long way from my encounters with Mr. Electrico, L. Frank Baum, Verne, Burroughs, and, before that, Edgar Allan Poe.
People ask me where my science fiction or fantasy will be taking me in the coming years. I believe that the whole outreach of science-fiction writers in the near future must be in a religious relationship with the universe. It was first indicated in that landmark film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when, in the final scenes, we scan the heavens to see the arrival of the mother ship, which is really an entire city from across the universe.
The scene is reminiscent of the encounter between God and Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, when God reaches down to touch and Adam reaches up to touch, and the spark leaps the gap.
So it is that we fantasy writers must look to the universe and give reasons for revisiting the Moon, heading for Mars, and moving out toward the cosmos.
Space travel to me answers the age-old question: What are we doing here? What is life all about? Where are we going?
George Bernard Shaw, many years ago, believed that the human race was headed in a direction that it could not quite comprehend but would nevertheless hurl ourselves headlong into that unplumbed future.
My own belief is that the universe exists as a miracle and that we have been born here to witness and celebrate. We wonder at our purpose for living. Our purpose is to perceive the fantastic. Why have a universe if there is no audience?
We are that audience.
We are here to see and touch, describe and move. Our job, then, is to occupy ourselves with paying back the gift. This must be at the center of the stories, novels, and films that we fantasy writers create tomorrow.
When we first landed on the Moon on that night in July 1969, I was asked to appear on The David Frost Show.
I eagerly accepted because I wanted to explain that space travel was about mankind’s possible immortality.
David Frost, however, laughed at the whole encounter, and I walked off the show.
At 8:30 P.M., London time, we landed on the Moon. The following dawn Neil Armstrong emerged from the craft to footprint the lunar soil.
Fleeing The David Frost Show at midnight, I crossed London to do a Telstar show with Walter Cronkite, who allowed me to speak the truths I felt were inherent in our escape from Earth.
I stayed up, did a dozen shows, cried all night with joy, because it was the most important night in my life, and for all the people on Earth.
At around nine in the morning, I walked back across London, totally exhausted but totally happy.
In front of my hotel, I saw a small tabloid newspaper with a headline which read NEIL ARMSTRONG WALKS AT SIX A.M.... BRADBURY WALKS AT MIDNIGHT.