In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

| 173| 5 29 Modernist Alternatives Bradbury was still, first and foremost, a short-story writer. The Illinois novel was slowly emerging from a growing nest of Green Town stories, and a wide range of niche market and major market magazine editors were interested in new Bradbury tales. The darker themes and moods of the two failed novels lingered in certain kinds of short stories he was writing, however, and reflected his deep ambivalence toward an increasingly destabilized world. How could he and Maggie consider raising a family as a strange new form of Cold War between East and West accelerated an arms race with potentially unimaginable consequences? He never developed a Postmodernist dislike of where technology and science had brought the world, but he always remained wary of where science may lead mankind in the future. This predictive urge led him to use his science fiction stories to work through some of the issues left unresolved in the failed novels. Many of these stories were dark and ranged across all kinds of science fiction settings. Ten of these dark science fiction tales are, for the most part, unrelated to the fragile crystal cities and the exotic masked Martians that Bradbury would eventually bridge into the larger narrative of The Martian Chronicles. These ten are remarkably dark situational extrapolations, completely unrelated to each other yet clearly sharing the despair and isolation found in the two unfinished crisis-of-values novels. But the darkness in these stories centers more directly on a powerful sense of loneliness, made all the more chilling by the lack of any familiar source of strength or system of belief to balance the horror of the unknown. These were all written in the 1946–48 period and slowly worked their way into print over the next several years. Some are science fantasies, but all are built onto the conventional scaffolding of science fiction. Even a cursory sequence of summaries, offered in the order of initial publication , provides a sense of the darkness pervading much of Bradbury’s lesserknown output of this period. What if Mars is a barren quarantine planet for people who have contracted the “blood rust” of a polluted Earth? “The Visitor” introduces a new resident who can provide wish-fulfillment illusions, until the greed of his fellow prisoners leads to his death. What if a space pilot crashes on an uninhabited planetoid and only has to await the ship dispatched to rescue i-xvi_1-328_Elle.indd 173 6/27/11 2:51 PM 174 | the tyranny of words him? “Asleep in Armageddon” describes the ghosts of ages past who take over his dreams and drive him to a sleep-deprived insanity (they’ll be waiting for the rescue crew as well). “The One Who Waits” is an ageless entity in a Martian well, a mind invader who destroys a crew of Earthmen, one by one. “The Lonely Ones” arethetwoEarthastronautswhotemporarily lose their slim grip on sanity when the prospect of continued isolation on lifeless Mars becomes too much to bear. “A Blade of Grass” is set on Earth, but is no less grim than the other tales: nurturing any life forms, even something as small as a blade of grass, is a capital offense in Earth’s far distant future, where the dominant robot culture has long-since eradicated all known plant and animal life. “Holiday,”“PaymentinFull,”“Purpose”(betterknownas“TheCity”),“Death Wish” (better known as “The Blue Bottle”) and “No Particular Night or Morning ” round out these ten, which are distinguished from other Bradbury stories of this period by their science fiction trappings, their unrelieved darkness, the lack of any familiar points of reference, and their relative obscurity within the Bradbury canon. Only three of these tales would make it into The Illustrated Man, the collection eventually designed to showcase the best Bradbury science fiction not included in The Martian Chronicles cycle of stories. In most cases, Bradbury showed a marked reluctance to collecting these stories until many years later, if at all. These stories all represent downward spirals toward death or insanity, without any of Earth’s wondrous technologies to rescue the protagonists or, at the very least, to explain and comment on the tragedy. Other dark science fiction stories, based more firmly in the ancient Martian culture he was creating in his own mind, found their way into The Martian Chronicles, including tales of exploration (“Ylla,” “The Earth Men,” and “Mars Is Heaven!” revised as “The Third Expedition”), exploitation (“The Martian”), and abandonment (“The...

Share