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38. Controversial Fictions
- University of Illinois Press
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232 | | 5 38 Controversial Fictions Almost immediately, the New York trip began to reap dividends . Doubleday soon agreed to a contract on The Illinois Chronicles, and Bradbury ’s first major-market interview, conducted during the last days of his New York trip by columnist Harvey Breit, was finally featured in the August 5, 1951, issue of the weekly New York Times Book Review. But the interview had occurred just after his Sunday night confrontation with the ballet dancers, and some of Bradbury’s responses represent a somewhat harsh distancing from the object of their derision. His most critical comments came in response to Breit’s query about the current status of writing in the field: “I’m afraid that as in any literary form there are only a few people who are trying to do something really good. In science fiction there are the space operas, a Western in space; you herd rockets insteadofcattle.Buttherearesomesciencefictionwriterswhoaretryingtothink in human terms of real human problems. The form has a bad name because of the space operas. You say science fiction and people think of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.” This observation was an overreaction to his recent experience at Elliott Grennard ’s soireé, for his own apprentice work in the lower-tier science fiction pulps was itself closely akin to space opera. But subsequent comments in the interview denied even that history, and this was unfortunate for more than one reason— most of his own mentors, including Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett, worked in and out of this subgenre, and his observations would also complicate his increasingly ambiguous relationship with writers and critics who believed that good science fiction depended on at least some interaction with the realities of technology and science. Bradbury never asked for the close association that the general reading public would establish between his name and the field of science fiction, but some of his New York Times interview comments could be far too easily taken out of context by those who felt otherwise. The aftermath of his negotiations with Doubleday during the New York trip also proved to be problematic in some ways. Walt Bradbury continued to have reservations about the older science fiction material that had not been brought into The Illustrated Man collection, and he finally declined the three-novella proposal . Congdon still favored the concept because he was now actively representi -xvi_1-328_Elle.indd 232 6/27/11 2:52 PM Chapter 38. Controversial Fictions | 233 ing Bradbury’s TV and stage interests in New York for the Matson Agency and wanted to maintain visibility for all three of the novella properties. Congdon sometimes found himself out of the loop on film possibilities, however, for Bradbury had retained Ben Benjamin as his West Coast media agent. Benjamin had recently joined Ray Starke with the Famous Artists Agency, and this move increased studio interest in Bradbury’s work. Congdon advised caution, however, and tried to persuade Bradbury to avoid film and television options that would tie up stories for long periods of time. The motion picture industry was still coming to terms with the new world of television , and Congdon wanted to maximize Bradbury’s media sales potential while avoiding long-term options that might never pan out. The majority of Bradbury’s sales were going to the major market magazines now; his anthology sales were expanding, but the real exposure and income remained with the new stories. As Bradbury became more absorbed with the television and film opportunities, however, Congdon found himself with fewer new stories to circulate. He was even more concerned with Bradbury’s growing tendency to hold stories back for revision, a process that often went on for months. The situation was complicated by the fact that Bradbury was now trying to publish stories with themes that were politically charged, including creative forays into freedom of speech, freedom from fear (both foreign and domestic), and a topic that was only just beginning to gain momentum in America—the Civil Rights movement. These stories were, for the most part, not polemics, for Bradbury knew that thinly disguised rational arguments ran counter to everything he believed about the spontaneous nature of literary creativity. Fortunately, there was no need for him to strike a pose on these topics—all his life, he had known what it meant to live on the margins of the American experience, and his instinctive love of equality was sincere. In recounting his own mixed European ancestry for an undated high...