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Meeting Bradbury: Adaptations,Transformations, and Tributes
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91 Meeting Bradbury: Adaptations, Transformations, and Tributes David Mogen “I’ve decided that maybe we should do a life and work study of a major science fiction writer. Who would you want to write a book about?” I sipped my gin and tonic as I reflected about what I assumed to be a purely speculative question. We were at a publisher’s party at the 1976 MLA convention in Chicago, where I was interviewing for jobs and trying to interest someone in publishing my dissertation, “Frontier Themes in Science Fiction.” I’d sent it to the publisher G. K. Hall, and the editor I was speaking to liked it but said it didn’t fit any of their existing lines. But, he was suggesting , they were interested in opening up a new direction in their ongoing American Authors series to embrace the newly engaged academic interest in science fiction. “Ray Bradbury,” I said after a moment. “I’d like to write a book about Ray Bradbury.” “Why Bradbury?” “Well, I think he’s the most interesting stylistically from that Golden Age generation. But for me there’s something else. The Martian Chronicles was the most influential single book that got me thinking about American frontier myths and science fiction. And actually, it was probably the first science fiction book I read as a kid that totally captivated me.” “The frontier thing? Mars as the New World and rockets the new wagon trains?” “Sure, but that wasn’t the way I thought about it as a kid. His stories just connected personally. Sometimes they broke my heart, but they always left me feeling dreamy and alive. They were fabulous and exotic, but they somehow connected to life in the small, remote towns in Montana where I grew up. Maybe I’m still trying to figure out why stories from so far away seem so intimate.” * * * Small-town dreamers and far-away dreams, I thought, next fall in the mailroom of my new department at Georgia State University in Atlanta. A week earlier I had received a contract from a small press to publish my disARTICLE The New Ray Bradbury Review 92 sertation, and now I was holding a contract from G. K. Hall that had just arrived. I had received a phone call from Boston a few days earlier stating that the editor had gotten approval to do the book about Ray Bradbury, and he wanted me to do it. Now I was contemplating a new direction that had just opened up in my life, reflecting on my earlier conversation with the editor about why I chose Bradbury as my subject. I knew I’d be covering new territories, but at that moment I was focusing with a new sense of purpose on my original impulse to select Bradbury. What was it about his stories that first captured my imagination as a kid and still did as an aspiring scholar? What in his style and subject matter connected my sense of wonder to home? The Science Fiction Writers of America got it right when they selected his haunting early piece “Mars is Heaven” (“The Third Expedition” in The Martian Chronicles) as the archetypal Bradbury story, I thought. It symbolically projects the emotional heart of Bradbury’s great theme, the promises and perils of adaptation to new and alien environments. The pioneers cross the vast wilderness of space to enter the new New World, warned of the dangers that have destroyed two earlier expeditions of frontiersmen. But they’re fatally seduced by overwhelming visions of grandparents sitting on the porches of white frame houses, of cold lemonade and lost brothers. They’re destroyed by the power of their most secret dreams, by their hearts’ yearning to recover this ideal small town of memory in their mysterious new frontier. Perhaps that’s the connection that speaks to so many, the deep ambivalence behind our quests for progress, the longing to recapture what is vanishing in the quest for the new. I was going to write a book dealing with all aspects of Ray Bradbury and his career, but on a personal level I was most curious about connections between Green Town and Mars. Somehow for me, as for millions of others, I suspected, Bradbury’s stories about wondrous frontiers of the future touched achingly close to home. Poetic and poignant, they spoke about what was in imagining what might be, about hidden dreams that inspire and destroy. * * * “Hello. Is this Ray Bradbury?” “Speaking...