The Stories of Ray Bradbury

"I hope this interview inspires a few more people to read it! We should go to Ray Bradbury next. Fahrenheit 451 is the one that most people seem to know, but it’s actually very atypical of most of his work . I’ve chosen his collected short stories for this interview. As a teenager I was getting all my books from the library. I was hoovering up anthologies of science fiction stories, most of which came from 1950’s and ’60s American magazines. Ray Bradbury was one of the writers who kept popping out at me from these anthologies, and eventually, I bought myself a big two-volume edition of his collected stories. He was the first writer I read where I became aware that I wasn’t just reading for the story. I was reading for the way he used language and this very poetic style that he has. Now when I look at it I think it’s a little bit too poetic in parts. It’s a little bit purple in places, but at the time, when I was 13 or 14, it was astonishing to me, and it opened a door for me. I thought, “Oh, okay. If I want to write, it’s not just about the story. It’s about the actual choice of words you make and how you describe things.” He’s very good at the short story. I’m surprised, looking back at them, how many of them are more mild horror than science fiction or fantasy because I’m not a horror fan at all and never have been. I don’t think I cared, really, because I just liked his vision so much at the time. There’s a fantastic one called The Foghorn where a lonely lighthouse on a fog-bound coast starts sounding its foghorn and a prehistoric monster, which has been sleeping at the bottom of the sea for centuries, wakes up hearing this and thinks that it’s another prehistoric monster calling to it. It’s so lonely, this poor creature. So it’s basically a 1950s monster movie, and I think it actually did end up getting turned into a rubbish, “brontosaurus-rampaging-through-New York” film. In the story your sympathy is with the monster completely and it’s just this sad story about the monster hearing the foghorn and thinking that there’s another like it somewhere and then learning that it’s all alone after all. People say, sometimes with justification, that science fiction isn’t interested in emotions and feelings and characters and things, but Ray Bradbury is. And he is brilliant for that reason. I find quite a lot of the sci-fi I read as a teenager is now really dated. Most of the stuff I was reading was from before computers were invented and so people on their super advanced 25th century spaceships are still using valve radios and stuff. But with Ray Bradbury, it doesn’t actually matter. It’s notional – the rocket ships and things. He’s not trying to be plausible. He’s not trying to predict the future in any way. He’s just spinning stories, and the stories are all about the people and the spindly, silver rocket ships are just a way of getting them to Venus or Mars or somewhere so that a story can occur. So there is no real interest in science except this great sense of wonder that does then send you off to read about Mars for real. There’s an opening passage here which sums up what Ray Bradbury is about for me. It is from a story called Mars is Heaven and it goes, “The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space.” That to me, is so spine-tingly, and that is very much what drew me in as a teen. I read Ray Bradbury and it made me go and write lots of short stories and most of them, well, all of them probably, were rubbish, but at least I was writing. Yes, it is, but eventually, I found that what appeals to me, much more, was the Tolkien scale. I didn’t really want to write little perfectly crafted short stories. I wanted to spread my imagination across vast landscapes. So as an adult I’ve never really written short stories seriously, but I do like reading them, and I admire well-written ones. Another thing that I got from Bradbury and from a lot of writers of his generation was that they were very happy to name-check the great writers they’d been influenced by. So, from Bradbury, I was sent on, to read people like Steinbeck and Hemingway , whom I might never have come across otherwise. Those pulp magazines probably would have been read by lots of not particularly well-educated teenagers, in that particular era, and it presented them with a little gateway to higher culture, and I rather like that."