Ray Bradbury: S is for Space

When Ray Bradbury passed away in 2012 I suffered a minor pang of guilt that I had never read any of his works, despite being aware of him as a major contributor to science fiction of the latter Twentieth Century. I rectified that pretty quickly with Fahrenheit 451 and also purchased The Martian Chronicles which I have yet to read. I enjoyed Farhenheit 451 although I wasn’t totally wowed by it (thank you over-hype!) I found Bradbury’s prose to be somewhat economic and enigmatic (similar to my feelings on Hemingway, actually) and it took me a while to get used to it. But I felt on reflection that this was a book and an author I’d enjoy revisiting at some point. Time has slipped by and I’d not been back for more until recently I was loaned the 1966 short story collection S is for Space. Cue me re-engaging with Ray Bradbury at last.

 

I have an on-off relationship with short stories. I usually find them somewhat unsatisfactory, giving me a glimpse of a world that I happily buy into only to find myself thrown out again far too quickly, usually abruptly and without a firm conclusion. S is for Space is no exception to that, and I tended to enjoy most the tales set on Mars, which felt like they had a more thematic cohesion and a greater sense of place and being.

The stories are very much of their time, that’s for sure. Mid-1960s, little America, fear of / preoccupation with atomic war, protecting and nurturing the family, hidden alien (foreign, Russian) threats, invasion or assimilation to a new philosophy or outlook through infiltration – it’s almost a tick list of national obsessions of the time. It’s also a very progressive collection; compiled at a time when efforts were being made to put the first man on the moon, it records a future where rocket travel to the Moon, Mars or beyond is as quotidian as loading up the car and moving to a new US State. There’s little sense of it being a multi-cultural or multi-racial future, though: it’s good ol’ American boys with their good ol’ families out there in the universe doing their best to make a good ol’ happy life. Hard work and baseball, mom’s apple pie… Again this just seems to confirm its sense of place in US culture.

One could perhaps argue that this isn’t a collection of stories as such, but more a collection of ‘situations’ and how people deal with them. The characters are very much grounded in real life, even if that life is set in the future or on Mars. There is a grittiness to the players, an uncompromising sense of struggle as they deal with whatever life throws at them. This isn’t high concept science fiction set in a universe created solely in the mind of the author; this is contemporary life (as Bradbury saw it at the time) tweaked a little. This allows the reader to buy-in to Bradbury’s situations much more quickly; he can concentrate on telling his story, not on trying to sell you his new world, his new universe. Even Mars is like the old Wild West.

Yes I found some of the stories mildly frustrating in the way they enigmatically just end without closure, but I did enjoy the collection overall and I found some of the situations and the concepts highly engaging. If I had a criticism it would be that the collection is a little too long, contains a few too many stories, and towards the end I felt the freshness was waning.

I’m hoping that what I enjoyed most in this collection I will find more of in The Martian Chronicles when I get round to reading that.