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RAY BRADBURY HIGH |
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by Charles Carreon It was 1967 in Phoenix, Arizona. I was in my freshman year at Camelback High, twelve years old, just out of a three-year stint in a Catholic military school in Virginia, an experienced I detailed in A Day In the Life of PFC Charles Carreon, Nine Years Old. The library in military school was pretty deficient, and I only remember two books from there, one being Jacques Cousteau's "Undersea Explorer," and the other "The Story of The United States Secret Service." So I was happy to find that the Camelback High library was really big, and had a modest sci-fi section. I started at the beginning. Of course Asimov owned the “A” section, and I gobbled up "The Stars Like Dust" in about two days. But I quickly moved on to the “B” section of the Science Fiction Alphabet, and there discovered Ray Bradbury. I had a long bus ride every day, and I was one of those poor latchkey kids, because my mom worked and my Dad lived in Washington DC. So there was nobody to meet me at home, which didn't have good air conditioning, and was thus hotter than hell. So it was easier to stay in the library and catch the late bus home, which gave me about three or four hours of reading that I could do without having to dodge the inquiring glances of my teachers. Yes, in those days they would dog you about reading a book in class. Now I guess they're happy if you aren't cooking crank in the boys room. Those were innocent days. All the world was potential to me. Bradbury introduced me to magical realism, in my view. That label hadn’t been invented, though, so “science-fiction” seemed an appropriate label for the author of some stories released under the name of The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury created a very non-scientifically-correct Mars, however, populated variously by mysterious ancient ones who faded into ashes at the touch of the chicken pox, by golden-skinned poets who shot their rivals with deadly bees, and by transplanted Africans, who left behind an earth full of nasty white folks. Bradbury found enough room in outer space to step outside of our social constraints and imagine something new. For example, by imagining black people in control of their own planet, we could imagine black people free of white domination. By imagining jealous Martian poets armed with living weapons, he conjured the unfamiliar through the familiar. The emotions we recognize. The landscape is foreign. The effect is entrancing. I also read “The Illustrated Man,” another story collection that expanded my realm of imaginative experience, giving me, among other things, a vista onto an African veldt with holographic lions that can’t be trusted (“The Veldt”), and a visit to a house that kept on minding its occupants even after they were incinerated in a nuclear attack (“There Will Come Soft Rains”). In Dandelion Wine, Bradbury turned soft and reflective, creating an elixir of light and time with stories like “A Medicine for Melancholy.” These stories, which I often read in the back of a bus pushing its way through the hot streets of Phoenix, Arizona, as the sun settled toward sunset, left me feeling dreamy and distant, a million miles away from the desert town, an inhabitant of the Universe. “Twice Twenty-Two” was another Bradbury story collection of forty-four stories that I remember had an effect that I can only recollect as intoxicating. I remember closing the book, and thinking how amazing it was that I could just open the covers and find a universe of infinite extent, bounded only by the imagination. I read “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” a hair raising set of stories about a nightmare circus that comes to the edge of town, claiming victims who find themselves caught on the wrong side of the funhouse mirror, unable to return from a ferris wheel ride, marooned in a realm of illusion. In “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” which was made into a movie with Eddie Olmos and other pioneering Hispanic actors that I recently watched, Bradbury sketched a quaint but charming set of theatrical vignettes with an especially Latin take on the concept that clothes make the man. As the years went by, I turned less often to Bradbury, but occasionally returned to his realm of fable, myth and parable. He brought to mind the issues that my teachers in high school rarely seemed to raise – issues of magic, friendship, love, loss, and death. Because most of his stories are short, and often have young characters engaged in passionate life situations, they are ideal for young people, and make great gifts for readers of any age. |