why do we still like Ray Bradbury?

Greetings, fellow undercover artists embedded in the apocalypse!

It's a funny business, connecting with other covert operatives across time and space. Tracking what holds true and what changes. What audiences respond to now; what they responded to a hundred years ago. What made our soul shiver as children; how that same stuff strikes us now.

A massive part of being an artist is watching other artists. How they make you feel. What they do well. Where they are successful. Who becomes big. And why.

When I wrote about why "we" don't read writers from "the Golden Age" of SF anymore, I wasn't surprised that it got a strong reaction - there has always been a very vocal core crew of science fiction fans ready to tell you about how YOU ARE WRONG if you fail to worship at the altar of Asimov, of Arthur C. Clarke, of Heinlein.

But I was delighted to see that one unifying theme across many of the social media responses was how many of my favorite contemporary SF/F/H writers shared my love for Ray Bradbury!

What I said specifically:

But those writers have meant very little to me in my journey as a science fiction writer (except for Ray Bradbury, whose short stories I adore and whose prose fucking sings).

So, for me, and for lots of my contemporary faves, there's a Ray Bradbury Exception - and it made me wonder: why?

This newsletter is about telling good stories in a bad world, and I wanted to learn more about how Ray Bradbury succeeded. I wanted to share the lessons I think he still has, for writers struggling to make beauty amid the ugliness. To that end, I'm including some awesome additional perspectives shared by other writers, both on social media and in follow-up conversation afterwards.

For me, what makes Ray special is first and foremost his sentences. There's a poetry to the prose, a rhythm and a sound that elevates his writing and gives it the weight and power of myth.

Which I think is part of why he never fit in with the mainstream of the Golden Age Dude Bros. Poetry is not rational, it's not scientific. It's not macho.

Matthew Cheney, a great writer and wonderful friend, said:

"There's a certain tendency among old guard traditional SF folks to disparage Bradbury (sentimental, gooey, a good writer for children but not adults, etc.) that ... reveals a lot."

Lincoln Michel, author of the awesome new book Metallic Realms, said:

"I've always thought of Bradbury as the bridge between the Golden Age and the New Wave. If we think of the New Wave as expanding science fiction through experimentation and closer attention to prose and style, then Bradbury was doing that before most others. He's simply a fantastic stylist, as well as a terrific storyteller. One only needs to read a few pages of The Martian Chronicles or The Illustrated Man or Something Wicked This Way Comes to see that. He was never the "hardest" science fiction writer--The Martian Chronicles is at times closer to fabulism than science fiction despite the subject matter--but so what? His sense of style and storytelling is what allowed him to write in any genre he pleased from realism and horror to children's literature and science fiction."

And Hailey Piper, who I consider probably the greatest horror writer to hit the scene in the past ten years? who just wrote A Game in Yellow, which came out last month and I just read and loved, said:

"Something I love about Bradbury's writing is that it feels beautifully dangerous. You don't know if you're going to get a heartwarming observation of the world, or a fatal flaw in human nature, or both in the same passage."

[ Side note, Bradbury wrote a brilliant story about a dying man discovering that his beloved grandson is gay, and it's subtle and sensitive and light years ahead of anything that I've ever read by any of the Golden Age writers on the subject of queer identity (and yes that includes the ones who were actually LGBTQ+), and I'm thinking I will dive deeper into it in a future undercover report. ]

Bo Bolander, another one of my favorite contemporary writers, said:

"Bradbury, like LeGuin, was the whole package: He could come up with brilliant hooks for his stories and novels like nobody's business but understood that without the undergirding of emotional beats the reader could relate to, what the hell was the point? Neat ideas are neat, but they don't get under your skin without the hypodermic sting of seeing yourself in the way fear or love or hate motivate a character. Look at all the unremarkable 'creepy carnival comes to a small town and offers to make all the dreams of the local folk come true--for a price!' stories that have come and gone since Something Wicked This Way Comes was published. Ask yourself why one is so vibrant and beloved and so poignantly alive, why most of the others feel a little wan and xeroxed in comparison.

And, of course, the man could fucking write a sentence. On a prose level nobody else in his cohort comes anywhere close, not even the masters. He could hear the rhythm and and the lilt in the way words school together. His paragraphs are murmurations wheeling across the page, the key shifts in a 3 am train whistle as it dopplers mournfully by on the other side of town. If you're a writer it's the kind of stuff that may occasionally make you slam the book down in a Salieriesque strop, wondering what the hell the point is.

Then you pick it back up again and keep on reading, teeth slightly gritted. THAT'S how good Ray Bradbury is."

He had heart. His people have heart, have breath, have life. His characters want things, even bad things, and they want them so bad they make you want them for them. Ray Bradbury is an important part of my writerly DNA, and I think he has so much to offer us as undercover operatives in an apocalypse.

I'll close out by urging my fellow undercover storytellers here in the apocalypse to check out Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, my favorite writing craft book, which contains, among many others, these brilliant insights:

“What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.”

“You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.”