Martian Chronicles: Ray Bradbury As A Commander Of Science Fiction

Bradbury grew up in Waukegan, Illinois and when he was a kid, along with his dad, he would hang around the fire station. Later on, he had heard about book burnings occurring in Germany, Russia and China, and the stories of the great libraries of Alexandria being destroyed by flames over 2,000 years ago. Bradbury attended libraries starting around the age of eight. Since he never went to college, he considered libraries as his “university.” In his own words:

“When I heard about Hitler burning the books in the streets of Berlin, it bothered me terribly. I was 15 when that happened, I was thoroughly in love with libraries and he was burning me when he did that…. The reason why I wrote Fahrenheit 451 is that I am a library person and I am in danger of someday writing something that people might not like and they might burn. So it was only natural that I sat down and wrote Fahrenheit 451.”

Raymond Douglas Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois on August 22, 1920. He lived in Waukegan, Illinois, which was a small city at the edge of Illinois. He also lived in Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles, California. Bradbury was the third son in his family, and his parents were Spaulding Bradbury and Esther Marie Moberg Bradbury. Ray Bradbury was born with the influence of a lot of men interested in the written word. Both his great-grandfather and grandfather were newspaper publishers. His father, a lineman with the electric company, one of his multiple ancestors was a woman who was tried in the Salem Witch Trial. Bradbury was a very unathletic child but loved the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the Oz stories of L. Frank Baum, and his mother would read these stories to him. One of Bradbury’s aunts would take him to stage plays dressed as a monster for Halloween, and introduced him to the first of Poe’s stories. He discovered the science fiction rubbish and began collecting his first comic strips which were, adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

Ray Bradbury was about 12 years old when he decided that he wanted to become a writer. Bradbury was never discouraged from this dream, and when asked what kept him so young and alert, he answered that he owed it all to doing what he loves every single day. The momentum to become a writer was equipped by a carnival magician named Mr. Electrico, who betrothed the boy, he was only 12 at this time, in a conversation that touched on endurance. At the age of 11, Bradbury began writing stories on small, unoccupied pieces of butcher paper. By the age of 12, he knew he wanted to be a writer. Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School, where he was greatly motivated by two of his teachers. While one taught Bradbury to love poetry, the other taught him how to write a short story. In school, he joined the poetry club, but outside of school, he joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Club. Bradbury then graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1938. He saw no need for college when he knew already that he wanted to be a writer, so he began scripting every day at the local library and nagging them to read every evening. While he was still in High School in his poem In Memory of Will Rogers marked his first writing when it appeared in the Waukegan News-Sun. Dark Carnival was his first actual book, which was a collection of short stories he arranged together to be published in 1947 by Arkham House. With 26 other short stories in a similar attitude, “Homecoming” appeared in Mr. Bradbury’s first book, “Dark Carnival,” published by a small professional press in 1947. That year marked a milestone when he married Marguerite Susan McClure, whom he met in a Los Angeles bookstore. They fell in love and were married on September 27, 1947. Together they had four daughters which were Susan, Ramona, Bettina, and Alexandra. Ray Bradbury had a very happy marriage and remained in steadfast love throughout their marriage, then Marguerite passed away in 2003.

A year later in 2004, President George W. Bush and the first lady, Laura Bush, granted Mr. Ray Bradbury with the National Medal of Arts. Mr. Bradbury is handled by his daughters, which are now known as Susan Nixon, Ramona Ostergren, Bettina Karapetian and Alexandra Bradbury, and eight grandchildren. A well-known twist in his life is that Bradbury, despite writing about spaceships and interplanetary excursion and having lived in Los Angeles for most of his life, never drove a car. He attributed this to having seen a gruesome car accident when he was young. Also, he never flew in an airplane until the age of 62. Later, he swooped on the Concorde to Paris, where he worked with Disney on the advanced Disneyland Park being constructed in France. Bradbury made daily appearances at science fiction conventions until 2009 when he resigned from the circuit. In 1950, Bradbury circulated his first major work, The Martian Chronicles, which complicated the conflict between humans conquering the red planet and the native Martians they came across there. While seized by many to be a performance of science fiction, Bradbury himself treated it to be a fantasy. ‘I don’t write science fiction,’ he said. ‘Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it’s fantasy. It couldn’t happen, you see?’ Television and comic book variations of Bradbury’s short stories began to develop in 1951, introducing him to an extensive audience. In the 1970s Bradbury no longer wrote short fiction at his previous measure, turning his intensity to poetry and drama. Earlier in his race, he had numerous mystery short stories, and he rebounded to the genre with “Death Is a Lonely Business”, a tribute to the detective narratives of writers such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett mixed with an autobiographical backdrop of 1949 Venice, California, where Bradbury engaged at the time. Two conclusions, “A Graveyard for Lunatics” and “Let’s All Kill Constance”, mined his background in the 1950s and ’60s Hollywood. His final narrative, “Farewell Summer”, was a conclusion to “Dandelion Wine”. He adapted 59 of his short stories for the TV series The Ray Bradbury Theatre. Ray Bradbury accepted many honors for his industry including an Emmy for his animated transformation of The Halloween Tree and the National Medal of Arts. In 2007 the Pulitzer Prize Board assigned Bradbury a Special Citation for his distinguished course.

Ray Bradbury, a commander of science fiction whose imaginative and melodic evocations of the forthcoming reflected both the optimism and the miseries of his own postwar America, perished in Los Angeles, at the age of 91. His death was proved by his agent, Michael Congdon. Bradbury ‘died peacefully, last night, in Los Angeles, after a lengthy illness,’ HarperCollins said in a written allegation. By many estimations, Mr. Ray Bradbury was the writer most guilty for bringing modern science fiction into the literary current. His name would emerge near the top of any list of extensive science fiction writers of the 20th century. His books are still being educated in schools, where many a reader has been imported to them half a century after they first arose. Many readers have said Mr. Bradbury’s narratives fired their own imaginations. More than eight million replicas of his essays have been sold in 36 languages. They include the short-story compilations “The Martian Chronicles”, “The Illustrated Man” and “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” and the novellas “Fahrenheit 451” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

Ray Bradbury’s writing is fluid and lyrical, like a blossom. This story is not only abstract genius, but it also has the capability to turn a mirror on the editor as so few modern narratives can. One of the main themes is censorship, and if you are unsure of exactly the relevance of censorship in everyday life, it is ever so important to read.

Bradbury’s ‘gift for storytelling, reshaped our culture and expanded our world’, but the author ‘also understood that our imaginations could be used as a tool for better understanding, a vehicle for change, and an expression of our most cherished values. There is no doubt that Ray will continue to inspire many more generations with his writing, and our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends.

Ray Bradbury’s very inspiring quotes always touch the heart, and I read this one in Fahrenheit 451. “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

I chose to write about this author because I found out that his books were about science fiction, and fantasy. When I found this out I really wanted to read his books and research about him because I like fantasy books and science fiction books. Ray Bradbury did not like negative people at all. The science-fiction biographer and composer of Fahrenheit 451 told Terry Gross in the year of 1988, that he found out about negative people in fourth grade, quickly after his companions started picking on him for collecting Buck Rogers comic strips. ‘In that particular year, I tore up my comic strips and a month later, I burst into tears and said to myself, ‘Why am I weeping?’ Who died?’ ‘ he said. ‘And the answer was me. I had allowed these fools to kill me and to kill the future.’ From that day on, Bradbury said he would never take notice of negative people again. ‘And I went back and collected the Buck Rogers comic strips and started to write about it,’ he said. ‘And I became a writer.’ After reading this quote I realized that he may write about fantasy and not seem so good, but he stood up for himself and became a very well-known author, so that makes him even better.

1. Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. Simon and Schuster, 1950.
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4. Editors, npr. “Ray Bradbury: ‘It’s Lack That Gives Us Inspiration’.” NPR, NPR, 8 June 2012,www.npr.org/2012/06/08/154524695/ray-bradbury-its-lack-that-gives-us-inspiration.
5. Encyclopedia, New World. “Ray Bradbury.” Ray Bradbury – New World Encyclopedia, 2019, www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ray_Bradbury#cite_note-1.
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7. Jonas, Gerald. “Ray Bradbury, Who Brought Mars to Earth With a Lyrical Mastery, Dies at 91.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 June 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/books/ray-bradbury-popularizer-of-science-fiction-dies-at-91.html.
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