Weekend Economists Chart the Bradbury Chronicles, June 8-10,2012

[Demeter]

35. Ray Bradbury: Finding Our Reflections Where We Didn't Expect Them by Peter Sagal

Heinlein, Asimov and Bradbury; they were the tripod (invasive, moving, with lasers) on which my science fiction education was built in the 1970s. This was somewhat self-selected, because once you — or I — grew out of Danny Dunn and Journey to the Mushroom Planet and Tom Swift, Jr., they were the inevitable destinations, the planets with the heaviest gravity wells in the sci-fi solar system.

Heinlein was story, adventure, politics, action. My favorite of his was Glory Road, an unabashed tribute to swords and swashbuckling on foreign planets in the vein of John Carter, but I was also freaked out by the parasitical brain worms of the Puppet Masters, confused but intrigued by the patriotic, slightly fascist future state of Starship Troopers, bemused and confused and excited by the weird sexual politics of Stranger In A Strange Land and Time Enough for Love.

Asimov was ideas, millions of them, based on physics, psychology, speculation: what if a civilization had never seen the stars? ("Nightfall.&quot What if social science became so powerful it could predict the future? (Foundation.) What if Asimov could actually write as well as he could think?

And Bradbury was people. Kids in a long-gone Midwestern town (based on a town not far from where I write), firemen who reluctantly burned books, and of course astronauts, travelers, people who went to other planets only to find themselves. That is, in fact, the ending of my favorite Ray Bradbury story, "The Million Year Picnic," the last story in The Martian Chronicles. A family from Earth arrives on Mars, after a nuclear war has wiped out life here. The Dad offers the kids a chance to see Martians; the story ends as the family looks into a canal, seeing their own reflection in the water, and the Dad says [something like]: "There they are. Now we are the Martians."

MORE AT LINK: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2012/06/06/154443387/ray-bradbury-finding-our-reflections-where-we-didnt-expect-them