How to celebrate Ray Bradbury’s birthday in Indianapolis

Portrait of Ray Bradbury by Unangazord

It’s easy enough to understand why the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library is located in Indianapolis. Vonnegut grew up here. But the Ray Bradbury Center, located on the IUPUI campus in downtown Indy, doesn’t have such an obvious backstory. Bradbury was, after all, born in Waukegan, Illinois and  lived most of his life in Los Angeles, California. 

But if you want to celebrate the late science fiction writer’s 102nd birthday, opportunities abound in the Circle City thanks to the Ray Bradbury Center. You can start by watching a Facebook Live talk on the novel Dandelion Wine offered by the Phil Nichols, the Bradbury Center’s senior advisor. If you want more, you could visit a special exhibit titled “Ray Bradbury: A Storyteller’s Story” at the Indiana State Library, organized by the Center. You could even register for a 90-minute tour of the Center itself.

His birthday is on Aug. 22.

I’ve been revisiting Bradbury over the past few weeks. While I haven’t read him since high school, I have thought about him from time to time. I was even inspired to write a poem about him once.

But we’ll get to that.

I read many of his short stories when I was growing up, including “A Sound of Thunder”, in which a time traveler irrevocably changes history for the worse by inadvertently stepping on a butterfly. I also read “The Illustrated Man”, in which a man’s body becomes the animated storyboard for the tales he tells.

Reading The Martian Chronicles again, I was struck by how the plotlines of these stories have influenced so much American science fiction. Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, for example, recalls the Chronicles story “April 2000: The Third Expedition”, written four decades earlier. In Contact, an alien life form appears to the protagonist, Dr. Ellie Arroway, in the form of her dead father. The aliens do this to communicate with her in a way she can understand. In the Bradbury story, on the other hand, the Martians take the form of astronauts’ dead relatives for far more nefarious purposes. That is, they trick the earthlings into complacency so they can kill them. (Contact, you may recall, was turned into a film starring Jodie Foster as Arroway.)

In The Martian Chronicles, the colonists from Earth inadvertently kill the Martian population by spreading chickenpox. With this plotline, Bradbury makes an explicit comparison to the decimation of the American Indian by European colonists. Bradbury wasn’t blind either to the institutional racism that was in effect in the Jim Crow South during the 1940s, when he wrote The Martian Chronicles. In the Chronicles story “Way in the Middle of the Air,” Bradbury extends the Great Migration of Blacks from the South beyond the northern states—to Mars. But once they arrive on the Red Planet, along with their fellow colonizers, they get to witness Earth’s destruction from afar by nuclear war. 

Bradbury’s imagined future on Mars is fraught, yet Chronicles ends on a hopeful note. In the last story in the collection, “The Billion Year Picnic” a father takes his family out for a picnic on a Martian canal with the promise to his family that he will show them Martians. He fulfills his promise by having his family members look down into the water in the canal and ponder their own reflections.

While Bradbury’s fiction is often branded as science fiction, his work usually transcends that label, incorporating elements of fantasy and numerous allusions to his literary antecedents. One of his most famous short stories, “There Will Come Soft Rains”, incorporates the entirety of Sara Teasdale’s eponymous anti-war poem.  

More importantly, his characters come across as flesh and blood human beings (except when they are robots) unlike many of his contemporaries who were fixated on future technologies. But many of the science fiction writers of the 1940s, when Bradbury started publishing regularly, wrote as if their characters were mere adornments for their space operas. Robert Heinlein, who Bradbury met just after he graduated high school, was one such writer.  Bradbury said of Heinlein, "He was well known, and he wrote humanistic science fiction, which influenced me to dare to be human instead of mechanical." 

In July, 1965, the Mariner 4 probe found that Mars had no magnetic field, and its atmospheric pressure was less than 1% of Earth’s. These inconvenient facts make it hard to read The Martian Chronicles as anything but science fantasy, as Mars was incapable of supporting human life in the way that Bradbury imagined it. And yet, the book is still timely, because it—like all the best literary work—functions as a mirror that sheds light on our common humanity.

After high school, I didn’t read Ray Bradbury at all. But I did see him speak once, on April 17, 1990 to be specific. His speech, titled “The Great Years Ahead” took place at Johns Hopkins University when I was a senior in Hopkins’ Writing Seminars program. 

It was an enormously optimistic speech. It was also a rallying cry, not just for more space exploration, but also for space colonization à la The Martian Chronicles. His point was that Homo sapiens have built a civilization that is to be marveled at. So why should we be limited to our earthly home? I took this to mean that Bradbury was willing to throw environmental concerns aside if they got in the way of populating the galaxy. 

During this time period, nuclear war with the Soviet Union had subsided as a concern in the American media. But there were many other doomsday scenarios that were coming to the forefront. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest was one concern. Global warming was another.  

Some in Bradbury’s audience, particularly members of Hopkins’ Writing Seminars Department, reacted negatively to Bradbury’s speech. My guess is that this reaction was because of his boundless optimism in the face of these concerns. I say this because, when most of the audience stood up and applauded at the end of the speech, most of the Writing Seminars professors remained seated. (Whether they clapped or sat on their hands, I don’t know, since I saw them from the back.) 

I reacted negatively to the speech as well.

Here’s the poem I wrote about the speech:

Byzantium*

The journey to Alpha Centauri was over. The fifth
planet’s moon was more than we dared hope for.  
Our explorers found airborne sea-creatures 
with thousand-foot wings, trees that sang
as they blossomed,  pigmy bipeds who bowed down
and worshiped us as gods.  The arrival had come
not years, not centuries, but millennia 
after your first dreams of interstellar flight.
In your clone youth and youthful idealism
were still intact. I am the body-reincarnate,  
you said at the christening, on the Polar 
Canyon’s lip. High above, on the starship’s 
wall-screens we watched the river run
below  your feet. Clear water, cold as ice!
Byzantium, you named the moon-planet, after Yeats.

A century later, we’re on the brink of yet another
great journey, this time to a farther star.
Once again you’re praising the fruits 
of a democratic spirit; our video culture,
the resilience of our youth, the miracles 
of our technology.  Praising our individual 
capacities while exhorting our collective will.
I sing the Body Electric! Can I help 
sounding jaded, cynical? Who are you to praise and
be praised? You appear over our quadruple 
wall-screens red-faced as a cherub.  No moon, you say
is big enough to compass the human spirit.
Way station to a broader destiny, raped for fuel
She floats beneath our myriad ships.  An empty husk;
blackened by our seed-spawn, no longer habitable.

Reflecting back, I’m a little amused and embarrassed by the outrage I felt. It seemed to me then that Bradbury had morphed from the prophet of Fahrenheit 451, the novel where he prophesied the advent of industrial-scale book burning in the US—a prophecy that’s starting to come true in Florida and Texas—into a narcissistic figure, enamored by his own fabulist exhortations.  But more than thirty years on, space exploration seems like one of the only things left that could unite humanity around a common purpose. Consider the way in which people of all political strips admire and respect Elon Musk, not because of his cartoonish actions in the social media sphere, but because the man clearly has a vision, one that is not much different from that of Ray Bradbury. The difference is that, with his SpaceX launches, Musk is turning science fiction into science fact.

My friend Hugh Steinberg, also a Writing Seminars major, wrote a poem to mark the occasion as well. He offered, I think, a more nuanced, poetic, and funnier take on the author than mine:

World’s Fair
April 17, 1990, while listening to Ray Bradbury

    They were
architecture,
they were cities of the          
future and
I was
dedicated   
to building
them and from   
the lessons I
learned
I tell
this old story,
I’ve told
    it hundreds of times,
Never
tear up the future again,
Never listen to fools.
The love pays back.
If you love King Kong above
all the apes in the world
you’ll be hired,
just look at me
I am an
amalgam of loves.

Steinberg’s poem was published in the literary magazine Grand Street. It was his published poem, he told me. (He is currently a senior adjunct in the creative writing faculty of the California College of the Arts.)

Also in the audience that day was Jonathan Eller. Eller, a noted Bradbury scholar, wrote a three-volume biography of Bradbury, edited his collected works, and co-founded the Ray Bradbury Center. He has been a professor of English at IUPUI (now emeritus) since 1993. It is impossible to imagine the Center being located at this institution if this were not the case.

Eller is, not surprisingly, a lifelong fan of the author. “Bradbury understood the workings of the human heart—how we dream, how we learn, and how we remember the past in order to shape our future,” he told the blog of the University of Illinois Press in 2020. “Bradbury did not mistrust technology; he mistrusted those who misuse technology for their own ends.”

It’s hard for me to imagine what Bradbury would think, say, of the social media revolution and the political chaos it has enabled. But I have a feeling he’d find a way to put a positive spin on things. His relentless optimism is very much needed now.

* “Byzantium” was published in a chapbook titled Kilohertz Country, published by Geekspeak Unique Press in 1999: