Familiar?

     Apes were to become men, in the inscrutable wisdom of nature . . .Down on the grass by a streamside, one of those apes with inquisitive fingers turned over a stone and hefted it vaguely.  The group clucked together in a throaty tongue and moved off through the tall grass foraging for seeds and insects.  The one still held, sniffed, and hefted the stone he had found.  He liked the feel of it in his fingers.  The attack on the animal world was about to begin.
     If one could run the story of that first human group like a speeded-up motion picture through a million years of time, one might see the stone in the hand change to the flint ax and the torch.  

-- Loren Eiseley --  "How Flowers Changed the World"
first published in The Immense Journey, 1957

The Star Thrower




Does this sound familiar?


And from the back cover of The Star Thrower:

"The book will be read and cherished in the year 2001. It will go to the MOON and MARS with future generations.  Loren Eiseley's work changed my life.  -- Ray Bradbury --



Curious.   Why that year of all the years he could have picked?

Ray Bradbury: "The Golden Kite, The Silver Wind"

Ray Bradbury
"The Golden Kite, The Silver Wind"
a short story
found  in Twice 22


This, of course, is a fairy tale, and that means it's not true.  This is fortunate because there's a great evil in the story.  The problem is that the great evil is what many believe is responsible for the superiority of Western Civilization.  Of course, they don't believe it's evil, but a good thing, and if Western Civ were ever to give this up, it would no longer be superior.  Anyway, here's the tale . . .

The Mandarin was upset.  He had watched the neighboring town of Kwan-Si grow in size so that it was as large as his town.  What was worse, now, was that the people were building a wall.


=================================
(from the story)

"'But why should a wall two miles away make my good father sad and angry all within the hour?' asked his daughter quietly.

'They build their wall,' said the Mandarin, 'in the shape of a pig!  Do you see?   Our  own city wall is built in the shape of an orange.  That pig will devour us, greedily!'

'Ah.'

They both sat thinking.

Life was full of symbols and omens.  Demons lurked everywhere.  Death swam in the wetness of an eye, the turn of a gull's wing meant rain, a fan held so, the tilt of a roof, and yes, even a city wall was of immense importance.  Travelers and tourists, caravans, musicians, artists, coming upon those two towns, equally judging the portents, would say, 'The city shaped like orange? No! I will enter the city shaped like a pig and prosper, eating all, growing fat with good luck and prosperity!'"

=================================

The daughter has an idea which the Mandarin immediately accepts.  He calls the stonemasons together and tells them to rebuild their wall in the shape of a club "'which may beat the pig and drive it off.'"


"Rejoicing, the stonemasons rebuilt the wall."  But the celebration was short-lived for the people of Kwan-Si rebuilt their wall into the shape of a great fire which would burn the Mandarin's club.   The Mandarin then retaliated with a  wall built in the shape of a lake that would extinguish the fire. The people of Kwan-Si rebuilt their wall in the shape of a mouth which would swallow the lake.   In short, a wall-shape-race had begun.  And so it went, for many months.



Finally it became too much, for the people stopped doing everything except reshaping the wall.

================================= 
 (the story)
"Sickness spread in the city like a pack of evil dogs.  Shops closed.  The population, working now steadily for endless months upon the changing of the walls, resembled Death;himself, clattering his white bones like musical instruments in the wind.  Funerals began to appear in the streets, though it wads the middle of the summer, a time when all should be tending and harvesting.  The Mandarin fell so ill that he had his bed drawn up by the silken screen, and there he lay, miserably giving his architectural orders."

==================================


The race ended.  The people could do no more.   The daughter told him to send for Kwan-Si.  They met; both mandarins were ill and had to be carried to the meeting.  The Mandarin's daughter appears and orders the servants to carry the mandarins outside.  There she points out several kites.

==================================
(the story)

"'What does it (a kite) need to sustain it and make it beautiful and truly spiritual?'

'The wind, of course!' said the others.

'And what do the sky and the wind need to make them beautiful?'

'A kite, of course--many kites, to beak the monotony, the sameness of the sky. Colored kites, flying!'

'So,' said the Mandarin's daughter.  'You, Kwan-Si, will make a last rebuilding of your town to resemble nothing more nor less than the wind.  And we shall build like a golden kite.  The wind will beautify the kite and carry it to wondrous heights.  And the kite will break the sameness of the wind's existence and give it purpose and meaning. One without the other is nothing.  Together, all will be beauty and co-operation and a long and enduring life.

.  .  .
And so, in time, the towns became the Town of the Golden Kite and the Town of the Silver Wind.  And harvestings were  harvested and business tended again, and the flesh returned, and disease ran off like a frightened jackal.  And on every night of the year the inhabitants in the Town of the Kite could hear the good clear wind sustaining them.  And those in the Town of the Wind could hear the kites singing, whispering, rising, and beautifying them."


======================================

Of course, this is a fairy tale, so it is not true.  Competition is the great thing, and co-operation is OK, in its place, a small place though.    I'm sure most would agree, right?

Ray Bradbury: "The Parrot Who Met Papa"

Ray Bradbury
"The Parrot Who Met Papa"
from Long After Midnight


"The Parrot Who Met Papa" is the second story I have read by Ray Bradbury that centers on Ernest Hemingway, sometimes familiarly known as Papa.  The first I read was "The Kilimanjaro Device," a time-traveling tale.  My post on that story is at  http://tinyurl.com/y7xt9t4h.  I wonder if there's any more about Hemingway and why he chose to write about him.  I also wonder if he has any other stories about real people.  I guess I will just have to read more stories by Bradbury. 

I suppose most people back then knew that Hemingway spent considerable time in Cuba.  That was the problem, for so many people knew this that Hemingway became a tourist attraction when he was there.  When the staring got to be too much, Hemingway would absent himself from his usual watering holes and hide out in a small local bar, the Cuba Libre.   At one end of the bar was a parrot in a cage, an ancient parrot to be sure.  Hemingway grew to like the parrot and would spend much time talking to it.  In fact, the question was whether Hemingway ended up talking like the parrot or the parrot sounded like him. Rumor had it that Hemingway had taught the parrot a word-for-word record of his last unpublished novel.

This parrot became famous, almost as famous as Hemingway himself.  So, although it was a shock to many, the reasons why El Cordoba, that was the parrot's name, was birdnapped? should have been obvious.  But, the real reason wasn't known, until much later.

Ray (the name of the teller of the tale, a coincidence, no doubt) decids to investigate and flies down to Cuba.  Upon interrogating the bar owner, he decides he knows the identity of the birdnapper.  He had asked the bar owner if someone strange or peculiar or eccentric had recently been there. The bar owner then described such a person who had been there the day before the parrot had disappeared:

"What a creature!. . . He was very small.  And he spoke like this: very high-eeee.  Like a muchacha in a school play, eh?  Like a canary swallowed by a witch!  And he wore a blue-velvet suit with a big yellow tie. . .And he had a small very round face. . . and his hair was yellow. . .he was like a Kewpie doll."

Ray recognizes him and blurts out, "Shelley Capon!"  (a capon is a castrated domestic rooster fattened for eating).  Ray knew that Shelley Capon hated Hemingway and now was very concerned about the fate of El Cordoba.

Perhaps I'm wrong here, but that description and the name reminds me of Truman Capote. Unfortunately I don't know anything about the relationship between Hemingway and Capote, so I can't offer that as evidence.

Ray then decides to confront Shelley Capon and rescue El Cordoba.  Shelly Capon is the most interesting character in the story.  If you have read the story or read it sometime in the future, let me know if you agree or disagree with my speculation regarding the identity of Shelly. 

It took a while for me to realize this, but this is a detective story!  El Cordoba is a victim of a kidnapping, and Ray comes to his rescue.  Shelly Capon is the unique and fascinating bad guy with his henchmen about him in the hotel room when Ray confronts him.  Their meeting gives us a clue:

Shelly greets him:  "'Raimundo, sit down! No .  .  . fling yourself into an interesting position.'

Ray responds:  "'Sorry,'  I said in my best  Dashiell Hammett manner, sharpening my chin and steeling my eyes.  'No time.'"

The tone is almost noir.  Ray senses a threat from those gathered in the hotel room.  Will he be allowed to leave, on his own two feet?   He responds with a threat of his own, clearly a hard-boiled detective tale.  Bradbury later introduces a very familiar element from a Hammett story, just to remind us of this story's antecedents. 

Overall, it's a light-hearted work, not to be taken seriously.  But, on the other hand, it is written by Ray Bradbury .  .  .

Favorite Fiction--2016

Some favorite works of fiction I read during 2016,

FIRST READS

Sarah Orne Jewett:
                  The Country of Pointed Firs
                   --my first reading of her masterpiece.  Why did I take so long to get to it?
                   --this is on my must reread list.

                   A Country Doctor
                   --this one is a bit weaker than the first, but still an excellent read. and better     
                      than 90% of the other works I've read this year.


Joseph Conrad:  Suspense
 --an unfinished novel set in the Napoleonic era.
 --a traveler gets involved with a plot of Napoleon's escape from Elba.

Ray Bradbury:         Farewell Summer

--the sequel to Dandelion Wine.  The tone is different in this one.  The boy resists growing up.

Graham Greene:    The Human Factor
--a spy novel.  The unmasking of a mole in the British secret service, told from the mole's point of view.

Nathaniel Hawthorne:: The Celestial Railroad and Other Stories
--a collection of some of Hawthorne's most well-known short works.
--decided to leave this in the First Reads grouping as there were several short stories that I hadn't read before.


Kazuo Ishiguro:   The Remains of the Day

--a great novel of repression and fear of commitment, set against the backdrop of WWII.   

--his master is a Nazi sympathizer and the butler refuses to go against his master for he  is the master.

REREADS:


Jane Austen:
                   Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon
                   Northanger Abbey
                   Mansfield Park
                   Emma
                   Sense and Sensibility
                   Persuasion
                   Pride and Prejudice

--as always, great reading.  This was my fifth? sixth? who knows how many readings I've had of her works over the years.  They are just as good, if not better, the fifth? time around as the first.

A. Solzhenitsyn:   One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
--the title says it all--one day in a Soviet Union era gulag in Siberia, based loosely on his time there.  I like to pair this one with Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead, his experiences in a Siberian prison camp during the reign of the Tsars.  Forced to make a choice, I would choose life there under the Tsars.  The treatment was cruel but  much more humane than under the commissars. 


Dostoyevsky:   "The Gambler"
--Dostoyevsky's great novella depicting the downfall of an gambling addict.
--great character study of numerous Russians traveling abroad. sometimes just for travel and sometimes to avoid debt collectors back home.  Comic figures trapped within a tragic story.


Evelyn Waugh:   Brideshead Revisited
--Flashback:  an English army officer finds his unit stationed  on one of the grand   
   estates and recognizes it as the one that had a great influence on him, beginning with
   his stay at Oxford.

--there's a great BBC TV adaptation of the book.  After watching it, I went out and 

   got the book.


Herman Melville:  “Benito Cereno”

--Melville's great novella regarding the slave trade and a very naive American ship captain.


Nikos Kazantzakis:   Freedom or Death

--his powerful novel set in Greece during the time of the Greek war for independence.
--as usual his characters come off the page at you.


Oscar Wilde:   The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray
--This is the first and censored version of Gray's novel.  To be honest, I can not see anything that
   would be more offensive than anything in the published version.  A classic example of changing
    tastes, I will includ this among the rereads for I have read this several times.


There were a number of enjoyable works that I read during the past year, but these are the ones that stand out.  While there  appears to be a large number of first reads, equal to the rereads, one should note that Bradbury, Greene, Hawthorne, and Conrad are all favorites of mine from way back when.  These are works by them that I've never read before.

Only two of the authors in the First Reads Section are new to me:  Kazuo Ishiguro and Sarah Orne Jewett and are now on my reread list.  Coincidentally, I read two books by both.  The other book by by Ishiguro will appear on my Favorite SF novels of 2016 list.


P.S.
Forgot to mention, but if you have questions about any of the authors or books, please ask.  I may not know the answer, but it's worth trying anyway.

Ray Bradbury: Long After Midnight, "One Timeless Spring"

Ray Bradbury
"One Timeless Spring"
Long After Midnight

"One Timeless Spring" is the second story in the collection, Long After Midnight.  Just as the first story, "The Blue Bottle," could have been a part of  The Martian Chronicles, this story, at first glance, could have been included in Dandelion Wine (DW) .  It's the story of a young boy who lives in a small town. Moreover, his name is Doug, just as the young boy in DW is named Doug Spaulding.

One difference between this story and the others in DW  is that it is a flashback tale.  Doug is looking back at the events whereas the others are told in the present, if I remember correctly.  I think it would take a bit of revision to fit it in.  Perhaps another reason is the tone of the tale.  It doesn't seem to quite mesh with the overall tone of  DW.

For example, the story begins

That week, so many years ago, I thought my mother an father were poisoning me.  And now, twenty years later, I'm not so sure they didn't.  There's no way of telling.

He begins a journal.


"'I didn't know I was sick until this week,' I wrote.  'I've been sick for a long time.  Since I was ten.  I'm twelve now.'"

Doug then decides he doesn't want to grow up (the Peter Pan Principle?); he wishes to remain twelve.  Is he afraid of growing up, of joining that mysterious and possibly dangerous world of the adults?  He remains adamant about freezing at that age, and then he meets Clarisse.

Since I read this story, I heard about and eventually read Bradbury's sequel to Dandelion Wine, the title of which is Farewell Summer and have come to the conclusion that  "One Timeless Spring"  actually fits in better with Farewell Summer.  The overall theme is the same:  a fear of growing up.
  

Ray Bradbury: Long After Midnight, "The Blue Bottle"

Ray Bradbury
Long After Midnight


Long After Midnight is a  collection of short stories that I had read many years ago, but as usual, I had forgotten what stories it contained.  I sat down yesterday and began. What I found surprised me.  I am a great admirer of Bradbury's short works, but I missed recognizing just how good these simple little tales are.

Since this collection contains 22 stories, I will comment on a number of them in several subsequent posts.  "The Blue Bottle" is the first story in the collection. .


"The Blue Bottle"
 This story takes place on Mars.  To be sure, I checked my copy of The Martian Chronicles, but it wasn't in there.  After reading the story, I wouldn't have been surprised to find it there because it contained elements reminiscent of those tales.

The story begins with two men searching for the Blue Bottle.

  "The sundials were tumbled into white pebbles.  The birds of the air flew in ancient skies of rock and sand, buried, their songs. stopped.  The dead sea bottoms were currented with dust which flooded  the land when the wind bade it reenact an old tale of engulfment.  The cities were deep laid with granaries of silence, time stored and kept, pools and fountains of quietude and memory.
  Mars was dead.
  Then, out of the large stillness, from a great distance, there was an insect sound which grew large among the cinnamon hills and moved in the sun-blazed air until the highway trembled and dust was shook whispering down in the old cities.
  The sound ceased.

  In the shimmering silence of midday, Albert Beck and Leonard Craig sat in an ancient landcar, eyeing a dead city which did not move under their gaze but waited for their shout:
  'Hello!'
  A crystal tower dropped into soft dusting rain.
  'You there!'
  And another tumbled down.
  And another and another fell as Beck called, summoning them to death.  In shattering flights, stone animals with vast granite wings dived to strike the courtyards and fountains.  His cry summoned them like living beasts and the beast gave answer, groaned, cracked, leaned up, tilted over, trembling, hesitant, then split the air and swept down with grimaced mouths and empty eyes, with sharp, eternally hungry teeth suddenly seized out and strewn like shrapnel on the tiles."

They were searching for the Blue Bottle, a mysterious Martian artifact which legends claimed that it held that which one most wanted.  Craig came along for the ride; it was Beck who drove the two of them from one deserted city to the next.  Many had found the bottle, according to various tales, and many had died, but still the Blue Bottle remained elusive.

Beck's search, though intensive and driven, was a strange one: "Only after he had heard of the Blue Bottle. . .had life begun to take on a purpose.  The fever had lit him and he had burned steadily ever since.  If he worked it properly, the prospect of finding the bottle might fill his entire life to the brim.  Another thirty years, if he was careful and not too diligent, of search, never admitting aloud that it wasn't the bottle that counted at all, but the search, the running and the hunting, the dust and the cities and the going-on."

It is Craig who finds the Blue Bottle, but he doesn't recognize it. He opens it to discover that the bottle is filled with bourbon; he takes a drink from it and discards it.  Beck, however, realizes what it is and places "it on the table.  Sunlight spearing through a side window struck blue flashes off the slender container.  It was the blue of a star held in the hand.  It was the blue of a shallow ocean at at noon.  It was the blue of a diamond at morning."

Beck picks it up and shakes it: Craig hears it gurgle (some bourbon is still in there), but Beck hears nothing.  He is about to open it when a man appears with a gun  (another fanatic searcher obviously), takes the bottle, and drives off.  Beck and Craig give chase.  They find him, by the side of the road, his body dissolving away. They see three men hurrying up a hill. Craig decides enough is enough and is no longer interested in the search, but Beck goes on after them.  He finds them, dead, their bodies also dissolving.  Beck now realizes what is in the Bottle.  It is what each searcher most desires, and now he knows what he most desires.


Beck's search for the Blue Bottle reminds me of the Arthurian tales of the Search for the Holy Grail. Those who find it will recognize it, as Beck recognizes the Blue Bottle, his Holy Grail, but that's only part of the story.  Why the search that absorbs so many people?  The mystery of both is the meaning of the Bottle and the Grail--what the Blue Bottle and the Holy Grail signify and that seems to differ for each searcher.

I think this story could well have been included in The Martian Chronicles.  The tone, the setting, the causal destruction of Martian cities and structures by humans, and those strange almost recognizable artifacts that possess an alien aura.  In this story it is the Blue Bottle.  Blue bottles are not alien to earth cultures, but what it contains may be.

Ray Bradbury: "The Night"

Folks, spoilers follow, so if you haven't read the story and prefer to read it with no foreknowledge, you should stop here.

As I've mentioned in the past, too many times I suspect, Ray Bradbury is one of my favorite short story writers, regardless of the genre. He is probably best known for his SF and fantasy tales, but many of his stories stray far afield.  This is an example of a tale of his that doesn't fit easily into any category, except that of an excellent story that makes its point quickly and clearly.  "The Night" (perhaps "The Ravine" would be just as appropriate) is a short and simple tale, one of those that many might complain that "nothing happens."

It's a warm summer evening in a small town.  Doug is an eight-year-old boy who has just returned from getting ice cream at the local grocery.  His mother is busy ironing.  They are the only ones in the house. Father is at a lodge meeting and won't be back until around midnight.  Skipper, Doug's older brother, is out in another part of town, playing with some friends. He is late and should have been home some time ago.

Just as Doug is getting ready for bed, his mother decides to look for Skipper.  They set out along the path that Skipper will probably take on his way back.  They drop down into a ravine and about half way through, they hear Skipper and his friends laughing and giggling.  She scolds him for being late and they return home. Doug and Skipper go to bed.  Shortly afterwards, father returns from his lodge meeting.

Did anything happen?

This story is included in the collection The Stories of Ray Bradbury which the unknown editor describes as Bradbury's  best one hundred stories  (there a couple of stories missing that I would include).  Why is this story included?

Perhaps something did happen, something that only Doug experienced.  While Bradbury can do the obvious monsters and demons and horrors with the best, what I like is his grasp of what goes on inside the characters.  Many times I have recognized myself in his tales, something that doesn't happen with most writers.  Perhaps the following quotation (my apologies for its length, but Bradbury says it much better than I could)  may explain why this tale was included as one of his best one hundred.  At least, I think so.

Doug and his mother are on the path, expecting to meet Skipper on his way back.   The narrator tells us:

"You are only eight years old, you know little of death, fear, or dread.  Death is the waxen effigy in the coffin when you were six and Grandfather passed away--looking like a great fallen vulture in his casket, silent, withdrawn, no more to tell you how to be a good boy, no more to comment succinctly on politics.  Death is your little sister one morning when you awaken at the age of seven, look into her crib and see her staring up at you with a blind blue, fixed and frozen stare until the men come with a small wicker basket to take her away.  Death is when you stand by her high chair four weeks later and suddenly realize she'll never be in it again, laughing and crying, and make you jealous of her because she was born.  That is death.

But this is more than death.  This summer night wading deep in time and stars and warm eternity.  It is an essence of all the things you will ever feel or see or hear in your life again, being brought steadily home to you all at once.

Leaving the sidewalk, you walk along a trodden, pebbled, weed-fringed path to the ravine's edge.  Crickets, in loud full drumming chorus now, are shouting to quiver the dead.  You follow obediently behind brave, fine, tall Mother who is defender of all the universe.  You feel braveness because she goes before, and you hang back a trifle for a moment, and then hurry on, too.  Together, then, you approach, reach, and pause at the very edge of civilization.

The ravine.

Here and now, down there in that pit of jungled blackness is suddenly all the evil you will ever know.  Evil you will never understand.  All of the nameless things are there.  Later, when you have gown you'll be given names to label them with.  Meaningless syllables to describe the waiting nothingness.  Down there in the huddled shadow, among thick trees and trailed vines, lives the odor of decay.  Here, at this spot, civilization ceases, reason ends, and a universal evil takes over.

You realize you are alone.  You and your mother.  Her hand trembles.

Her hand trembles.

Your belief in your private world is shattered.  You feel Mother tremble.  Why?  Is she, too, doubtful?  But she is bigger, stronger, more intelligent than yourself, isn't she?  Does she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of darkness, that crouching malignancy down below?  Is there, then, no strength in growing up? no solace in being an adult? no sanctuary in life? no flesh citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights?  Doubts flush you.  Ice cream lives again in your throat, stomach, spine and limbs; you are instantly cold as a wind out of December-gone.

You realize that all men are like this.  That each person is to himself one alone.  One oneness, a unit in society, but always afraid.  Like here, standing.  If you should scream now, if you should holler for help, would it matter?"


This ordinary walk in a quiet town has turned into something else.  Is this a horror story?  Or a growing up story when Doug climbs another step towards maturity and most likely doesn't realize it?


Any thoughts? 

Ray Bradbury: The Lake

One of Ray Bradbury's strengths is that he can take the simplest elements and create a memorable tale from them:  two twelve year-old children, a summer at the lake, a half-finished sand castle, a sudden parting and perhaps an equally sudden and unexpected reunion.   Bradbury tells the story much better than I can, so I will give you some excerpts from this brief tale, but haunting (that may be a pun, but I'll let you decide)  nevertheless.

"The wave shut me off from the world, from the birds in the sky, the children on the beach, my mother on the shore.  There was a moment of green silence.  Then the wave gave me back to the sky, the sand, the children yelling.  I came out of the lake and the world was waiting for me, having hardly moved since I went away. 


      I ran up on the beach.

.  .  .  .  .

It was September.  In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason.  The beach was so long and lonely with only about six people on it.  The kids quit bouncing the ball because somehow the wind made them sad, too, whistling the way it did, and the kids sat down and felt autumn come along the endless shore.

All of the hot dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing in all the mustard, onion, meat odors of the long, joyful summer.  It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins.  One by one the places slammed their covers down, padlocked their doors, and the wind came and touched the sand, blowing away all of the million footprints of July and August.  It got so that now, in September, there was nothing but the mark of my rubber tennis shoes and Donald and Delaus Schabold's feet, down by the water curve.

.  .  .  .  .

I called her name.  A dozen times I called it.

   'Tally!  Tally!  Oh, Tally!'

.  .  .  .  .

   I thought of Tally, swimming out into the water last May, with her pigtails trailing, blonde.  She went laughing, and the sun was on her small twelve-year-old shoulders.  I thought of the water settling quiet, of the life-guard leaping into it, of Tally's mother screaming, and of how Tally never came out. . . .

.  .  .  .  .


And now in the lonely autumn when the sky was huge and the water was huge and the beach was so very long, I had come down for the last time, alone.

.  .  .  .  .

Turning, I retreated to the sand and stood there for half an hour, hoping for one glimpse, one sign, one little bit of Tally to remember.  Then, I knelt and built a sand-castle, shaping it fine, building it as Tally and I had often built so many of them.  But this time, I only built half of it.  Then I got up.

   'Tally, if you hear me, come in and build the rest.'

.  .  .  .  .

The next day I went away on the train.
.  .  .  .  .

I lengthened my bones, put flesh on them, changed my young mind for an older one, threw away clothes as they no longer fitted, shifted from grammar to high school, to college books, to law books.  And then there was a young woman in Sacramento.  I knew her for a time, and we were married."


There is more to this story--a return to the lake and another half-finished castle and .  .  .

I won't say any more, but if you are interested--this is a link to an online version of the story.  It's a short one.

http://tinyurl.com/puhzqcy

If you read it, come back and let me know what you think of it.

Ray Bradbury: The Kilimanjaro Device

Ray Bradbury's "The Kilimanjaro Device"
a short story found in the collection  I Sing the Body Electric


Did the title jog your memory a bit?  Perhaps remind you of another story by an American writer?  Who does the following quotation from the story suggest?

     "Oh, he had readers all right, all kinds of readers.  Even me.  I don't touch books from one autumn to the next.  But I touched his.  I think I liked the Michigan stories best.  About the fishing. I think the  stories about the fishing are good.  I don't think anybody ever wrote about fishing that way and maybe won't ever again.  Of course, the bullfight stuff is good, too.   But that's a little far off.  Some of the cowpokes like them;  they been around the animals all their life.  A  bull here or a bull there, I guess it's the same.  I know one cowpoke has read just the bull stuff in the Spanish stories of the old man's forty times.  He could go over there and fight, I swear."

One last clue:  The narrator refers to "the old man" as "Papa."  Of course, the style Bradbury adopts in this story is also a clue:  short declarative sentences, usually the straightforward subject-verb-object form.  Everything is concrete and definite.

But the point of the story is rather unusual, which isn't surprising since it's a tale by Ray Bradbury.  The narrator is on a mission, which is why he has come to this small town where the "old man" is buried.  He reveals his mission to a local hunter, the one who was quoted above.



     "'You  been up to the grave yet?'  asked; the hunter, as if he knew I would answer yes.
     'No,' I said.
     'Why not?'
     ' Because it's the wrong grave.,' I said.
     'All graves are wrong graves when you come down to it,' he said.
     'No,' I said. 'There are right graves and wrong ones, just as there are good times to die and bad times.'
     He nodded at this.  I had come back to something he knew, or at least smelled was right.
     'Sure, I knew men.' he said, 'died just perfect.  You always felt, yes, that was good.  One man I knew, sitting at the table waiting for supper, his wife in the kitchen, when she came in with a big bowl of soup, there he was sitting dead and neat at the table.  Bad for her, but, I mean, wasn't that a good way for him?  No sickness. No nothing but sitting there waiting for supper to come and never knowing if it came or not.'"



As you can see, the story is going in a strange direction.  What does this have to do with the grave on the hill that is the wrong grave?  The grave is that of Ernest Hemingway, although it is never stated.  However, the clues given above clearly suggest it is Papa Hemingway, who committed suicide in 1961 and was buried in Ketchum, Idaho.  There's also  a time machine involved, sort of a "psychic time machine" that is.

Time machine stories generally fall into two broad categories.  There's type in which the time travelers go solely as observers, fearing to do something, anything  which would change history and perhaps eliminate them.  Frequently though, they end up doing exactly what they feared.  Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of  Thunder" is a variation of that type of story.  The travelers go back, intending to hunt dinosaurs, but they kill only those dinosaurs that will die within a few minutes anyway, thereby reducing the risk of changing the future.  But.  .  .

The second type of time traveler is the one who goes back intending to change history.  There generally two types of these.  One type involves those who go back to kill someone who had a major and deleterious effect (in their minds anyway) on history--I have read several stories in which someone goes back in order to kill Adolf Hitler, thereby reducing the possibility of WWII and the holocaust.   A second type depicts the efforts of those who attempt to save someone from being killed--Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy, for example.

But, neither of these is exactly what the narrator has in mind.




SPOILER:  The following reveals the story and the narrator's mission.  











The focus in the story is on dying at the right time.  As I mentioned above,  Hemingway committed suicide after living several years in pain and ill health, the result of an hereditary disease that affected several members of his family, some of whom either died from the disease or committed suicide.  Another contributing factor was the injuries he suffered in two plane crashes.  He and his wife had flown to Africa, but the plane crashed on landing.   He and his wife survived, but with some broken bones and tissue damage.  They attempted to fly out to get medical treatment on the next day, but that plane's engine exploded at takeoff.  Again they survived.  Eventually they did get the needed medical help, but Hemingway suffered health problems after that.

The narrator has a time machine, but he doesn't intend to use it to stop Hemingway from killing himself, nor does he intend to prevent the two plane crashes.  Instead, he goes back in time and meets "the old man." 

The narrator explains that the truck can possibly go back to 1954 (the date of the two plane crashes) and possibly can turn into plane.   The old man then asks him if he could land the plane a little bit differently, a little bit harder and that he "be thrown out but the rest of you okay?"
The narrator answers, "I'll see what I can do."

The old man "gazed back down the road at the mountains and the sea that could not be seen beyond the mountains and a continent beyond the sea. 'That's a good day you're talking about.' 
      'The best.'
      ' And a good hour and a good second.'
      'Really, nothing better.'"

Death is inevitable, but there are good deaths and bad deaths.

Ray Bradbury: "Kaleidoscope"

Spoiler Warning: I reveal the ending,



This story was an eye opener for me.  I read it back when I was very young.  Up to that time, I had read many SF short stories, most of which were problem stories.  Something dangerous was happening, there was a threat to humans in space or on other planets, but humans always were successful at the end.  When I started reading it, I assumed this would end happily, for several of the crew members anyway, and Hollis especially..  The opening lines should have prepared me for something different, but I noticed nothing.

"The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener.  The men were thrown into  space like a dozen wriggling silverfish.  They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.

.  .  .  .  .

They fell.  They fell as pebbles down wells.  They were scattered as jackstones are scattered from a gigantic throw.  And now instead of men there were only voices--all kinds of voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of terror and resignation."


In the story we see Hollis and the rest of the crew attempting to come to grips with their fate.  Death is certain: unlike many SF stories I had read up to this time, it appears as though there will be no last minute rescue. 

As the story unfolds we see the way Hollis and the various crew members react to the shock of the loss of the ship and then the full realization of their situation.  All this is conveyed over the radios found in each space suit.   The captain makes an attempt to "rally" the crew but soon learns what some crew members really think of him.

Bitter antagonisms and feelings among the crew which had been repressed for so long finally emerge as various members of the crew decide now is the time to tell others what they think of them.  It is not pretty:  this is not a shining example of the stiff upper lip and heroic behavior found so often in films and stories.  As time passes, some regret their outbursts and try to make amends by taking back what they had said in panic and fear.  Eventually they do reach the point where the anger and fear has passed and they are resigned.  

As I posted the first lines of the story, it's only appropriate that I post the last lines:

"The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed, 'Look, Mom, look!  A falling star!'
The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois.
"Make a wish,' said his mother. 'Make a wish.'"


As so frequently happens in Bradbury's tales, the ending is ironic.  Whenever I look up at the stars at night and see a falling star, I can't help but think of "Kaleidoscope."

IN MEMORIAM Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury:  August 22, 1920  to  June 5, 2012

We shall not see his like again.


Novels

The Martian Chronicles

Fahrenheit 451

Dandelion Wine

The Illustrated Man



Some Short Stories

"The Fog Horn"

"There Will Come Soft Rains"

"A Sound of Thunder"

"All Summer in a Day"

"Kaleidoscope"

"The Pedestrian"

"The Crowd"

"The Playground"

"The Veldt"

"The Murderer"



    Poet nightingale .  .  .
Will I hear your later verses
     In the vale of death?
                   -- Anon --

Ray Bradbury: August 22, 1920,

Spoiler Warning: I will discuss significant plot elements and events.

Here are three short tales by Ray Bradbury, whose birthday we celebrate today. I had read only one of them before, “The Crowd,” and possibly I might even have seen a TV dramatization of it. When I think of the story, an image comes to mind. The camera, if that’s what it is, is on the ground facing up and one can see faces all around, just as if one were lying on the ground with a crowd gathered about. The other two stories are new to me, but also enjoyable, if one can take a touch of horror along with some greed.

-------------------------

“The Coffin”

Charles Braling was old. His brother Richard was younger. Charles was rich, and almost everything he did made him richer. Richard was poor, except for what Charles gave him. Everything Richard did had been a failure. Charles was dying; he had perhaps only several weeks to live. That was why he was in such a hurry to complete his latest invention—“The Braling Economy Casket.” Richard wasn’t dying, which meant there were two reasons for him to be happy: one was that he wasn’t dying and the other was that Charles was. In spite of their many differences, the two brothers did share something—a mutual hatred.

Richard, along with greed, possessed one more characteristic: curiosity. Curiosity may not always be fatal, but it’s certainly much deadlier when paired off with greed. That was why, when Charles died, he ignored Charles’ last wish, to be buried in his special casket, which he had finished minutes before he died. Richard wanted to find out just what this coffin could do. Perhaps it might be marketable. It was his brother’s idea after all, and those had been remarkably profitable. So, he called the funeral parlor, and gave his orders: “Ordinary casket . . . No funeral service. Put him in a pine coffin. He would have preferred it that way—simple. Good-by.”

Now, Richard thought, to find out about the coffin. It was approximately twelve feet long, with a central open section about six feet in length. It had two covered sections, one at the head and one at the foot, each about three feet in length. The casket lid was transparent at the head position. The casket was also extraordinarily wide, perhaps three feet wide on each side of the central chamber for the body. Richard could see no openings or hatches or buttons or any way of getting inside those compartments, at least from the outside. So, he decided to get in the casket and test it. There were ventilating holes around the sides, and just to be safe, he told the gardener to come upstairs in about fifteen minutes to make sure all was well.

So, he crawled inside and looked around. He could see nothing that would give him access to the compartments. Suddenly the lid slammed shut and locked. He panicked at first, but then relaxed. There was enough air in the casket, along with the ventilating holes, and the gardener would soon be along. He might as well relax.

Then . . .

“The music began to play.

It seemed to come from somewhere inside the head of the coffin. It was green music. Organ music, very slow and melancholy, typical of Gothic arches and long black tapers. It smelled of earth and whispers. It echoed high between stone walls. It was so sad that one almost cried listening to it. It was music of potted plants and crimson and blue stained-glass windows. It was late sun at twilight and a cold wind blowing. It was a dawn with only fog and a faraway fog horn moaning.

. . . . .

The sermon began.

The organ music subsided and a gentle voice said:

‘We are gathered together, those who loved and those who knew the deceased, to give him our homage and our due—‘

‘Charlie, bless you, that’s your voice!’ Richard was delighted. ‘A mechanical funeral, by God. Organ music and lecture. And Charlie giving his own oration for himself!’

The voice continued:

“We who knew and loved him are grieved at the passing of Richard Braling.”

Richard thought he had misheard the voice. That should have been Charles Braling.

And then Richard found out just how complete the funerary arrangements were that Charles had built into the Braling Economy Casket.

I felt a bit sorry for Richard, for after all, he hadn’t really done anything that wrong. But, if he had followed Charles’s wishes, and if he hadn't been so greedy and curious, none of this would have happened.

-------------------------

“The Crowd”

I had read this story long ago and, as I mentioned earlier, may even have seen a dramatized version of it. It’s a quiet little story based on observable facts, something we have all seen, but, as far as I know, only Ray Bradbury wondered about it and gave us this little gem. We’ve all seen this: an accident happens and a crowd forms. Where did all these people come from? Who were they? The sidewalks and entrances may have been empty before, but let an accident happen and a crowd forms.

Mr. Spallner had been in an accident—lots of noise, tumbling motions, and then silence.

‘The crowd came running. Faintly, where he lay, he heard them running. He could tell their ages and their sizes by the sound of their numerous feet over the summer grass and on the lined pavement, and over the asphalt street; and picking through cluttered bricks to where his car hung half into the night sky, still spinning its wheels with a senseless centrifuge.

. . . .

Where the crowd came from he didn’t know. He struggled to remain aware and then the crowd faces hemmed in upon him, hung over like the large glowing leaves of down bent trees. There were a ring of shifting, compressing changing faces over him, looking down, looking down, reading the time of his life or death by his face, making his face into a moon-dial, where the moon cast a shadow from his nose out upon his cheek to tell the time of breathing or not breathing any more ever.”

Several weeks later, Spallner was released from the hospital and eventually returns to his office. While talking with a colleague, he hears the sound of a crash from the street below.

“Spallner walked to the window. He was very cold and as he stood there, he looked at his watch, at the small minute hand. One two three four five seconds – people running—eight nine ten eleven twelve – from all over, people came running –fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen seconds – more people, more cars, more horns blowing. Curiously distant, Spallner looked upon the scene as an explosion in reverse, the fragments of the detonation sucked back to the point of implosion. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one seconds and the crowd was there, Spallner made a gesture down at them, wordless.

The crowd had gathered so fast.”

Spallner becomes obsessed with the crowd. He searches old newspaper for pictures of accidents and begins to see that some of the faces in the photographs of the crowds went back decades, seemingly without aging. He detects patterns of appearances of faces in the crowds. Some faces appeared in only one photograph, but others showed again and again. And some of the accident victims died because somebody in the crowd had moved them before an ambulance arrived on the scene. Was that deliberate, Spallner wondered?

Spallner gathers his evidence and decides to take it to the police. Perhaps they might make something of it. But, he never makes to the police station.

“He was rather shocked, but not surprised, somehow, when the truck came rolling out of an alley straight at him. He was just congratulating himself on his keen sense of observation and talking out what he would say to the police in his mind, when the truck smashed into his car.

. . . . .

The crowd was there. . .

He hadn’t felt much at the impact, his spine was hurt. He didn’t dare move. . .

Someone said, ‘Give me a hand. We’ll roll him over and lift him into a more comfortable position. . .”

Lucky Spallner. Thanks to his curiosity and his keen sense of observation, he is now going to get the answers to all his questions about The Crowd.

--------------------------

The Scythe

This is a horror story, about a man who has just hit bottom, and thinks that it can’t get worse. He should have talked to my grandmother, a cheerful soul; one of her favorite sayings was “Things are never so bad they can’t get worse.” I guess that was meant to cheer us up, but somehow it never quite succeeded.

Drew Erickson was out of work, out of money, and out of gas. That he was also lost didn’t make much difference since he couldn’t go anywhere even if he did know where to go. With him were his wife Molly and their two children.

Off in the distance he could see a golden wheat field, ripe enough for the scythe. And, beyond that, a small farmhouse. Hoping for help, trading work for food and perhaps shelter, he went to the farmhouse. He got no answer when he knocked and called, so he went in. He found the occupant upstairs in the bedroom.

“The paper lay open on the pillow beside the old man’s head. It was meant to be read. Maybe a request for burial, or to call a relative. Drew scowled over the words, moving his pale, dry lips.

To him who stands beside me at my death bed:

Being of sound mind, and alone in the world as it has been decreed, I, John Buhr, do give and bequeath this farm, with all pertaining to it, to the man who is to come. Whatever his name or origin shall be, it will not matter. The farm is his, and the wheat; the scythe, and the task ordained thereto. Let him take them freely, and without question – and remember that I, John Buhr, am only the giver, not the ordainer. To which I set my hand and seal this third day of April, 1938.

[Signed] John Buhr, Kyrie eleison!

A scythe leaned on the wall beside the bed. “Words were scratched on the blade: Who wields me – wields the world!”

Their luck had changed: food in the refrigerator, shelter, a bull and several cows, and a farm that was theirs.

Several days later, Drew decides to go to work. The wheat needs cutting. He went out with the scythe. At the end of the day, he was puzzled. The golden wheat he cut down began immediately to rot and disintegrate as he watched it. Secondly, it was a huge field but only a small portion was ripe for cutting, a portion that he could do in one day. On the second day, he could see green shoots already springing up where he had cut down the ripe stalks, and another portion of wheat that had been green yesterday was now ripe for cutting.

Eventually Drew tries to stop cutting the wheat for it rotted away too quickly to be harvested. Cutting the wheat, therefore, was a waste of time. But, when he tried to stop, he felt some force working on him, forcing him eventually to go out there.

While cutting a ripe section of wheat one day, he swore he could hear his mother’s voice cry out as he cut a stalk. He became convinced that he had killed his mother. And the rest of the wheat? Were they also people. He sent off a telegram and got word several days later that his mother had died, approximately at the same time he had cut that stalk.

Drew now understood the meaning of the words on the scythe; he was Death. The true horror of what he was doing struck home when he encountered stalks that he knew were his wife Molly and his two children.

Spoiler Warning: I reveal the ending of the story at this point.

“And then, sobbing wildly, he rose above the grain again and again and hewed to the left and right and to left and to right and to left and to right. Over and over and over! Slicing out huge scars in green wheat and ripe wheat, with no selection and no care, cursing, over and over, swearing, laughing, the blade swinging up in the sun and falling in the sun with a singing whistle! Down!

Bombs shattered London, Moscow, Tokyo.

The blade swung insanely.

And the kilns of Belsen and Buchenwald took fire.

The blade sang, crimson wet.

And mushrooms vomited out blind suns at White Sands, Hiroshima, Bikini, and up through, and in continental Siberian skies.

The grain wept in a green rain, falling.

Korea, Indo-China, Egypt, India trembled; Asia stirred, Africa woke in the night…

And the blade went on rising, crashing, severing, with the fury and the rage of a man who has lost and lost so much that he can no longer cares what he does to the world.

. . . . .

“Once in awhile during the long years a jalopy gets off the main highway, pulls up steaming in front of the charred ruin of a little white house at the end of the dirt road, to ask instructions from the farmer they see just beyond, the one who works insanely, wildly, without ever stopping, night and day, in the endless fields of wheat.

But they got no help and no answer. The farmer in the field is too busy, even after all these year; too busy slashing and chopping the green wheat instead of the ripe.

And Drew Erickson moves on with his scythe, with the light of a blind suns and a look of white fire in his never-sleeping eyes, on and on and on . . . ”

I wonder: is it more comforting, after reading the daily headlines and studying the history of the human race, to think that what we do is caused by madmen, rather than by sane, ordinary people.

A thought just occurred to me. Could Drew be symbolic of weapons makers and inventors or creators of weapons--possibly nuclear weapons?

Three by Bradbury

I will discuss significant elements and the endings of these stories.



These three stories appear in a number of collections and anthologies. I am taking them from a collection of Bradbury's stories titled Twice 22, which includes all of the stories from two other collections: The Golden Apples of the Sun and A Medicine for Melancholy.


"The April Witch"

This is one of those stories that I first read and then dismissed as being lightweight with little substance. Several days later I was still thinking about it, and I began to realize that perhaps it really isn't that lightweight.

It's a tale about Cecy, who, at the age of seventeen, told her folks that she wanted "to be in love."

Her parents responded, "Remember, you're remarkable. Our whole family is odd and remarkable. We can't mix or marry with ordinary folk. We'd lose our magical powers if we did. You wouldn't want to lose your ability to 'travel' by magic, would you? Then be careful. Be careful!"

Cecy's way of traveling was unique, as least for normal humans anyway. She could "sleep in moles through the winter, in the warm earth." She could "live in anything at all--a pebble, a crocus, or a praying mantis." She could leave her "plain, bony body behind" and enter into anything she wanted. She then decides that if she can't be in love in her own body, then she will be in love in someone else's body, sort of a courtship by proxy , I guess.

She enters the mind of Ann Leary, a young woman, and influences her to go to the dance with a handsome young man. The poor fellow becomes confused because while Cecy is in control, she appears to want to be with him, but when Cecy relaxes, Ann takes control and behaves as though she wishes he would go away.

It's clear that Cecy isn't happy being Cecy with magical powers. She just wants to be like everybody else. She'd give up her powers if only he would love her.

It's a "grass is greener on the other side" story. But, what is on her side? She has the power to travel freely without restriction, to enter into the minds of all possible creatures on this planet, and that includes non-living creatures also. She is willing to give that up for love with a normal human being. I wonder how many readers would make this deal. One point isn't clear to me: why does she, for some reason, exclude those of her own kind. After all, her parents have magical powers also. Perhaps it's because she wants "to be in love" now, and there are none of her kind in the vicinity.

Is there something immature in wanting simply "to be in love"? Shouldn't being in love come as a consequence of meeting that special person? Does she really understand what is meant by being in love?

Another part of the story seems to be the lesson that one can't have it all, in spite of the advertisements, self-help gurus, and political pundits who promise everything for everybody. To quote another SF writer, "TANSTAAFL" That's Robert A. Heinlein's famous dictum, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."

There's yet another point I wonder about. Does she realize what's she's giving up? I wonder how many readers would be willing to give up this power "to travel."

The story, of course, is a fantasy. As far as I know, nobody has had such powers. Or . . .

On the other hand, if one looks at what she can do, is it so impossible for us to even come close to this?

In the past month or so, I've been in the mind of a detective chief inspector at Scotland Yard and

in the minds of a late Victorian family that is slowly disintegrating and

in the mind of a young woman who is in a tournament in which winner is the last one alive and

in the mind of a young woman who can visit other minds and

in the mind of a disgraced Chinese detective who manages to get out of a Tibetan work camp and live with Buddhist monks in the almost inaccessible mountains of Tibet and

in the mind of a Prussian magistrate who is forced to cooperate with officers in Napoleon's army of occupation in investigating a series of murders and

in the minds of people and beings from the far past and the distant future and in galaxies far away.

I'm not an April Witch: I'm an Avid Reader.

__________________________


"The Flying Machine"

"In the year A. D. 400, the Emperor Yuan held his throne by the Great Wall of China, and the land was green with rain, readying itself toward the harvest, at peace, the people in his dominion neither too happy nor too sad."

A man invents a flying machine and has the bad luck to have it observed by the Emperor. The Emperor orders his execution after finding out that he has told no one of his invention. The man, not understanding why, pleads for his life, saying:

"I have found beauty. I have flown on the morning wind. I have looked down on all the sleeping houses and gardens. I have smelled the sea and even seen it, beyond the hills, from my high place. I have soared like a bird; ;oh, I cannot say how beautiful it is up there, in the sky, with the wind about me, the wind blowing me here like a feather, there like a fan, the way the sky smells in the morning! And how free one feels! That is beautiful, Emperor, that is beautiful too!"

The Emperor sadly responds, "But there are times . . .when one must lose a little beauty if one is to keep what little beauty one already has. I do not fear you, yourself, but I fear another man."

. . . . .

"Who is to say that someday just such a man, in just such an apparatus of paper and reed, might not fly in the sky and drop huge stones upon the Great Wall of China?"

This story was published prior to 1953, less than a decade after the two atom bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Considering that and all the lives lost and damage created by "conventional" bombs, what would you do if you had a time machine that could go back to a certain day at Kitty Hawk in December 1903?

--------------------

"The Golden Kite, The Silver Wind"

The crisis!

"They build their wall," said the Mandarin, "in the shape of a pig! Do you see? Our own city wall is built up in the shape of an orange. That pig will devour us, greedily!"

"Life was full of symbols and omens. Demons lurked everywhere. Death swam in the wetness of an eye, the turn of a gull's wing meant rain, a fan held so. the tilt of a roof, and, yes, even a city wall was of immense importance. Travelers and tourists, caravans, musicians, artists, coming upon these two towns, equally judging the portents, would say, 'the city shaped like an orange? No! I will enter the city shaped like a pig and prosper, eating all, growing fat with good luck and prosperity!"

The Mandarin's daughter suggested rebuilding the city walls in a shape of a club which would drive the pig off. Kwan-Si's people responded by rebuilding their walls in the shape of a giant bonfire which would burn up the club, which was followed by a lake to put out the fire . . . a mouth to drink the lake dry . . . a needle to sew up the mouth . . .a sword to cut the needle . . .a scabbard to sheath the sword. . .

"Sickness spread in the city like a pack of evil dogs. Shops closed. The population, working now steadily for endless months upon the changing of the walls, resembled Death himself, clattering his white bones like musical instruments in the wind. Funerals began to appear in the streets, though it was the middle of summer, a time when all should be tending and harvesting."

Finally the two Mandarins met. "This cannot go on . . . Our people do nothing but rebuild our cities to a different shape every day, every hour. They have no time to hunt, to fish, to love, to be good to their ancestors and their ancestor's children."


The Solution:

"You, Kwan-Si, will make a last rebuilding of your town to resemble nothing more nor less than the wind. And we shall build like a golden kite. The wind will beautify the kite and carry it to wondrous heights. And the kite will break the sameness of the wind's existence and give it purpose and meaning. One without the other is nothing. Together, all will be beauty and co-operation and a long and enduring life."

"And so, in time, the towns became the Town of the Golden Kite and the Town of the Silver Wind. And harvestings were harvested and business tended again, and the flesh returned, and disease ran off like a frightened jackal. And on every night of the year, the inhabitants in the Town of the Kite could hear the good clear wind sustaining them. And those in the Town of the Wind could hear the kites singing, whispering, rising, and beautifying them."

Pure Fantasy! Escapism! Terrible stuff to waste time on. We should get back the real world and its problems. Yet, back when this story was written and for several decades afterwards, the the East and the West were engaged in building nuclear weapons that would give each superiority over the other. Each increase by one side would result in an increase by the other. This was called the Arms Race. If one side had enough weaponry to destroy its enemy twice over, then the other had to have enough to destroy them three times over.

In the story their Walls Race was destroying them. At present, we are trying to insure that our Arms Race doesn't destroy us. Perhaps a little "escapist" co-operation might not be a bad idea, after all.

Ray Bradbury: August 22, 1920

Ray Bradbury

Happy 90th Birthday!


SF writers generally deny that they are prophets: they are just trying to write some stories about science and technology and people. As I have suggested before, I see two basic types of SF: the "what if" story and the "if this goes on" story. The first type occurs when the author asks "what if a giant asteroid" were to collide with the earth and tells a story that answers that question. In the second type, the author learns that the human population now takes fewer years to double its population than it has in the past: this would lead to a story that describes what might happen if this goes on for another century. In 1953, Ray Bradbury published a short story titled "The Murderer," which belongs in the "if this goes on" category, and I think he got it right--this is pure prophecy.

The murderer in the story is Albert Brock. He has just arrived at a mental institution and we sit in when he is interviewed by a psychiatrist. Brock is not a serial killer, at least not a serial killer of humans; in fact he hasn't killed a single person. He is the one who insists he is a murderer; his victims are certain types of electronic devices. Keep in mind that this was written in 1953.

His victims are radios, TVs, telephones, intercoms, phonographs, and especially the radio wrist watch, a communication device. As I read the story, my mind insisted on substituting cell phone or mobile phone for wrist radio.

". . . it was music by Mozzek in every restaurant; music and commercials on the buses I rode to work. When it wasn't music, it was interoffice communications, and my horror chamber of a radio wrist watch [cell phone] on which my friends and my wife phoned every five minutes. What is there about such 'conveniences' that makes them so temptingly convenient? The average man thinks, Here I am, time on my hands, and here on my wrist is a wrist telephone [cell phone], so why not just buzz old Joe up. eh? 'Hello, hello!' I love my friends, wife, humanity very much, but when one minute my wife calls to say, 'Where are you now, dear?' and a friend calls and says, 'got the best off-color joke to tell you. Seems there was a guy--' and a stranger calls and cries out, 'This is the Find-Fax Poll. What gum are you chewing at this very instant?' Well!"

. . . . . . . . . .

Desperate, Brock begins by destroying all of the electronic communication devices around him. And then he got his Idea:


"Why didn't I start a solitary revolution, deliver man from certain 'conveniences'? 'Convenient for who?" I cried. Convenient for friends: 'Hey, Al, thought I'd call you from the locker room out here at Green Hills. Just made a sockdolager hole in one! A hole in one, Al! A beautiful day. Having a shot of whiskey now. Thought you'd want to know, Al!' Convenient for my office, so when I'm in the field with my radio car there's no moment when I'm not in touch. In touch! There's a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices. . ."

The last paragraph of the story horrifies me.

The psychiatrist returns to his office. His diagnosis:

"Seems completely disoriented, but convivial. Refuses to accept the simplest realities of his environment and work with them. . .

Three phones rang. A duplicate wrist radio in his desk drawer buzzed like a wounded grasshopper. The intercom flashed a pink light and click-clicked. Three phones rang. The drawer buzzed. Music blew in through the open door. The psychiatrist, humming quietly, fitted the new wrist radio to his wrist, flipped the intercom, talked a moment, picked up one telephone, talked, picked up another telephone, talked, picked up the third telephone, talked, touched the wrist-radio button, talked calmly and quietly, his face cool and serene, in the middle of the music and the lights flashing, the two phones ringing again, and his hands moving, and wrist radio buzzing, and the intercoms talking, and voices speaking from the ceiling. And he went on quietly this way through the reminder of a cool, air-conditioned, and long afternoon; telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio. . ."

Of course, there's no computer and email, Facebook and Twitter, but remember, SF writers really aren't prophets.

Three by Ray Bradbury

I will discuss important plot elements and endings for the stories.


Three Short Stories by Ray Bradbury:

A poignant tale about a monster and about loneliness and even perhaps about unrequited love.

One of the gentlest post-holocaust stories I've ever read.

Another gentle horror tale: avoid those regressive tendencies!




The Fog Horn

This is a gentle monster tale, although there is some destruction in the story, seemingly the result of frustration and despair and loneliness. Briefly, a fog horn awakens a creature that has been sleeping for millions of years. It sounds like the call of one of his own kind. Lonely he swims up from the depths and finds the lighthouse. This has happened for several years now, but this time will be different.

It's a simple little tale, one that certainly doesn't deserve the treatment it got from Hollywood back in the '50s when the beast was transformed into a ravenous destroying monster that attacked NYC as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms Beneath the Sea.

What makes this tale, aside from its theme of loneliness, is Bradbury's language. This is not a story to be raced through, paragraph to paragraph, page after page, until the end is reached and one can go on to the next story. It should be read slowly and thoughtfully in a quiet place. One should savor the language. It may take longer to finish it, but it's worth the time spent.

The story opens with two men in a lighthouse:

"Out there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the gray sky. McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered cards and make the waves turn high and foam."


McDunn then relates a strange incident that happened years ago that tells us the sea is a place that we know little about and a place of inexplicable events. It's about the lighthouse and the possibility that other creatures may not see it as we do.


"'The mysteries of the sea,' said McDunn thoughtfully. 'You know, the ocean's the biggest damned snowflake ever? it rolls ands swells a thousand shapes and colors, no two alike. Strange. One night, years ago, I was here alone, when all of the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of trembling and staring up at the tower light going red, white, red, white, across them so I could see their funny eyes. I turned cold. They were like a big peacock's tail, moving out there until midnight. Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped away, the million of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in some sort of way, they came all those miles to worship. Strange. But think how the tower must look to them, standing seventy feet above the water, the God-light flashing out from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monster voice. They never came back, those fish, but don't you think for a while they thought they were in the Presence?'"


I have never lived by the sea, so a fog horn is not something that I regularly experience. However, many years ago, I went to San Francisco and there I did hear a fog horn. I had forgotten about it until I read the following passage in this story:


"One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, 'We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like a empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.' "


And now, whenever I hear a fog horn in a film, I remember that passage.

The night comes and the fog rolls in. The Fog Horn blew and the monster appears and answers.



"I saw it all. I knew it all--the million years of waiting alone, for someone to come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of reptile-birds, the swamps dried on the continental lands, the sloths and saber-tooths had their day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white ants upon the hills.

. . .


The monster was only a hundred yards off now, it and the Fog Horn crying at each other. As the lights hit them, the monster's eyes were fire and ice, fire and ice.

" 'That's life for you,' said McDunn. 'Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them.' "


This doesn't seem to me to be that beast from 20,000 fathoms that tried to destroy NYC.

Is this really a tale of unrequited love?
==================================


There Will Come Soft Rains

The main character is a house, a house of the future, with all the gadgets and gizmos dreamed up by the futurists and that appear occasionally as a feature article somewhere, usually as a filler. Actually the house strikes me as being a bit of a nag.


"In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-Tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o'clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!"

The house goes ahead and makes breakfast, but there's no one there to eat it. Obviously something is wrong and it isn't until the following passage that we get the answer.

"Ten o'clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles."

The house has been doing exactly what it was programmed to do, even though its human occupants had been gone for some time. But, without humans, there are breakdowns, for this is a human invention, and eventually the house is destroyed by fire. Bradbury's description of the house's desperate efforts to save itself makes it seem alive and sentient, frantically trying to put out the fire, a beast of prey.


Recently I've seen several books, a film, and a TV series, all with a similar theme: What will happen to our cities and towns and roads and towns and buildings after we are gone? Bradbury's story was published in 1950, and it asked the same question a half century ago. The title comes from a poem by Sara Teasdale, and it sums up those books and films and the TV series:


"There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire;
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, whether bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone."

While it's clear that Teasdale may be too optimistic about the overall effects of a nuclear war, especially in the areas that have been bombed, I think the point of the story and the poem are clear, and it happens to be the same point that one of the films made--at least the one that I saw. Human artifacts will eventually disappear. We will not be missed.


===================================

The Pedestrian

Mr. Leonard Mead has a strange habit: he likes to go for walks in the city where he lives. And he has had the city streets to himself. "In ten years of walking by night or by day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not once in all that time."

No, this is not a post-holocaust tale in which Mr. Mead is the last man on earth.


"Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows. Sudden gray phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls, where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomb-like building was still open."

This story has a copyright date of 1951 and it's an "if this goes on" tale. Why was nobody out on the streets anymore? TV is the villain. I saw it happening in my neighborhood. People would frequently come out on the front porches of their homes and enjoy the cooling air during the warm months. By the late 60's this had disappeared for the most part. Everybody was inside watching TV. I now live in Tucson where the weather is such that one could sit outside for most months of the year, but it seldom happens.

But this isn't just a playful exercise in human foibles. Mr Mead has had the freedom of his regular strolls for many years now, but human society, as usual, has little or no tolerance for those who are different--in any way. And we here in the land of the free are no different.

Mr Mead is confronted by the police who question him about his activities and are astounded to learn that he's just out walking--walking for the sake of walking. He is ordered to get in the back of the car, which is outfitted much as would be a cell. When he asks where he is being taken, he is told "To the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies." I fear he will be a subject of their research for the rest of his life.

Regressive tendencies--a throwback, someone who engages in activities that are out of step in today's world. I wonder what that would include today. I write with a fountain pen, whenever possible. Would that be considered a regressive tendency?

Would I be guilty of regressive tendencies because I am frequently out of touch with people? In fact, any time I leave the house I am "out of touch." No one can contact me, unless they are physically in my presence. I could be anywhere or doing anything. I don't have a cell phone (actually I prefer calling them mobile phones). Many people are surprised and some even taken aback a bit--not much, but they obviously think that something may be wrong with someone who chooses to be out of touch.

Are you guilty of any regressive tendencies? Well, perhaps you might not want to say here, for someday you may find yourself making a one-way trip to "the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies."