Ray Bradbury, ‘Digital’ Writer

The Martian Chronicles deal with a back and forth between Earth and Mars, the attempts of Earth’s inhabitants to reach the red planet and those of the Martians, fascinating and derailing, to ward them off. The Martians stop the first three human expeditions using the strangest methods: guns that shoot bees, snake pits and poisonous relations. They succumb at the final hour and all die of measles upon contact with the humans. Like locusts, the waves of colonists follow one after another — women, wandering priests, old tourists, up to the arrival of all the black people leaving Earth and its censoring legislators, who caused all the departures. The colonists continue moving to Mars until there are 90,000 invaders who then change the names of everything. However, the Martian presence survives in the struggle in its defense of a single earthling, in a past life, on another spatial-temporal plane, in the transparent and unfathomable song, the dance of the spheres and spinning of the black flakes of burned Martian bodies. War explodes on Earth. Inexplicably, instead of keeping them away, the event causes the colonists to return until very few remain, [like] a cruel and materialistic hot dog vendor, to whom is left the vast and useless Martian estate, robot families, an insufferable couple and homes in constant automatic maintenance thanks to half-animal, half-automatic devices. At the end, in their revolving game, the chronicles return everything to where it started.

At Earth’s imminent self-destruction, one last family escapes to Mars, where it discovers, for itself and others, the true Martian identity: amber skin and golden eyes, luminous lighthouses that manage to see the floundering disappearance of ancient waters in smoke beds and dried up seas. It is a fable strongly impregnated with the myths of the years when it was written. While regular lives were getting torn apart by the millions, the cyclopic efforts of the war’s contenders had allowed science and its resulting technological applications to reach unprecedented levels. The world, which only six years prior had been mucking around in chivalry parades, was ready for robots, automation, radio messages, enigmatic encryptions, missiles, atomic mushrooms, gigantic vehicles, airplanes and spacecraft.

The peoples, transformed by the intersection of hypernationalist offshoots and forced bellicose face-offs, were no longer the same lords and farmsteaders of bygone centuries, but symbolic literary-ideological figures: the red Russian communists, the scrawny rich Jews, Germans and other lineages of the sacred Roman-Germanic Empire had lost their name in favor of omni-oppressive fascism. The Americans, among them the narrator, saw themselves as different and unrecognizable among the new breed: the Midwest farmers, the ethnic and intellectual New Yorkers, the incompatible black and white races. Then, the magical effect of scientism and sociology driven to excess slowly went away. It dissipated up to the apogee and the end of the cold war, among missile-ready navies and gigantic floating bridges.

In his last years, the author, American Ray Bradbury, criticized the current approach toward technology, particularly the juvenile fanaticism for the trendiest brands, whether in tablets or social networks. Now that all humans could be Martians, he seemed to be saying, they appear like courtesans. They admire objects whose technomagical height they do not understand, just the call of fashion. Today, the Martian Chronicles take on another meaning. They are the near future, whose moment we cannot know, but whose framework is already known. The bellicose threat that reflected the power of the U.S., the only nuclear power when the story came out, is no longer valid. The destruction of Earth’s political, social and economic groundwork is unavoidable because of its osmosis with Mars, which has penetrated it by now. Technological power, neat in its formal linearity, nullifies any other power and dictates even the modes of communicating one’s instincts. Until the end, the earthlings, unchangeable in themselves, do not understand, react, threaten and cry. In the progressive inequality and immortality that technology promises, one day they will figure out that they are no longer themselves. Maybe they are Martians, maybe robots, maybe one and the other. Bradbury passed away in 2012 with the esteem and praise of the best intellectual circles. Seven novels, 600 short stories, 8 million published copies translated into 36 languages — these are all fruits of an instruction founded on frequent visits to libraries and do not remove the impression of a certain lazy cleverness on the author’s part. His writings were brief and then reconstructed into novels through a connective tissue that allowed the individual parts to remain usable on their own.

People’s way of thinking changed, not only through the content but also because of this object-oriented writing. It was almost like a software advertising script created by the first digital author. However, he did not receive grand honors, crowd recognition, television talk time or excellence prizes. To the contrary, unlike Doris Lessing, skeptical bard of the feminine experience (Nobel winner for literature in 2007) and the Canadian Alice Munro (2013 prize), he never won one. With Munro, he was only able to share the honors of reigning over the literary island of Redonda, which made her duchess of Ontario in 2005 and him duke of Diente in 2006. The honors paid to the cofounder of science fiction make one smile: the World Fantasy Life prize, Grand Master Award, Horror Writers Association Life and the Grand Master of Horror. At least the French made him Commandeur (2007).

And those of the Pulitzer could not award him as a journalist, so they paid him tribute as a second-to-none fantasy writer. It is hard to imagine that this really mattered to Bradbury. Super light and super concrete, the author from Illinois had a timbre of suave, Voltairian superficiality that was mystifying, disturbing and attractive. It made one think without clamor, shouting, long speeches or ulcers, but with the subtlety of King and Tolkien’s grandchildren. In fact, the Swedish Nobel committee designated Tolkien as a second-rate author in 1961 and transformed itself into a satirical institution with prizes to Fo, Arafat and Obama. Ray would have laughed suavely for a long while. His face was the other side of Allen’s neurotic expression, his irony as soft as it was psychological. Having put down roots in California, Bradbury quietly lived in the market of offer and demand. He even did editing work, becoming his own screen director as if he had been proposed as minstrel in King Arthur’s court.

The man who escaped toward Mars paid great attention to Earth, where he firmly planted his feet. He tickled the tastes of the public without letting himself get dragged down by its dictatorship; he considered philosophy and politics a trumpeting of fashion, which, like skirts, changed from being long to short from one year to another without reason. Unlike other authors in his vein, he kept a seraphic distance from the nervous electricity of his messages. He could easily dominate through the early fame he amassed with the Martian Chronicles of 1950, Illustrated Man of 1951, Fahrenheit 451 (which Truffaut’s 1966 film is based on) and The Golden Apples of the Sun of 1953. Moreover, because he was not a writer condemned to a short life like his successor, Philip Dick, who died at 54, he did not have the popular fame he would have deserved.

After all, from technology we expect the selfsame transmission of the melodrama of the neurotic permissions of one’s own imagination; one pretends to be in the company of stupefying chemicals just to have a sense of contemporaneity. To look at 3-D screens, it is necessary to remove G-glasses and put on the Martian eyes of the 92nd Ray, the digital author who could overlook the support of information technology.