I write this not to praise Ray Bradbury, but to bury him

On Tuesday, June 5th, Ray Bradbury died.

On Wednesday, June 13th, I rolled out of bed and faced my bookshelf in the light of dawn, and I noticed an old sci-fi paperback tucked behind a row of other paperbacks: "R is for Rocket" by Ray Bradbury.

I mentioned before how I have a bunch of old sci-fi paperbacks from an old friend who was moving; "R is for Rocket" is one of these.  I started reading this collection of short stories long ago, and I re-shelved it in disgust.  According to my bookmark, I was reading the story "Rocket Man."  Bradbury published this volume in 1962, but it is actually a collection of short science fiction stories published years earlier, some as early as 1943.  On re-reading it, what I mostly notice is the tremendous thrill Bradbury tries to inspire about how awesome it will be once we finally put a man on the moon.

Today, our country has virtually retreated from manned space exploration.  It's true!  Back in the 1950s and 1960s, futurists assumed that astronauts would have planted the US Flag on every planet in the solar system by now.  We would build a moon base to mine resources for more rockets, and launch future space flights from that low-G platform.  It was all right around the corner!  Your kid could grow up to be an astronaut!

Even after we solved the technological hurdles, manned space flight was still hideously expensive, and there wasn't anything exciting in the rest of the Solar system that we really needed to see up close; you know, with actual weighted boots on the ground.  The inner planets are too hot, poisonous, and/or corrosive; the outer planets have an average temperature way colder than even a Minnesota January wind chill; and nuclear fusion reactors are currently a pipe dream.  Put it all together and space colonization is virtually impossible, even if those planets had anything we wanted.  Although humanity seems hell-bent on making Earth uninhabitable, it's still worse in space.

So after the American economy peaked in the 1970s, suddenly Uncle Sugar had a lot less dough to blow on moon bases that weren't going anywhere.  Big Brother can't even afford to treat your broken bones on Earth.  Hell, now some "conservative" politicians are tired of ponying up the tax dollars to keep the venerable US Postal Service (that's Benjamin Franklin's Postal Service, people!) in operation.  So now we use the term "Amazing Technological Breakthrough" to refer to a portable telephone with which you can update your Facebook status.

In 1962, "R is for Rocket" was still relevant.  After we really did put a man on the moon in 1969, the book became a lot less relevant.  You could see history (and the events Bradbury could only speculate on) unfold on the TV news.  Unfortunately, Bradbury's stories seemed to concentrate on the influence such technological changes had on daily life, and the fiction didn't seem to mesh with the reality. 

I mentioned that Bradbury published "R is for Rocket" in 1962.  In contrast, he published his classic "Fahrenheit 451" almost 9 years earlier, in 1953.  Perhaps Bradbury's name became more of a draw after "Fahrenheit 451" and someone saw money in publishing Bradbury's older stuff.

Anyway, after spotting "R is for Rocket" on my shelf, I reflected on Michael Moore's 2004 award-winning documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11".  Moore's title refers to Bradbury's literary masterwork, "Fahrenheit 451," which was about a dystopian future wherein the government deploys 'firemen' to incinerate all books in an attempt to control society through its knowledge of history (an elaboration of Orwell: if you control the present, you can control the past; if you control the past, you can control the future); presumably, Moore created his documentary to remind America of what was severely under-reported and thereby dropped from public political discourse during George W. Bush's election and first term.  Bradbury, instead of being flattered (or even inspired) by Moore's reference, was offended, and Bradbury pleaded with Moore to rename his documentary.

Moore was apparently moved by Bradbury's attention.  Moore promised Bradbury that he'd ask the studios to make this effort, but Moore conceded that doing this was at best impractical at the late stage of the project; as it was, fear of the documentary's controversial nature caused lots of corporate bigwigs at movie studios to fight the movie at every turn.

At its core, "Fahrenheit 9/11" was a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent President George W. Bush from being elected to a second term.  "Fahrenheit 9/11" became yesterday's news after November 2nd, 2004.  By 2009, "Dubya" was out of the White House, and Americans of almost every political persuasion were enjoying the process of forgetting George W. Bush: the Left Wing wanted to move on from our nation's dark age of fascism; and the Right Wing considered the negative consequences of his reign an embarrassment to future plans to revive those same policies.  As I write this in 2012, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is less than a footnote.

I have to wonder what Bradbury was really concerned about.  "Fahrenheit 9/11's" focus gave it a shelf-life precluding it from having lasting social impact; at best, Moore's work could only eclipse the popularity of Bradbury's for a few years, and could hardly blunt the impact of Bradbury's work.  Was Bradbury simply offended by the derivative nature of the title?  If so, I could point out that Bradbury's book gives no props to Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, the 18th-century inventor of mercury and alcohol thermometers.  I suspect Bradbury either didn't want anyone touching the shiny polish on his literary baby, as if it were a freshly-waxed sports car or an expensive pair of shoes; or that he didn't want a single penny of his royalties to accidentally help pay for Michael Moore's daughters' college education. 

Bradbury is celebrated for supporting libraries, but he has resisted urges to publish his work in e-book format.  He was recently quoted with the following statement: "We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now."  Is this really a science fiction writer?  "Fahrenheit 451" concludes with praise for the oral tradition of literature; if Bradbury supports the dissemination of literature in forms other than print-on-paper, how can Bradbury consider e-books a step too far?  Does he really expect those astronauts he wrote about to lug around hundreds of pounds of printed paper, or should they be required to memorize any book they want to read?  Is it really so terrible that we have constructed an electronic network wherein news, literature, music, conversation, and emergency assistance can be accessible by anyone anywhere?  The problem of "too many machines" might be relevant if the machines start thinking for us.  Perhaps Apple's 'Siri' comes close to this by preventing us from having our fingers do the walking through the actual paper yellow pages of the phone book.  Maybe Bradbury wants us to just smell the flowers and talk to people face-to-face.  But I suspect that Bradbury had simply become a grouchy old man: 'you darned kids these days have too many gadgets to play with.' 

In "Fahrenheit 451," a 33-year-old Ray Bradbury tried to warn us about a future wherein our access to literature--our history: cultural and otherwise--was prevented by an oppressive government.  It was timely: a fictional witch-hunt against books written during 1953's real witch-hunt against domestic political subversives, one year before Senator Joe McCarthy's very sense of decency was publicly questioned.  We can tell that it was still relevant in 2004 because so many wanted to censor or 'disappear' Michael Moore's movie. 

Unfortunately, the Ray Bradbury who brought us "Fahrenheit 451" died a long time ago.  I suspect that Bradbury simply got too old to help us into the future, because he remembers only the good things from his past, and he got to the stage wherein everything new was crap.  If you want to look to a future, Bradbury might encourage us to look to the old future he wrote about (you know, with rockets and astronauts and stuff), not the future we're actually building.