Although I’ve had this book as long as I can remember, I’d never read it. Not the whole way through, until now. As I kid I read Ray Bradbury when I could. I’m sure I read a story or two in Golden Apples of the Sun, but I didn’t approach the entire collection. I was drawn in at this late age by “The Fog Horn.” This is the story that lay behind The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, that classic of Harryhausen, the other Ray. It’s been years since I’ve seen the movie, but the story was on my mind and I kept going. Some of Bradbury ages well, while other stories, not so much. The designation of his tales also changes over time. As Stephen King says in Danse Macabre, Bradbury didn’t so much write science fiction (as the cover of this edition declares), even if the people occasionally get into rockets.
I realized as I read just how much my early writing style was influenced by Bradbury. My stories were vignettes like these, not as accomplished, of course, but without lots of violence. And with horror elements. But it kept coming back to me how Bradbury’s characters, even the time-traveling ones, are stuck in the button-down forties and fifties. I naturally overlooked this as a child but all these decades later and the strict binaries of, for example, men’s and women’s worlds, comes through on every page. When women are the main characters, they’re usually not very flatteringly drawn. The same goes for caricatures of races, although Bradbury is sympathetic he also uses stereotypes. And many of the stories in this collection are just about everyday events, not a speculative element in sight. Maybe I did try to read it through as a kid, but lost interest.
Writers struggle against irrelevance. Those who look to the future sometimes get it right but often don’t. And some reflect a present that we’d rather not acknowledge. Of course, when I’m writing fiction I tend not to think in these terms. The story simply takes you over and you can’t help being a refugee from the year in which you were born. This is especially evident when Bradbury casts a rosy lens back toward childhood years. As a child myself I had no idea that Bradbury was a time traveler from the twenties and thirties. His childhood was nearly over by the time my mother was born. It was a different world. Some of his stories managed to transcend time and its for those that I keep reading him.