Robots:Asimov::Mars:?

kw: book reviews, essays

Who showed us that we are the Books, we are Martians, we are the monster under the bed? Who can string together the greatest number of enthusiastic adjectives in one long, hollering breath? Who filled that big golf ball in Florida with sight, sound, acceleration?

The term "most unique" is a redundancy, except when it refers to Ray Bradbury. "Ordinary" uniqueness simple doesn't do him justice. Just when you thought you had a handle on him, via his fiction, his screenplays, his scoring of the Epcot center's narrative, and his TV stories on The Ray Bradbury Theater, he drops a book of essays into the pond.

I think the definition of "essay" has been forever changed by Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon From the Cave, Too Far From the Stars. The sub-subtitle is Essays on the Past, the Future, and Everything in Between. This is, I think, a publisher's hyperbole. We live in the collision of past and future, and the "in between" is too ephemeral to measure...the "Everything" is nothing. We really live in the future, for without anticipation we are not alive.

You either know Bradbury's style or you don't. If you don't, get one of his books, any of them, and read it all at a sitting. Only then will you be in a position to extract any substance from one of these essays. He writes about writing, about fiction, about people and places, but the undercurrent is, he is writing about your very soul. What is your makeup? Where have you come from and where go you now?

I have said before that all writers reveal themselves; some also reveal the real world to us; the best reveal ourselves. A very, very few lead us to become ourselves.