The one-author genre

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies

Set aside The Martian Chronicles and a few other Mars stories, and it becomes clear that Ray Bradbury is not really a science fiction writer. He is a poet of human psychology. I got the first inklings of this upon reading the closing story in Chronicles (I don't recall its title), that ends, "We are the Martians." And The October Country seems pure fantasy, and perhaps it is, but it also is poetry.

This is doubly clear in his new collection We'll Always Have Paris. It even closes with an overt poem, the first I recall seeing in Bradbury's work. In these twenty-two pieces—some are a bit hard to call "stories"—, drawn from the hidden corners of all of the author's career, we find the particular Bradbury perspective: Many of them turn a corner, in ways even more subtle than O. Henry, but many do not. Rather, they go in a straight line leaving you traveling, at considerable velocity, in a direction that you know cannot be sustained. A corner is sure to come, but you get to turn it for yourself.

The opening story is one such. "Massinelle Pietro" is the title character's name, and he's going to jail. Pietro is most like Zorba the Greek. When life hands you lemons, don't just make lemonade, dance upon the lemons to make lemon wine (my phrasing, but it makes me recall "Dandelion Wine"). You end the story with Pietro's home/store/emporium half-emptied of its banned menagerie and Pietro in a squad car, but still carrying one little dog. What will become of them? Work it out for yourself. You've been given enough by then.

And a story like "The Twilight Greens"…is it horror, or something else? We need a new word, one that combines a threat of impending doom with a hint of possible redemption. The most tragic story is "Come Away With Me", in which, finally, the rescued one cannot accept his rescue, and the protagonist finds there is nobody else to rescue. Almost a case of White Knight Syndrome gone wild, but done with more class.

Now I can look back at seeming-sci-fi works like Chronicles with a new eye. I tell my music students that I look for the day that they progress from playing the instrument to playing the music. There are many writers of science fiction or other fiction modes. For Bradbury, sci-fi or whatever are instruments. He writes to play your soul.