Take me home
In the current edition of The New Yorker, Ray Bradbury ponders the roots of his love of magic and the fantastic
When I was 7 or 8 years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents’ boarding house, in Waukegan, Ill. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing Amazing Stories, with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination. Soon after, the creative beast in me grew when Buck Rogers appeared, in 1928, and I think I went a trifle mad that autumn. It’s the only way to describe the intensity with which I devoured the stories. You rarely have such fevers later in life that fill your entire day with emotion.
When I look back now, I realize what a trial I must have been to my friends and relatives. It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another. I was always yelling and running somewhere, because I was afraid life was going to be over that very afternoon.
MY NEXT MADNESS happened in 1931, when Harold Foster’s first series of Sunday colour panels based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan appeared, and I simultaneously discovered, next door at my uncle Bion’s house, the John Carter of Mars books. I know that The Martian Chronicles would never have happened if Burroughs hadn’t had an impact on my life at that time.
I memorized all of John Carter and Tarzan, and sat on my grandparents’ front lawn repeating the stories to anyone who would sit and listen. I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, “Take me home!” I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities.
WHILE I REMAINED earthbound, I would time-travel, listening to the grownups, who on warm nights gathered outside on the lawns and porches to talk and reminisce. At the end of the Fourth of July, after the uncles had their cigars and philosophical discussions, and the aunts, nephews and cousins had their ice-cream cones or lemonade, and we’d exhausted all the fireworks, it was the special time, the sad time, the time of beauty. It was the time of the fire balloons.
Even at that age, I was beginning to perceive the endings of things, like this lovely paper light . . .