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no illusions about the prospective blessings of a machine-age utopia. They do not gape at gadgets with adoring wonder. Their approach to the inhabitants of other worlds is anthropological and nonviolent. They owe more to Aldous Huxley than to Jules Verne or H. G. Wells. Insofar as the reading public is turning to them and forsaking the cops and the cowboys, the public is growing up.
This is not to suggest, however, that Ray Bradbury can be classified simply as a science-fiction writer, even a superlatively good one. Dark Carnival, his earlier book of stories, showed that his talents can function equally well within comparatively realistic settings. If one must attach labels, I suppose he might be called a writer of fantasy, and his stories "tales of the grotesque and the arabesque" in the sense in which those words are used by Poe. Poe's name comes up almost inevitably, in any discussion of Mr. Bradbury's work; not because Mr. Bradbury is an imitator (though he is certainly a disciple) but because he already deserves to be measured against the greater master of his particular genre.
It may even be argued that The Martian Chronicles are not, strictly speaking, science fiction at all. The most firmly established convention of science fiction is that its writers shall use all their art to convince us that their stories could happen. The extraordinary must grow from roots in the ordinary. The scientific "explanations" must have an authoritative air. (There are, as a matter of fact, some science-fiction writers whose work is so full of abstruse technicalities that only connoisseurs can read it.) Such is not Mr. Bradbury's practice. His brilliant, shameless fantasy makes, and needs, no excuses for its wild jumps from the possible to the impossible. His interest in machines seems to be limited to their symbolic and aesthetic aspects. I doubt if he could pilot a rocketship, much less design one.
Christopher Isherwood, [Review of The Martian Chronicles], Tomorrow 10, No. 2 (October 1950): 5657
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Isaac Asimov
Bradbury has written scores of stories about Mars. He gives Mars an Earthlike temperature, an Earthlike atmosphere and Earthlike people, sometimes down to tuxedoes and pocket-handkerchiefs. His stories reek with scientific incongruity. But he gets away with it. Not only does he get away with it, but, among the general population, he is by far the

 
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