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Though Bradbury has written passionately of space exploration throughout his career, he has also produced a large body of science fiction focusing on technological and social issues. Because he associates space travel with the American frontier myth, his space-travel fiction, however ironic, tends ultimately to celebrate our destiny in the cosmos, which he identifies with immortality. His images of earthbound futures tend to be more unrelievedly grim. Partially because Bradbury's implicit mythology identifies earthbound futures with death, his science-fiction stories set on earth tend to be warnings, projecting futures in which unresolved contemporary problems have become monstrous in scope. Yet some of the later stories especially celebrate the potential benefits of technology and progress. The title of Marvin E. Mengeling's excellent essay, "The Machineries of Joy and Despair: Bradbury's Attitude toward Science and Technology," accurately describes the range of possibilities projected in these fictions, which metaphorically express Bradbury's deepest loves and fears. |
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Bradbury himself has never despaired that we are doomed to inherit his "machineries of despair," for he has always regarded such warnings as part of science fiction's healthy functionsto dramatize current problems with crazy mirrors, designed to help us avoid the potential dangers they reflect. Indeed, in Fahrenheit 451 the most ominous threat of the future is our tendency fatuously to ignore problems. Thus, Bradbury's reputation as a "technophobe," blindly opposed to technology and progress, was never deserved, even during the period when he wrote his bleakest fiction. And his science fiction has changed in emphasis over the years, increasingly adopting a tone of celebration rather than of warning. |
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In a general sense, Bradbury's early shift in attitudes about the fruits of technology parallels the disillusionment of many in his generation. As an adolescent, he was an enthusiastic member of Technocracy, Inc., an organization devoted to the Wellsian faith that science and social engineering could create utopia. His disillusionment at discovering that Technocracy, Inc. was linked to fascism only anticipated the impact of the Second World War and the Bomb, experiences that gave the Frankenstein myth new meaning, whose impact inspired some of Bradbury's most powerful science-fiction imagery in the forties and fifties. Yet by the sixties he was becoming predominantly celebratory in tone, both about the impact of technology and about the future. (. . .) |
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