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most popular science-fiction writer and regularly appears in such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post.
In my opinion, Bradbury gets away with it because he does not really write science fiction. He is a writer of social fiction. His "Mars" is but the mirror held up to Earth. His stories do not depict possible futures; they are warnings and moral lessons aimed at the present. Because Bradbury believes that our present society is headed for chaos and barbarism unless it changes its present course (he may well be right), his warnings are jeremiads. This has led some critics to the superficial belief that the man is simply "morbid" or that he has a ''death wish." Nonsense! He is simply writing social fiction.
Isaac Asimov, "Social Science Fiction," Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Future, ed. Reginald Bretnor (New York: Coward-McCann, 1953), p. 175
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Ray Bradbury
(. . .) I very much enjoy, I relish, writing science fiction.
There is great serious fun for the writer in asking himself: when does an invention stop being a reasonable escape mechanismfor we must all evade the world and its crushing responsibilities at timesand start being a paranoiacally dangerous device? How much of any one such invention is good for a person, bad for a person, fine for this man, fatal to the next?
So much depends, of course, on what the individual hears when he gives himself over to the electronic tides breaking on the shore of his Seashell. The voice of conscience and reason? An echo of morality? A new thought? A fresh idea? A morsel of philosophy? Or bias, hatred, fear, prejudice, nightmare, lies, half-truths, and suspicions? Or, perhaps even worse, the sound of one emptiness striking hollowly against yet another and another emptiness; broken at two-minute intervals by a jolly commercial, preferably in rhymed quatrains or couplets?
In writing a science-fiction story around such an idea, the author must consider many things. Is there, for instance, a delicate interplay where the society does not crush the individual but where the individual realizes that without his cooperation society would fly to pieces through the centrifugal force of anarchy? Is the programming on such an ear-button receiver of a caliber to enable a man to be a gyroscope, both taking from and giving to society: beautifully balanced? Does it tell him what to do every hour and every minute of every day? Or, fearing knowledge of any sort, tell him

 
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