Always Thought That Ray Bradbury Was Overrated

Read him briefly in my youth, but never enjoyed anything he wrote:

I remember reading “Mars is Heaven” at about age 12 with all the shock and disbelief that probably would have hit me if I’d tried to read Proust—or rather, with all the shock that would not have hit me, but would have gone far over my head had it actually been Proust. A spaceship lands on Mars, and the astronauts disembark to find an idyllic small town in which all their childhood fantasies are fulfilled (Bradbury was born in 1920 and raised in Waukegan, Ill.). That night, though, the crewmembers who have thrown themselves into their idyllic Waukegan past die: Only the doubters survive. Somehow, it’s the moment in which the happy nostalgics drift away into their respective houses for the evening that stays with me, not the aftermath.

Coming off a straight diet of shoot-‘em-up-and-blast-off Tom Swifts, I vividly recall reading Bradbury the same way I read Cordwainer Smith, Norman Spinrad, and especially Philip K. Dick—with the uneasy sense that something’s happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. In a weird way, Bradbury is (like T.S. Eliot or Willa Cather) an Imagist: He succeeds not by telling a complete story, but by lodging some enigmatic unforgettable image deep in a reader’s brain—like those men moving in the twilight into houses that both are and are not their childhood homes.