Ray Bradbury always seemed out of synch with the contemporary science fiction milieu: he wrote on a typewriter until the end, was sentimental, loved circuses, dreams, toys, fantasies, myths, loathed technology to the point of never driving a car, and never concerned himself much with scientific fact. Reading Listen to the Echoes, a book of conversations between Bradbury and his biographer Sam Weller, is like entering another world entirely–a little like sitting cross-legged on the rug in Bradbury’s study, I’d imagine, poking around his papers, listening to stories about the old days, and occasionally taking a break to play canasta.

Weller: You have long associated the space race with religion and faith. What is the connection?

Bradbury: Exploring space is our effort to become immortal. If we stay here on Earth, human beings are doomed, because someday the sun will either explode or go out. By going out into space, first back to the moon, then to Mars, and then beyond, man will live forever.

It definitely doesn’t make Bradbury come off as any more avant-garde, but it does clarify him as an authentic individual who cared deeply about the ephemeral magic of creativity. The artists he admired–John Huston, Frederico Fellini, George Bernard Shaw, to name a few–he loved, deeply, with the emotional resonance of a child. His relationship to the creative process was beautiful; he wrote every day and would sometimes sob when re-reading his old work, feeling that it came from somewhere beyond his mind. He was formed by experiences he chose to interpret as mystical: a circus performer who touched his forehead as a child and pronounced “live forever,” for example, or a glimpse at the Apollo lander through the window of the Smithsonian one night, lit up briefly by a bolt of lightning in a rainstorm.

Weller: Did you know Philip K. Dick?

Bradbury: Forty years ago we were together at a bar and we talked. You meet people and you realize they don’t like being alive. They don’t like talking. He seemed pretty negative.

In a climate of “hard” writing, Bradbury was the softest of the O.G. science fiction canonists. The man who famously, in The Martian Chronicles, put oxygen on Mars, didn’t care much for science–or any other system of knowing. He wasn’t impressed by any critical or formal approach to writing. As a self-educated person (and a dreamer), he burned bright for ideas, not ideologies. I think that for Bradbury, science was a functional metaphor, and science fiction a methodology for tapping into grander, more archetypal kinds of stories. When it comes down to it, he wrote fables and myths about the future, not extrapolations.

The Paris Review: Do you think science fiction offers the writer an easier way to get at ideas?

Bradbury: I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, into the face of Medusa, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield, then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it’s really looking at a reflection of the truth that is immediately in front of us. So you have a ricochet vision, a ricocheted truth, which enables you to swallow it and have fun with it, instead of being self-conscious and super-intellectual.

In the early 1990s, William Gibson wrote Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), a 300-line autobiographical poem saved on a 3.5″ floppy designed to erase itself after a single use. The book version accomplished the task in analogue: its pages were treated with photosensitive chemicals, which began gradually fading the words and images from the book’s first exposure to light. The text was about memory, and the idea was that a reader would experience it as such, with the words becoming memories as they were consumed. Like a conversation, like a moment experienced in direct time, one could never recall it precisely, or command it–as on a computer–to return. It was simply lived, then faded away.

Although Agrippa was engineered to be ephemeral, it committed one cardinal error: it was written at the dawn of the free information age. Almost immediately after the poem’s initial “Transmission” (a complex affair involving illusionist Penn Jillette and a vacuum-sealed sculptural magnetic disk) enterprising hackers pirated the text and disseminated it online, on USENET groups and listservs. Since Gibson didn’t use email at the time, fans faxed him pirated copies of the text in droves. If Agrippa had been undertaken today, I can only imagine the full text would have been leaked before it even made it into the art gallery. The project was, in short, a failure: not because it was a bad idea, or poorly-executed, but because there simply is no such thing as a transitory memory anymore. When someone tries to artificially construct one, our networked technological milieu literally wrests it away and commits it, permanently, to the cloud.

We no longer serve one another sensory impressions, live largely felt experiences; we no longer conjure up the past through a patchwork of fallible nodes of thought, ever-shifting, foggy and surreal. It’s difficult today, perhaps impossible, for an artist to make something with the qualities of pure memory: intangible, subjective, and yet with real emotional affect. In an age of hyper-documentation, of consistent quantifiability, every click leaves a trace.

Which, of course, may have been the very point Gibson was trying to make. Agrippa, in attempting to emulate natural memory, was an impossible object. By being technological, it was inherently destined to assimilate itself into a greater collective cache of experience. In his new collection of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor, he addresses this more succinctly: technology, in a sense, is memory.

In Gibson’s view, our technology is–always has been–an direct extension of our humanity. He argues that the moment we began began taking photos, making films, externalizing the human experience with so-called “mass” media, we set into motion an immeasurably vast prosthetic memory for the race. What we can’t remember, or live directly, we can now conjure up through images, films, and data; we can remember second-hand, often losing touch with the difference between our memories, truth, history, and the experience of others. We can view things at a distance, things which happened before we were born, we can watch the dead talk: ghosts have been walking among us since the first image was recorded. Of film, Gibson writes, “we are building ourselves mirrors that remember–public mirrors that wander around and remember what they’ve seen,” adding, “that is a basic magic.”

Only briefly does he make what I think is a crucial leap to extending the argument beyond the parameters of 20th century technology. The prosthetic memory of the human race isn’t just quantifiable in archives of film, living networks of interconnected conversation, and endless bytes of media data. It’s also a different kind of information: mesopotamian clay tablets, cave paintings, the printed word, anything, in fact, that is capable of representing a fragment of ineffable experience in physical form. Of course, this isn’t Gibson’s territory, the cyberprophet, the calm-and-bemused  voice of techno-truth, but he tackles it:

“Our ancestors, when they found their way to that first stone screen, were commencing a project so vast that it only now begins to become apparent: the unthinking construction of a species-wide, time-defying, effectively immortal prosthetic memory. Extensions of the human brain and nervous system, capable of surviving the death of the species. The start of building what would become civilization, cities, cinema.”

While media is an “extended nervous system we’ve been extruding as a species for the past century,” art is a complex memory we’ve been collaboratively creating for much, much longer. It’s too big for a single individual–or a single machine, hopefully– to experience it all at once, but it’s the central project of the human race. And it can’t be pirated, or destroyed: only lived, and added to, often thoughtlessly, by succeeding generations of increasingly technological human beings.

Additional Materials:

Full text of Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)
Distrust That Particular Flavor on Amazon
Fantastic video interview with William Gibson on Motherboard TV