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.

Los Angeles is arguably the science fiction capital of America. Blade Runner’s iconic sino-Futuristic downtown notwithstanding, there’s a strong historical lineage for science fiction in the Southland: the fan culture which took root here mid-century, the early conventions, the legacy of Forrest J. Ackerman and his one-man museum of memorabilia, Ray Bradbury’s lifetime on the West Side, Harlan Ellison’s local screeds, and, of course, the Hollywood culture machine, which has been spitting out genre epics from backlots in Burbank since time immemorial. Science fiction in L.A. has had many stomping grounds, from the fourth-floor dining room of Clifton’s Cafeteria, where the early heads congregated over free lime sherbet, to the hallowed halls of the L.A. Science Fiction and Fantasy Society clubhouse in North Hollywood, but it’s also always everywhere, just a feeling, something disconnected about a city both so fake and real.

I have been enjoying, very much, being a science fiction reader in Los Angeles.

Not only does the city’s atmosphere of accreting globalization, total simultaneity, and neon lend itself perfectly to my inner wanderings, but the culture is alive and well. Several weeks ago, I attended a birthday party for Ray Bradbury at Mystery and Imagination Books in Glendale. When he was alive, Ray would spend his birthdays at the bookstore, signing for fans and eating cake; after he passed away this year, the owners decided to keep the tradition going. Friends in the community took turns telling stories about Ray, showing off old letters, and reading miscellaneous Bradburiana. Old men in thick glasses sat nestled on plastic chairs like thrones. Christine Bell, the owner of Mystery and Imagination, gave a halting eulogy to her friend that brought the whole room to tears.

On the other end of the spectrum, I also recently saw William Gibson speak at the Last Bookstore. In a sense it was the perfect genre dichotomy: while Mystery & Imagination is a hole-in-the wall bookshop, all lurid pulp paperbacks stacked vertiginously (and tends to host moldies and tenderhearted horror geeks), The Last Bookstore is a cavernous warehouse, an old bank building in the always-already cyberpunk milieu of downtown L.A.

Gibson was chewing gum and perpetually craning his neck to gawk at the monstrous ceilings, like some kind of enfant terrible bobble-head. He kept referring to the bookstore itself as the perfect example of science fiction’s divergent predictions; if a person from 100 years ago were to peer through a time-portal at us sitting on folding chairs in this once-grand building perverted, he postulated, they would have thought we were dressed like longshoremen and wouldn’t recognized our activity as something cultural. He called the store “glorious, Borgesian, mad in the best possible way.”

He had some great things to say about the early days of cyberpunk, too, namely that the moment the epithet materialized, he immediately sought to avoid the inevitable typecasting to follow. “If we get any on us,” he remembers thinking, “we’re finished.” The attempt wasn’t quite a success; he recalled looking around and realizing that all his contemporaries were lining up to get “Cyberpunk” stamped on the backs of their jean jackets. “I didn’t want to spoil the party.”

He called contemporary SF a “forest of unfamiliar names” and confessed to reading scarcely any of it. Essentially, he said, it’s not a problem with the genre–rather, it’s a problem of genre itself. When science fiction aficionados write off all other fiction as “mundane,” something is wrong, he said, adding, “Isaac Asimov is far out and Cormac McCarthy is mundane? And you want me to talk to you?”

Other great Gibsonisms from my notes:

• “The banal Holiday Inn-like ruins of post-Tolkien epic fantasy”
• “In The Wire, we have our Dickens”
• “Bruce Sterling is the Leon Trotsky of cyberpunk”

Of his recent trilogy’s (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History) diversion away from science fiction, he summed it up as a recalibration of his weirdness stick:

In order to induce the kind of cognitive dissonance we come to good science fiction for, one must have a yardstick for how weird it is right now. My yardstick of weirdness was too short to describe the weirdness outside my window.

Which is as fair a description of Los Angeles as I could summon right now: weirdness outside the window, ever-changing, and rife with exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance we come to good science fiction (and interesting cities) to experience.

It was the summer of 1992 when I picked up my first Ray Bradbury novel at a yard sale. A paperback copy of The Martian Chronicles beat up beyond repair, it still surreptitiously toted the markings of a public library on its inside jacket pocket. I was eight. I slipped out the library card; no one had checked it out since the mid-1970s. Seduced by the cover – a man in horn-rimmed glasses, hair parted do-goody to the side, flanked by an ominous red planet – I bought it for a kid nickel, and skipped home, all white Keds on black asphalt.

I remember everything about that day: how I flopped onto a couch in my parents’ house, savoring the cool of the basement, and propped the old paperback on my knees with a shrug. How the cover was held on by yellowing Scotch tape, the corners dog-eared into smooth nubs. How the grey concrete walls of the basement slowly disintegrated, replaced by the quiet whirl of interstellar space.

How I could no longer see our rope swing out the window, or hear the familiar click-click of the sprinkler: only the hazy orange light of a Martian sunrise, the siren call of distant alien songs. How suddenly I was floating through space and time, my sweaty legs still stuck to the couch leather.

In retrospect, my initiation was classic Bradbury. His stories, even when they ebbed far into the reaches of interstellar space, always remained anchored in the warm grit of everyday life.

Sure, he tackled planetary conquests, near and distant futures, and cybernetic pathos, and his fear of technology dampening the human spirit was nearly divinatory. But he wasn’t married to the machines. The guy didn’t even drive a car. Instead he spent his life giving voice to the dreams, heartbreak, sacrifice, and tiny quotidian tragedies lived by the people that the future left behind.

Bradbury, in short, was for the humans, and to peg him as merely a science-fiction writer is to diminish the scope of his work.

His stories swelled from a fountainhead of seemingly indomitable faith in the human spirit; even his most prescient dystopia, Fahrenheit 451, trusts the human race so much that it imagines an entire colony of people who devote their lives to memorizing, word for word, the books their totalitarian government hopes to eradicate. His baddies were always those who dared rob humanity of its culture, exploit its capacity for love, or pervert the sticky-sweet flow of childhood memory. For Bradbury, science was a metaphor, a great force which might, if employed incorrectly, corrupt the starry-eyed eight-year-olds within us all. His science-fiction went beyond the ghetto of genre; it was universal, literary, with the lasting quality of myth.

From the first page of The Martian Chronicles, and with every page that followed, Ray Bradbury lulled me into a reverie of grandiose proportions from which, over twenty years later, I still have not yet awoken. He didn’t toss me, or any of his readers, into the future unthinkingly. Rather, he showed us an unbroken continuum stippled with the same cresting melancholia and folly that has always characterized the human experience.

Ray Bradbury was gentle, sometimes exceedingly sentimental, with a wizardly knack for story; above all, however, he was our shepherd, luring us first into the sweeping, dusty vistas of Mars, and then forward into the infinite.

* This little elegy to my departed science fictional hero first appeared yesterday on Motherboard, but I thought I’d share it to my readers here. 

Hannes Bok’s last published work, a wraparound illustration of Roger Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” printed in the November 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Hannes Bok was a seminal figure in early science fiction culture and one of its great artists. An astrology nut and closeted homosexual in the already surreal milieu of early SF fandom, his work, championed by Ray Bradbury and fan icons like Forrest J. Ackerman, was minimal, sometimes almost Art Nouveau, characterized by austere pen and ink renderings of kitsch monsters, hybrid creatures, and elegant humans in angular turmoil. He was mentored in his early career by Maxfield Parrish and adopted from this elder the technique of layering his canvases with glaze, which lent his color pieces (often made for the cover of magazines like Weird Tales and Other Worlds) a hyper-saturated luminosity.

Bok was a card-carrying member of the Futurians, a legendary New York fan group that nurtured the careers of Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl, as well as being active in the primordial science fiction scene of Los Angeles in the late 1930s — in a compendium published posthumously, his best friend Emil Petaja recalls eating free lime sherbet at L.A.’s historic Clifton’s Cafeteria with Bradbury and other members of the then-elite of science fiction. File under: great minds and great desserts.

Hannes Bok died at 49 of a heart attack after a protracted period of withdrawal from the world; his lifelong obsessions with astrology, the occult, and the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius made him a pariah in his later years. Regardless, Bok remains a beloved icon of the genre’s early years, a true heretic of the acrylics.

Galaxies Like Grains of Sand is a short novel comprised of even shorter stories, presented in roughly chronological order, covering a billion year spree of humanity (I have to wonder if Brian Aldiss took a page from Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men). The sections are broken into ages, long eras of the future, with names like “The Robot Millennia,” and “The Mutant Millennia.”

Galaxies, originally released in the UK in 1959 as The Canopy of Time, is the kind of science fiction novel that I find immediately compelling; Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, the first science fiction book I ever read (an obvious game-changer) has a similar format. It’s wildly romantic, like reading the pottery shards of the ancient future, but coldly logical, too, in a way: how else do you write about such extreme lengths of time, such broad reaches of space, than to forsake 99% of what “happened”?

There is no time for the full story: only meager shreds from the perspectives of many, giving a rough sense of a structure — something much more massive than the reader. Over the course of the book, humanity evolves and devolves, leaves Earth for so long as to forget it ever existed, travels through time, changes from warring to robotic, sexless, primitive, collective, mutant. We achieve great things — stylized culture, self-perpetuating, harmless war, a transcendent language which enables us to travel in space — and just as quickly forget them. Nothing remains the same, despite the characters’ desire for permanence.

In Galaxies, humanity is implicitly on trial; if we buy into the artistic conceit that it is a compilation of stories from the lifespan of the long-dead Homo Sapiens, then we become members of the next race, the one which has superseded the follies of the past (er, our present). Moreover, we become jurors. We are led to view the first race as plucky, if eventually harmless. And tragic.

Which, of course, is us. Aye, the rub.

As Aldiss wrote in a later work, The Malacia Tapestry, “we all stand condemned in the terrible forests of the Universe.”

NEXT BOOK: JAMES TIPTREE JR: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF ALICE B. SHELDON