On reading Ray Bradbury...The very first science fiction book I ever read was Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. I was around eleven at the time and I still remember feeling as though the skies had opened up and dropped an entire universe at my feet. Although it has been a long and circuitous path to my own beginnings as a writer, I still recall that electric moment. Recently I re-read Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Although I had reservations about some aspects of the book --- the women, even the Martian ones, play stereotypical 50's gender roles, and are obsessed with cleaning the house --- there was something about the book that revived the old sense of wonder. This sense of wonder is why I read Asimov and Clarke, went on nature rambles, stared at the smudged city sky in a vain attempt to find contellations to dream about, became a physics student, wrote poetry, and eventually washed up on the shore of writerhood. And reading the book again I was filled with the vague, dream-like melancholy of the long-dead (or rare) Martians, who despite their telepathic abilities, could not withstand an onslaught of Earthmen. I imagined walking in their splendid, abandoned bone-cities, watching the luminous ghost-ships of their past glide past in the canals. I thought of the crystal, fruit-bearing walls of their houses, and the metal books that one could play like an instrument. I thought of other dead cultures and their ghost cities, of the Incas and the Aztecs. And dying arts and traditions the world over, ancient customs and ways of thinking becoming first quaint museum curiosities and then forgotten. I don't know whether Ray Bradbury had seen all this in his head also, but I saw it when I read the book. It is an unusual book. Arranged as a chronological series of stories connected mainly by theme, featuring for the most part characters that appear only in one scene or two, to make a point or to ilustrate with the events of their lives some moment of history of the planet Mars, this is a book to be read and savored slowly. The language is spare and poetic. This kind of structure is what Ursula Le Guin dubs a story suite, a novel disguised as a series of connected stories. I find it a very attractive form, and am thinking of using it myself. What else? It has been raining again --- perhaps there is something about rain that makes me feel like writing. The old Indian connection between monsoons and new birth, creativity. Back home in India the monsoons have come at last. My mother says there was flooding in the streets and no electricity or water for two days. I imagine the squelch of wet shoes in muddy streets, the smell of mold, the air moist and cool, leaves on trees washed clean, dripping. The smell of hot chai and pakoras frying. I remember how the grass grows knee-high, green and wild in this season. Amidst the blare of car horns and the daily cacophony of the city, sometimes the koel sings its long, wild ululation from the depths of a shrub or tree. The night is cool and clean with rain, and Ray Bradbury's terraformed Mars is right outside my window. Water whispers in the long canals, seedlings grow into trees in one magical night. The brown-skinned Martians with their yellow-coin eyes glide in ghost ships to festivities long past, and perhaps they feel the rain pitter-pattering through their bodies, a ghost rain. Perhaps they raise their eyes in wonder at the spectral clouds drifting before hard, bright stars, and their musical books begin to sing in unfamiliar ragas... Until the next downpour... posted by Vandana 10:40 PM . . .
Moved website to RCN. posted by Vandana 7:51 PM . . .
