It’s hard to pick one book that Ray Bradbury is best known for. He only wrote a handful of longer books (Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, etc.). Mostly he was a creator of perfect little stories—stories that were usually about something other than what you initially thought. 26 strange, lovely little stories about Mars are woven together in The Martian Chronicles. Today, on RDB's 101st birthday, Kimberly revisits this essential work.
Get your copy of "The Martian Chronicles" here:
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Mentioned in this episode:
Launchpad Astronomy workshop:
https://www.launchpadworkshop.org/
Christian Ready Launchpad Astronomy YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/christianready
Star Dragon by Mike Brotherton
https://amzn.to/3CZnqNx
Spider Star by Mike Brotherton
https://amzn.to/3gg2BUt
My first book - How to Be a Great Student
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TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome everybody, to Socratica Reads. I’m Kimberly Hatch Harrison, the co-founder of Socratica. What do we do at Socratica? We’re dreaming up the education of the future. It’s hard, sometimes, not to get mired in the issues of today. How do you keep your eye on where we want to go? This is one of the real benefits of science fiction. It allows you to think freely. I don’t mean in DENIAL about reality, or that you become unreasonable or illogical. Just that you can think about what the world could be like if we leapfrog over some of the roadblocks that are keeping us stuck here. That’s why my podcast Socratica Reads is focused on science fiction. I’m collecting the stories that have inspired me and inspired our work at Socratica.
One of my guiding lights, my North star, is Ray Bradbury. I started this podcast a year ago today, on Ray Bradbury’s 100th birthday. It’s a year later, and of course, I am still looking to Bradbury to remind myself. There’s something about that man that keeps the curious child alive in me.
It’s not just Bradbury. It seems like the universe is conspiring. Something amazing happened to me this month. I just got back from a visit to Laramie, Wyoming, where I was invited to take part in a very special workshop called “Launchpad Astronomy.” It’s run by two astronomy professors: Mike Brotherton and Christian Ready. You might recognize Mike Brotherton from his other life as a writer of hard scifi like Star Dragon and Spider Star. Christian Ready you might know as your “friendly neighborhood astronomer” from his YouTube channel Launchpad Astronomy.
These two fellows lead a small class of writers every year in this crash course on Astronomy. It’s their gift to the world. If you’re tired of terrible mistakes in science fiction - these are your new heroes. This is their way to fight back and try to inject a little reality and real science into the creative projects you’ll see on the big screen and read in science fiction stories. I’ll include a link in the description so you can see how many extraordinary creators have been through this program.
You know I was in heaven, because it was back to school time - we spent a whole week in a college classroom learning about black holes, quasars, the birth of stars, the expansion of the universe, some basics of relativity, cosmology, you know. All the good stuff. AND we got to do a little telescoping. We went up in the mountains to this observatory where there were true dark skies. We saw the Milky Way, and some sneaky little fireballs. We saw Saturn and its rings. Jupiter and the Galilean moons. And RED MARS.
I thought a lot about Ray Bradbury while I was there. How much he loved space, and the people who bring space to us. I remembered the epitaph to The Martian Chronicles:
“It is good to renew one’s wonder,” said the philosopher.
“Space travel has again made children of us all.”
The Martian Chronicles is not a novel. It’s a compilation of stories. But they’re not the stories you might expect about human space exploration or what happens when people finally arrive on Mars. In your typical science fiction story, we’d hear all the details about the special new rocket, and the specific flight path, the complications of orbital mechanics, and so on. In these Mars stories, Bradbury says the rocket takes off, and then the rocket lands. Meanwhile, a Martian woman dreams of an Earthly man and realizes something terrible about her Martian husband.
Or, how about the second story. Imagine if you went on a rocket to Mars, and you arrived and nobody cared?
I’m going to read you an excerpt from this beautiful little story.
Are you ready? Let’s begin.
(reads pp 16-25)
I wish Ray Bradbury were here to see the Martian expeditions, and to see that double rocket landing footage from SpaceX. But we’re seeing it for him. It is Ray Bradbury’s 101st birthday. May he live forever.
