SCIENCE sciencemag.org 21 AUGUST 2020 • VOL 369 ISSUE 6506 927PHOTO: © LISL STEINER, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. COURTESY OF RAY BRADBURY LITERARY WORKS, LLC.
By I ngrid OckertO
ne hundred years ago this month,
the poet laureate of Mars was born
in sleepy Waukegan, Illinois. To a
generation of baby boomers, Ray
Bradbury was best known for his
masterpiece The Martian Chronicles
(1950), a lyrical collection of stories that
wondered how humans might adapt to life
on the red planet. His poetic descriptions
captured the world’s collective imagina-
tion, spurring the development of space
technologies, including Mars-bound satel-
lites and rovers. As Norman Cor-
win noted in 1971, “[Bradbury] got
to Mars before the scientists...No
amount of scientific data, no logs
and extrapolations of computer
codes, will ever dislodge him from
that planet.”
To mark the centennial of Brad-
bury’s birth, Jonathan Eller, a
professor of English at Indiana Uni-
versity and director of the Center for
Ray Bradbury Studies, has written
Bradbury Beyond Apollo, the final
biography in a trilogy that explores
Bradbury’s life. Eller’s thoughtful
narrative is meticulous, offering
more than 300 pages of analysis
and snippets from Bradbury’s un-
published letters and manuscripts
to document every moment of the
writer’s golden years, starting with
the launch of Apollo 15 in 1971 and
ending with his final days in 2012.
Along the way, Eller offers readers
insights into how Bradbury estab-
lished his legacy as a luminary of
the space age.
Throughout his career, Eller
explains, Bradbury looked for op-
portunities to collaborate, to strengthen
his connection with fans, and to grow as a
writer. Bradbury Beyond Apollo dives deep
into the writer’s expansive personal and
professional network of scientists, film-
makers, writers, and artists. Bradbury, we
learn, established friendships early on with
key players and looked for projects that
would allow them to work together. He
met Walt Disney in the 1960s, for example,and worked with Disney’s “imagineers” on
several projects before their partnership
bore fruit, namely in the form of Epcot’s
ride Spaceship Earth and Walt Disney Pro-
duction’s film Something Wicked This Way
Comes (1982) based on Bradbury’s novel
of the same name. Similarly, Eller reveals
how Bradbury helped Bruce Murray and
others at the Planetary Society promote
space travel and planetary exploration.
While not all of the writer’s projects came
to fruition, he continued to dream up new
films, books, exhibits, and other projects
and collaborations.For a historian of science like myself,
Eller’s careful analysis of Bradbury’s pro-
fessional networks is invaluable. Too of-
ten, the files of influential public figures
remain closed, reinforcing their enigmatic,
two-dimensional public image. The care-
ful detail of this biography paints a rich
portrait of Bradbury as a talented conver-
sationalist and gifted collaborator and al-
lows readers to understand the nuances of
his professional relationships. The writer’s
correspondence, meanwhile, offers incred-
ible perspective into the interconnectedworld of postwar science communication.
Equally valuable is the full picture of
Bradbury’s career as a public speaker that
Eller provides readers. Bradbury appeared
regularly on television and in auditoriums
across the United States, strengthening
his relationships with fans and helping to
establish him as a leading voice for space-
flight. Although some biographers
might have omitted discussion of
Bradbury’s public lectures, Eller’s
decision to include a detailed re-
counting of the author’s outreach
efforts proves vital to understand-
ing his continued influence within
the scientific community.
Even as Bradbury established a
persona as a martian luminary, he
continued to write stories in other
genres—strange tales of haunted
crypts, hard-boiled noirs, and sweet
musings of childhood innocence.
Eller documents the continued de-
velopment of Bradbury’s writing
prowess, describing how the author
experimented with poetry and with
more realistic stories.
Bradbury was careful to delineate
his expertise as that of a writer, not
a scientist, when speaking alongside
professionals at NASA symposiums.
But his popularity demonstrated
that inspiration, not just education,
was an important dimension of sci-
ence communication. Today, many
successful scientists recognize that
effective communication weaves to-
gether awe and information.
Bradbury’s lectures offered audiences
opportunities to connect with him, and
with each other, over a positive vision of
human spaceflight. As he explained in
a letter to officials at the Smithsonian in
1981, “[I am] in the business of shaking
people up and rousing their blood so they
go out of the show half-mad with love and
stunned with the beauties of space. If we
do that, the rest will follow.” j10.1126/science.abc2948SCIENCE LIVESRay Bradbury, luminary of the space age, at 100
A new biography chronicles the golden years of Earth’s first martian
Bradbury Beyond Apollo
Jonathan R. Eller
University of Illinois Press,- 376 pp.
INSIGHTSSurrounded by Disney and NASA mementos, Bradbury writes in 1981.The reviewer is a historian of science based in Berkeley, CA,
USA. Email: [email protected]Published by AAAS