The science fiction genre was always an inexact fit for the kaleidoscopic enthusiasms of Ray Bradbury. Closer to Borges and Calvino than Asimov and Heinlein, he was a carnival-barker poet of the human condition in all its forms -- but as befits a consciousness blooming in what some historians
call the Age of Science, the era's themes and curiosities inevitably shaped his work.
On the following pages, Wired peers at some of our favorite Bradbury stories through the lens of what's now scientifically known. Of course, as he wrote several hundred short stories and more than 30 books, we've only scratched the surface, so please suggest your own favorites.
Above: "The Long Rain" & "All Summer in a Day"
The cloud-covered surface of Venus inspired much literary speculation in the early 20th century, with writers including C.S. Lewis, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Olaf Stapledon imagining what lay beneath the shroud. Bradbury dreamed of a world where rain fell almost ceaselessly.
"It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands," Bradbury wrote in "All Summer in a Day," a 1954 story about a girl who missed the planet's septennial day of sunshine. "And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives."
It's now known that surface temperatures on Venus could melt lead, and that the rain would be acid -- but perhaps Bradbury's conditions prevail on one of
thousands of newly discovered exoplanets, just as life imitated George Lucas'
imaginary planet of Tatooine.
Image: Three-dimensional surface rendering of Maat Mons, the tallest volcano on Venus. (NASA/JPL)
