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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 280 из 359Even worse, Bradbury's paperback publisher insists tiresomely on calling him "The World's Greatest Living Science Fiction Writer" (making him sound like one of the freaks in the shows he writes about so often) ,when Bradbury has never written anything but the most nominal science fiction. Even in his space stories, he is not interested in negativeion drives or relativity converters. There are rockets, he says in the connected stories which form The Martian Chronicler, R Is for Rocket , and S Is for Space . That is all you need to know and is, therefore, all I am going to tell you.
To this I would add that if you want to know how the rockets are going to work in any hypothetical future, turn to Larry Niven or Robert Heinlein; if you want literature- stories , to use Jack Finney's word-about what the future might hold, you must go to Ray Bradbury or perhaps to Kurt Vonnegut. What powers the rockets is Popular Mechanics stuff. The province of the writer is what powers the people.
All that said, it is impossible to talk of Something Wicked This Way Comes , which is most certainly not science fiction, without putting Bradbury's lifework in some sort of perspective. His best work, from the beginning, has been his fantasy . . . and his best fantasy has been his horror stories. As previously mentioned, the best of the early Bradbury was collected in tile marvelous Arkham House collection Dark Carnival . No easily obtainable edition of this work, the Dubliners of American fantasy fiction, is available. Many of the stories originally published in Dark Carnival can be found in a later collection, The October Country , which is available in paper. Included are such short Bradbury classics of gut-chilling horror as "The Jar," "The Crowd," and the unforgettable "Small Assassin." Other Bradbury stories published in the forties were so horrible that the author now repudiates them (some were adapted as comics stories and published, with a younger Bradbury's permission, in E.C.'s The Crypt of Terror ). One of these involves an undertaker who performs hideous but curiously moral atrocities upon his "clients"-for instance, when three old biddies who loved to gossip maliciously are killed in an accident, the undertaker chops off their heads and buries these three heads together, mouth to ear and ear to mouth, so they can enjoy a hideous kaffeeklatsch throughout eternity.
Of how his own life influenced the writing of Something Wicked This Way Comes , Bradbury says: "[ Something Wicked This Way Comes ] sums up my entire life of loving Lon Chaney and the magicians and grotesques he played in the twenties films. My mom took me to see Hunchback in 1923 when I was three. It marked me forever. Phantom [ of the Opera ] when I was six. Same thing. East of Zanzibar when I was about eight.
To this I would add that if you want to know how the rockets are going to work in any hypothetical future, turn to Larry Niven or Robert Heinlein; if you want literature- stories , to use Jack Finney's word-about what the future might hold, you must go to Ray Bradbury or perhaps to Kurt Vonnegut. What powers the rockets is Popular Mechanics stuff. The province of the writer is what powers the people.
All that said, it is impossible to talk of Something Wicked This Way Comes , which is most certainly not science fiction, without putting Bradbury's lifework in some sort of perspective. His best work, from the beginning, has been his fantasy . . . and his best fantasy has been his horror stories. As previously mentioned, the best of the early Bradbury was collected in tile marvelous Arkham House collection Dark Carnival . No easily obtainable edition of this work, the Dubliners of American fantasy fiction, is available. Many of the stories originally published in Dark Carnival can be found in a later collection, The October Country , which is available in paper. Included are such short Bradbury classics of gut-chilling horror as "The Jar," "The Crowd," and the unforgettable "Small Assassin." Other Bradbury stories published in the forties were so horrible that the author now repudiates them (some were adapted as comics stories and published, with a younger Bradbury's permission, in E.C.'s The Crypt of Terror ). One of these involves an undertaker who performs hideous but curiously moral atrocities upon his "clients"-for instance, when three old biddies who loved to gossip maliciously are killed in an accident, the undertaker chops off their heads and buries these three heads together, mouth to ear and ear to mouth, so they can enjoy a hideous kaffeeklatsch throughout eternity.
Of how his own life influenced the writing of Something Wicked This Way Comes , Bradbury says: "[ Something Wicked This Way Comes ] sums up my entire life of loving Lon Chaney and the magicians and grotesques he played in the twenties films. My mom took me to see Hunchback in 1923 when I was three. It marked me forever. Phantom [ of the Opera ] when I was six. Same thing. East of Zanzibar when I was about eight.