*** Group mind question *** I'm working on something (a short story) and could use a bit of help with some Bradbury trivia. Can anybody tell me which Ray Bradbury story was the 1st "black folks on Mars" story that he got published. Or the first one he wrote if that's two different animals. Also, are all of those stories in MARTIAN CHRONICLES or are they spread throughout the body of his work. This data may be in one of the Clute books but I don't own them and the two editions of "Martian Chronicles" that I have at hand are not detailed the way I wish they were with regard to 1st app. copyright information. I don't need a detailed bibliography - just the title and year of the 1st of those stories. For the sake of my story I'm hoping it was in the late 1950's but it could've been as early as 1946-47 I suppose.

Bonus round - If Ray ever spoke about these stories specifically I would be REALLY interested in what he had to say about them. Feel free to hit my e-mail address if this seems too off topic or to let me know if I got a bite.

- Barney Dannelke dannelke01@enter.net

ps. this is not somebody trolling for term paper material or the answer to a test although I admit I am trying to save myself a couple of days of re-reading. Not that it wouldn't be a blast - I'm just a wee bit hammered for time.

*** PARTIAL group mind answer *** OK, just so you don't think I'm a complete lazy bastard I poked around a bit and the 2 stories I seem to be remembering are "Way In The Middle Of The Air" from MARTIAN CHRONICLES and "The Other Foot" from THE ILLUSTRATED MAN. Was that all there were? It would seem so but I don't know [my brain is telling me there were more but I don't know if I should trust it] and I still don't know when they were written or if "The Other Foot" was indeed a "sequel". Help?

"Way in the Middle of the Air," "Other Worlds," July 1950, appears in "The Martian Chronicles," "The Other Foot," "New Story," March 1951, does not, and I don't know of any other "black folks on Mars" stories. Rest assured, Bradbury has caught hell on various aspects of the MC over the years and these stories are one of the main things to draw critical fire. I don't know if he's spoken publicly specifically about these. It's been evident from things he said about how he responded to the others that he does not take kindly to criticism of his work and tends to be quite direct in taking exception to it. One exchange, although not directly related to this, that really sticks in my mind was from a 1968 interview in "Psychology Today," in which he expressed, in the "go west, young man" philosophy so often found in his work, that it was the automobile which freed the Negro, "put a gallon of gas in a car" and go somewhere you like better, to which the interviewer responded, "Come on, Ray, the original Lincoln was not a Continental."

Thank you dandelion. That's a great help. I just wanted to be sure I wasn't missing a handfull from one of the other collections. I have a couple of endings for this story I'm working on and one of them might reference the existence of Ray and those stories. It's sort of an alternate history of SF thing. At any rate, I wasn't looking at those stories in a critical way. I think you have to step back a bit and look at what other folks were writing in 1950 and place them in that context. PUDD'N'HEAD WILSON is a tough read today but it was WAY ahead of its time when it was written. As far as Ray's remarks, well, I'm an old friend of Harlan Ellison and once in a very great while he'll say something and I have to step back and remind myself that he was born in 1934. We are all of us products of our time. That's also a good part of what makes these bodies of work so special and so non-reproducable. Some people might say "warts and all" but I just see them as of their time. Thanks again.

Not to digress, but . . .

I'm not so sure we need to understand Bradbury in the context of his time AS MUCH AS we need to accept that while dealing with universal truths of the human condition, literature demonstrates those truths in particulars. Bradbury writes to his own experience -- which primarily involved his upbringing and peers in the midwest. His stories come out of his life experiences -- not someone else's.

In his famous (or infamous) Author's Afterword in Farenheit 451, he argues that people wanted him to include more blacks, women, christians, etc., in his stories. The individuals he wrote about were not "representative" enough and so had to be genericized so they would not isolate, offend, or ignore any group (whether religious issues, gender inclusive, whatever!). This was a form of censorship that he specifically mentions came from the mouth of Captain Beatty. The result would be the destruction of what literature does. In Bradbury's words:

"Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito -- out! Every simile that would have made a submoron's mouth twitch -- gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer -- lost! Every story, slenderize, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like -- in the finale -- Edgar Guess. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant's attention -- shot dead!"

Continuting with the reference to Captain Beatty:

"Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever."

Toward the end, Bradbury offers his solution:

"If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake . . . "

Bradbury's job was to tell his stories. Not someone else's. I don't see him as being anti-anyone. He just wrote what he knew. Why he continues to get castigated for that is beyond me. When Ralph Ellison wrote his great novel, "Invisible Man", no one complained that it contained a black perspective.

Mr. Dark - I'd say we're pretty much on the same page with all that you've said and quoted.

A friend of mine sent me this since my last posting - Doug writes, "Way In The Middle of the Air" has most recently gotten the bum's rush (Avon dropped the tale from its 1997 reprint edition of "The Martian Chronicles") - I hope this isn't a permanent state of affairs.

Interestingly, to me, at any rate, Mike Resnick is falling under something like the same kind of fire for his African science fiction. Being pigmentally challenged may well be a factor in all this. His responses are similar to Bradbury's. I think Ray got it right the first time. It's not as though either of these fellows invented a sub-genre and then built an electric fence around it. Ah, well.

- Barney Dannelke