Glad I found this forum, hope someone can help. Ray wrote a lot of stories dealing with racial issues, but I've had no luck figuring which one is THIS story:
All I can recall, as I read it long decades ago, was there was a white man talking to a black man, about how there were aliens coming, or already here. And the attitude seemed to that they were now making jokes about the aliens the way there used to be jokes about black people. And that there was obviously some sort of shift in attitude going on.
There were probably more details I can't recall that might help identify this. But it was somehow that quiet realization (quiet realization is Ray's way), that things hadn't been good before, and would change.
Can anyone give me directions to this story again? I'd love to re-read it.
Thanks for all your help.

Ray tackled such issues in some of his Martian stories but this doesn't sound like any of his I've come across unless it's an extremely obscure one.

Yeah, I don't think it's one of the Martian stories. It WAS in one of the hardback collections. I read it in the late '60s or early '70s, so it's from one of the collections up to that point. And probably such a quiet little tale, it never got the same attention some of his bigger ones now do. But it really struck me when I was a kid, made me stop and think about the nature of things, and would love to read it again, and recommend it to others.
If no one knows this from my bumbling description, is there anywhere on the web where I can find capsule over-views of ALL his short stories? I wouldn't expect anyone else to wade through it all, but if someone could direct me to such an info source, I'd be happy to take the time to work through his hundreds of tales myself to find this one.

Hi randyfan,

that story is not by Bradbury. It's Frederik Pohl's "The Day After the Martians Came". Originally published in DANGEROUS VISIONS edited by Harlan Ellison, which you should be able to find quite easily. It was also included in Pohl's short story collection THE DAY AFTER THE MARTIANS CAME. Full publication history is here:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?57222

I can understand why you might have thought it was Bradbury, because some of the sentiment of the story is shared with Bradbury's "Way in the Middle of the Air", which is about black people leaving Earth for Mars. It's in some editions of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, but tends not to be in recent reprints because it is rather outdated.

I always include "The Big Black and White Game" ('45) when doing my TKAM unit (a must read for hs teens). The interesting thing about these RB's stories - related to the post (including those in MC written in the later 40's) is they pre-dated the socially conscious efforts of many authors who received acclaim years later in the mid-50's and early 60's.

By that time RB had already jumped off, built his wings and was beginning to soar...

Quite right, fjp. Just this morning I was re-reading "Way in the Middle of the Air" (written c.1948) and was struck by how the "river" of black people Bradbury describes sounds like the march on Washington and other civil rights marches of the '60s.

OK, Bradbury's blacks were heading off to Mars to find their freedom, but the very idea of a mass movement to freedom was, in the late '40s, years ahead of its time.

quote:

Originally posted by philnic:
Just this morning I was re-reading "Way in the Middle of the Air".

It's one of my favourite stories in The Martian Chronicles.

"Did you hear about it?!"

Or NOT in The Martian Chronicles - depending on which edition you pick up!

Phil--

Thanks so much for the information. I just went and found my copy of "Dangerous Visions". (Woo, the rare 1967 Book Club edition! Am I rich yet?) You are absolutely right, that is the story-- and you're also right, over the years it became a Bradbury story in my mind, as it is so much the type of ideas I associate with him. Now I'll have to drop Pohl a note.

Thanks again for finding that for me, I bow to your superior knowledge of all things science fictiony, and am glad you are sharing it with the rest of us.

Another Bradbury story that touches on racial issues (and self-acceptance) is the story "Chrysalis" found in The Cat's Pajamas. In the introduction, Bradbury explains the story's origin at being "inrigued by the thought" that black persons can sunburn. The story also predates the civil rights movement.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Linnl,

quote:

Originally posted by philnic:
Quite right, fjp. Just this morning I was re-reading "Way in the Middle of the Air" (written c.1948) and was struck by how the "river" of black people Bradbury describes sounds like the march on Washington and other civil rights marches of the '60s.

Bradbury caught hell for that and a later story, "Walking on Air," about disabled kids in space. Some people took them to mean everyone different should be shipped off to Mars rather than accepted in society. When I read "Way in the Middle of the Air" in the '70s I thought it was no longer relevant, but years later as an adult saw it as an alternate universe history of if the Civil Rights movement hadn't happened. Fascinating when read as such.

dandelion, you've hit the nail on the head regarding "Middle of the Air". Whereas much of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES is timeless, and some of it is "quaint" in its representations of daily lives that seem old-fashioned, "Middle of the Air" just seems so at odds with our present day culture and is therefore open to misinterpretation if read without knowledge of the context in which it was written.

In the 1976 audiobook version of MC, Bradbury comments on this story, saying how it has been so totally overtaken by events. He also makes an interesting observation that in real life it was the technologies of the automobile and the highway that gave black people their escape from the south and into the cities of the north - rather than his imagined escape by rocket to Mars.

It's an observation that sounds plausible, but I don't know enough about it to know if it is true.

I haven't read Bradbury in, well, in decades, really, but "Way in the Middle of the Air," which I would have read in the '60's or '70's, is one of the stories that really stuck with me. I'm sort of sorry it's viewed as dated because I think it was striking to read then, and even more so when it was written. Really, in 1948-50, it almost seemed that the power structure in the South was so firmly entrenched that space travel seemed the only way out for blacks living there. At the time Ray's story emphasized the near hopelessness of their situation, and presented it to an audience that probably wasn't thinking much about it. I thought it was stunning.

Just thinking about this in the wake of Ray's death a few days ago. What an active, engaged mind he had.