SubscribeCouteau: In researching for this interview, I’ve noticed that commentators have often made note of your ambiguous, or at least changing, relationship with technology. The obligatory remark is that you chose to downplay its role in favor of literary stylistic innovations while everyone else was exploring it. And then, when other writers were catching up with your own stylistic concerns, you gained a certain faith in technology and even, for the first time, flew in an airplane, after many years of avoiding them. Is this an oversimplification, and do you care to comment on your current feelings regarding high-tech?
Bradbury: Well, you know, when you’re twenty, it’s easy to be negative. And we just came out of, we were going through World War II and coming out of it. And so, it was a negative time. And then the atom bomb came along, and I got married in those periods: 1946, ‘47, I was courting my wife. And there was that day which you didn’t experience because you weren’t born. But there was the time, in the middle of the summer of ‘46 or ‘47, when they were going to explode the first super-nuclear warhead, out in the islands. But the scientists weren’t quite sure whether the earth wouldn’t catch on fire. What if the earth caught on fire and the whole thing went up? Well, the night before, you know, I think everyone in the world thought about it, everyone that could hear about it on radio, because there was no TV in those days and [it was] primitive: a few thousand sets in the United States. So, you become a philosopher that night, don’t you? What if this is the last night of the world? So, it didn’t happen, thank God. But nevertheless, it was a negative time, and out of that I wrote a lot of things that went into the Martian Chronicles. Including “There Will Come Soft Rains”: the house that lives on, after the people, and talks to itself. So, it’s all part of a time, and my being very young, in my twenties.
posted by youngergirl44 at 7:47 PM on October 12, 2006