The Romance of Places: An Interview with Ray Bradbury,.

        Ray Bradbury is one of the most well-known figures in science-fiction today. His books include The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451 -- the latter filmed by Truffaut in 1966. He is the winner of numerous awards for his books and screenplays, and was Idea Consultant for the United States Pavilion at the 1964 World's Falr. He has also worked as a consultant on city engineering and rapid transit.

        A frequent visitor to Parts, especially to the restaurants and bookshops in the Latin Quarter, Bradbury claims to have fallen in love with it all 37 years ago when he first arrived here to work with John Huston on the screenplay of Moby Dick. Seated sipping coffee in the lobby of the Hotel Normandy, near the Palais-Royal, Bradbury spoke of hls fascination with the city, along with other passions such as city planning, hts method of writing, and the future of science fiction.

        Couteau: Do you have any bort of daily ritual which serves as a preparation to writing, or do you just sit down at a certain time and begin?

        Bradbury: Well the ritual is waking up, number one, and then lying in bed and listening to my voices. So, over a period of years...I call it my morning theater; it's inside my head, and my characters talk to one another, and when it reaches a certain pitch of excitement I jump out of bed and I run and trap them before they are gone. So I never have to worry about a routine; they're always in there talking.

        Couteau: How long do you write?

        Bradbury: Oh, a couple of hours. You can do three or four thousand words and that's more than enough for one day.

        Couteau: How about the building of a story; do your characters and plots always arise spontaneously, or do they ever originate in carefully planned constructs?

        Bradbury: No, any carefully planned thing destroys the creativity. You can't think your way through a story, you have to live it. So you don't build a story, you allow it to explode.

        Couteau: Do you, for instance, use people and places out of the past, out of your own life?

        Bradbury: Rarely. More recently, yes, in my two murder mysteries, Death Is a Lonely Business and the sequel, which just came out, A Graveyard for Lunatics. Events in my past life are in there, some people that I knew. But most of my stories are ideas in action. In other words, I get a concept, and I let it run away. I find a character to act-out the idea. And then the story takes care of itself.

        Couteau: Have you ever used characters or settings first observed in dream states?

        Bradbury: No, dreams don't work. I don't know anyone who ever wrote anything based on dreams constantly. You may get inspiration once every ten years. But dreams are supposed to function to cure you of some problem that you have, so you leave those alone.

        Couteau: You've been received by world leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev. When the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon they paid you homage by naming the Dandelion Crater in honor of your novel Dandelion Wine. How have these experiences affected your writing?

        Bradbury: Not at all. You just don't think about it; you shouldn't. The most dangerous thing you can do is to know who you are. See, Norman Mailers's problem is he thinks he's Norman Mailer. And Gore Vidal's problem is he thinks he's Gore Vldal. I don't think I'm Ray Bradbury. You see, there's a big difference. Just do your work everyday, don't go around thinking, "Geez, wow!" The hell with that. The work is important, the work is fun and there's no time: if you get into your work everyday, tbere's no time to think who you are.

        Couteau: I'm curious about your vision of the future. I'm thinking of a story now: "The Pedestrian," in which you express a rather paranoid vision of the future. What is your vision of the future, especially the political future, today?

        Bradbury: It's very optimistic. Look what's happened in the last eight months. Because America stood firm, and just stayed quietly there, finally the communists gave up. They were an evil empire; Reagan was absolutely right.

        Couteau: How will the opening of the East Bloc affect science-fiction writing?

        Bradbury: I don't think it will affect it much. Because we've always talked about freedom, we've always talked about totalitarian governments. After all, Fahrenheit 451 is all about Russia, and all about China, isn't it? And all about the totalitarians everywhere, either left or right, doesn't matter where they are, they're book burners, all of them. And so Fahrenheit 451 will continue to be a read book, by people all over the world, 'cause there are still totalitarian governments.

        Couteau: This past August you celebrated your 70th birthday. After devoting your life to science-fiction, have you arrived at any conclusion concerning the function of science-fiction, either in our individual lives, or in the life of the social collective?

        Bradbury: Well, it's the most important fiction ever invented. But people haven't given it credit. Because it has to do with the history of ideas. Of dreaming an idea, birthing an idea, blueprinting an idea, making it into a fact. And then moving on to the next idea.
        The history of science-fiction started in caves, 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the caves were problems to be solved. It's problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting to solve problems. You look on the walls of the caves, they had pictures of antelopes, gazelles, and mammoths. The problem was how do you kill them? That's a science-fiction problem. You have to think of it first before you can settle it. Then, you find ways of inventing knives, and then spears. A spear is an extension of a man's arm, and his imagination. And when you throw it, you're throwing your will, and you're killing the animal. So that's science-fiction dreaming becoming primitive fact.

        Couteau: What are some of the directions that science-fiction writing will explore in the oncoming decades?

        Bradbury: Hopefully, a lot of our thinking and writing in the next twenty or thirty years will be to get up back into space again, because we've allowed the Challenger to destroy our will power. See, what happened in the twenty-four hours following the explosion was, that film was on the air a hundred times. You see a thing often enough, you begin to disbelieve in the future. Television is very dangerous. Because it repeats and repeats and repeats our disasters instead of our triumphs.

        Couteau: Earlier you mentioned something about the need to be uplifted and you used the word 'soul'. Is this the long-term function of science-fiction, or your vision of what we need in the future? Are you talking about a unifying spiritual vision?

        Bradbury: Yeah, I try to write about it. My stories are warnings, they're not predictions. If they were predictions I wouldn't do them. Because then I'd be part of the doom-ridden psychology. Every time I name the problem, I try to give the solution.
        So not only have I talked about the future and the past, but I've been part of creating three malls, in California: the Glendale Galleria; the Horton Plaza, in San Diego; and the Westside Pavilion, at Westwood Boulevard. In other words, the failure of cities is the failure of chambers of commerce and the failure of the mayors and the city councils who don't understand what cities are. They're in for political power, they're not in to recreate the city, and make it better for everyone. So my dream has been, if they won't do it, some sort of corporate effort has to do it.
        And Disney is my hero. He created a model. Disneyland, Disney World, EPCOT; they're social, they're not cities, but they give you examples of ways of living. Of lots of trees, lots of flowers. Lots of fountains and ponds, lots of places to sit, lots of places to eat, so that you can get out of the house again. In a lot of cities people can't get out of the house, they're not safe. So a mall is an environment which is safe, and beautiful -- it can be -- and creative, and filled with examples of ways of living like you find in the Latin Quarter here, over by Notre-Dame. So l'm trying to introduce that into Amerioan culture, to give people a chance to walk with their families, and to be happy, instead of being afraid, walking through the streets of New York.

        Couteau: When did you first become intrigued with cities? Was it an interest at all associated with science-fiction?

        Bradbury: When I was eight years old and saw the covers of science-fiction magazines. They're all architectural. We love science-fiction because it's architectural. All of the big science-fiction films of the last twenty years are architectural. 2001, when you see the rocket ship flying through the air, it's a city it's a big city up there. And in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when the mother ship descends, it's not a ship, it's a city. It's so beautiful. And when the aliens come out of the ship, you want to go back in with them; and go away forever. And when one of the characters does, your heart goes with him.
        So, we love architecture; we love the romances of places. And identifiable objects in Paris, London, Rome -- if you took the Eiffel Tower out of Paris and the Arc-de-Triomphe, half the city would be gone, because of the objects, the romance of objects. I've written articles which have influenced the building of these malls at home. I wrote an article called "The Aesthetics of Lostness." We travel for romance, we travel for architecture...
        Malls are a temporary answer. The mall is a city away from the city, because the city doesn't know what it's doing. Corporations know what to do. Because they have to know; they have to make a profit. Profit is a great motive. But cities don't have to make a profit. Governments don't have to make a profit, do they? The experiment doesn't work, they say, "Oh, what the hell let's tax people." But corporations, you've got to make sure you know what you're doing, because otherwise you're out of business.

        Couteau: l've noticed that commentators have often noted your ambiguous, or at least changing relationship, with technology. Earlier in your life you chose to down-play its role, but later on you gained a certain faith in technology and even, for the first time, flew in an airplane. 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. We were coming out of World War II, and so, it was a negative time. And then the atom bomb came along. 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, and the whole thing went up? WeIl, the night before...I think everyone in the world thought about it. 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.
        Then, as time progressed, and I learned more about those positive inventions that give us freedoms -- the Xerox machine is the freedom to have your own printing press! And now we have the Fax machine, which is another printing press. Not only can you send things, but you can print things in your own house. So the ability to acquire knowledge and dispense it is a thousand-fold.

        Couteau: Was your faith in government shaken as well, at that time?

        Bradbury: I think that politically the world if mad; always has been, probably always will be.

        Couteau: Do your future plans involve a political role of some type?

        Bradbury: No, no; there's no power there, and you become one of those dummies. If you're inside the political sphere you can't do anything. You're not allowed to speak up. The good things in our country are coming from the outside, corporate effort. EPCOT is a permanent world's fair, which I always wanted to have when I was twelve. 'Cause I saw the Chicago World's Fair, in 1933, and discovered they were going to tear it down in two years. Why tear down something so beautiful, that is a centrifuge for the young, to lure people into life, so that when they come out of a museum, or a world's fair, they want to live forever? That happened to me, both the fiction that I read, and the world's fairs that I saw. And then, finally, I was invited to create the interior of the United States Pavilion at the New York World's Fair in 1964. Can you imagine how excited I was? 'Cause I'm changing lives, and that's the thing. If you can build a good museum, if you can make a good film, if you can build a good world's fair, if you can build a good mall, you're changing the future. You're influencing people, so that they'll get up in the morning and say, "Hey, it's worthwhile going to work." That's my function, and it should be the function of every science-fiction writer around. To offer hope. To name the problem, and then offer the solution. And I do, all the time.