The Martian Chronicles was published the next year, in the late spring of 1950.
Traveling east that spring, I did not know what I had done. Between trains in Chicago, I walked to the Art Institute to have lunch with a friend. I saw a crowd at the top of the Institute stairs and thought they were tourists. But as I started walking up, the crowd came down and surrounded me. They were not art lovers, but readers who had gotten early copies of The Martian Chronicles and had come to tell me just exactly what I had all-toounkowningly done. That noon encounter changed my life forever. Nothing was the same after that.
The list of What Ifs could go on forever. What if I hadn't met Maggie, who took a vow of poverty to marry me? What if Don Congdon had never written to become and remain my agent for forty-three years, starting in the same week that I married Marguerite?
And what if, soon after the publication of the Chronicles, I had missed being in a small Santa Monica bookshop when Christopher Isherwood stopped by.
Quickly, I signed and handed over a copy of my novel.
With an expression of regret and alarm, Isherwood accepted and fled.
Three days later, he telephoned.
"Do you know what you've done?" he said.
"What?" I said.
"You've written a fine book," he said. "I've just become the lead book reviewer for Tomorrow magazine, and yours will be the first book that I review."
A few months later, Isherwood called to say that the celebrated English philosopher Gerald Heard wished to come meet me.
"He can't!" I cried.
"Why not?"
"Because," I protested, "we have no furniture in our new house!"
"Gerald Heard will sit on your floor," said Isherwood.
Heard arrived and perched on our one and only chair.
Isherwood, Maggie and I sat on the floor.
Some weeks later, Heard and Aldous Huxley invited me to tea, where both leaned forward, one echoing the other, and asked:
"Do you know what you are?"
"What?"
"A poet," they said.
"My god," I said. "Am I?"
So we end as we began, with one friend seeing me off and another taking me in from a journey. What if Norman Corwin had not sent me or if Walter I. Bradbury had not received me?
Mars might never have gained an atmosphere, and its people would never have been born to live in golden masks, and its cities, unbuilt, would have stayed lost in the unquarried hills. Much thanks to them then for that journey to Manhattan, which turned out to be a forty-year round trip to another world.
July 6, 1990
ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
For some ten years now, I have been writing a long narrative poem about a small boy in the near future who runs into an audio-animatronic museum, veers away from the right portico marked Rome, passes a door marked Alexandria, and enters across a sill where a sign lettered Greece points in across a meadow.
The boy runs over the artificial grass and comes upon Plato, Socrates and perhaps Euripides seated at high noon under an olive tree sipping wine and eating bread and honey and speaking truths.
The boy hesitates and then addresses Plato:
"How goes it with the Republic?"
"Sit down, boy," says Plato, "and I'll tell you."
The boy sits. Plato tells. Socrates steps in from time to time. Euripides does a scene from one of his plays.
Along the way, the boy might well ask a question which hovered in all of our minds the past few decades:
"How come the United States, the country of Ideas on the March, for so long neglected fantasy and science fiction? Why is it that only during the past thirty years attention is being paid?"
Another question from the boy might well be:
"Who is responsible for the change?
"Who has taught the teachers and the librarians to pull up their socks, sit straight, and take notice?
"Simultaneously, which group in our country has backed off from abstraction and moved art back in the direction of pure illustration?"
Since I am neither dead nor a robot, and Plato-as-audioanimatronic lecturer might not be programmed to respond, let me answer as best I can.
The answer is: the students. The young people. The children.
They have led the revolution in reading and painting.
For the first time in the history of art and teaching, the children have become the teachers. Before our time, knowledge came down from the top of the pyramid to the broad base where the students survived as best they could. The gods spoke and the children listened.
But, lo! gravity reverses itself. The massive pyramid turns like a melting iceberg, until the boys and girls are on top. The base of the pyramid now teaches.
How did it happen? After all, back in the twenties and thirties, there were no science-fiction books in the curricula of schools anywhere. There were few in the libraries. Only once or twice a year did a responsible publisher dare to publish one or two books which could be designated as speculative fiction.
If you went into the average library as you motored across America in 1932, 1945, or 1953 you would have found:
No Edgar Rice Burroughs.
No L. Frank Baum and no Oz.
In 1958 or 1962 you would have found no Asimov, no Heinlein, no Van Vogt, and, er, no Bradbury.
Here and there, perhaps one book or two by the above. For the rest: a desert.
What were the reasons for this?
Among librarians and teachers there was then, and there still somewhat dimly persists, an idea, a notion, a concept that only Fact should be eaten with your Wheaties. Fantasy? That's for the Fire Birds. Fantasy, even when it takes science-fictional forms, which it often does, is dangerous. It is escapist. It is daydreaming. It has nothing to do with the world and the world's problems.
So said the snobs who did not know themselves as snobs.
So the shelves lay empty, the books untouched in publishers' bins, the subject untaught.
Comes the Evolution. The survival of that species called Child. The children, dying of starvation, hungry for ideas which lay all about in this fabulous land, locked into machines and architecture, struck out on their own. What did they do?
They walked into classrooms in Waukesha and Peoria and Neepawa and Cheyenne and Moose Jaw and Redwood City and placed a gentle bomb on teacher's desk. Instead of an apple it was Asimov.
"What's that?" the teacher asked, suspiciously.
"Try it. It's good for you," said the students.
"No thanks."
"Try it," said the students. "Read the first page. If you don't like it, stop." And the clever students turned and went away.
The teachers (and the librarians, later) put off reading, kept the book around the house for a few weeks and then, late one night, tried the first paragraph.
And the bomb exploded.
They not only read the first but the second paragraph, the second and third pages, the fourth and fifth chapters.
"My God!" they cried, almost in unison, "these damned books are about something!"
"Good Lord!" they cried, reading a second book, "there are Ideas here!"
"Holy Smoke!" they babbled, on their way through Clarke, heading into Heinlein, emerging from Sturgeon, "these books are-ugly word-relevant!"
"Yes!" shouted the chorus of kids starving in the yard. "Oh, my, yes!"
And the teachers began to teach, and discovered an amazing thing: