Beyond Eden

Chapter 13 opens with commentary on Bradbury’s 1980 Omni magazine article “Beyond Eden,” an essay commissioned to support the projected Space Shuttle program. In this essay, Bradbury defined his Space-Age Trinity—God, humanity, and the machines of interplanetary flight. The chapter goes on to document Bradbury’s April 1980 interviews with friends who had achieved prominence in the new generation of science fiction films: producers Gary Kurtz and Gene Roddenberry, director Irvin Kershner, and special effects artist John Dykstra. Bradbury never completed the article on the future of science fiction films that these interviews were intended to support, but he did articulate a maturing sense of Toynbee’s “challenge and response” as a way to focus the kind of human growth required to reach other worlds.