Bradbury on Space

This chapter discusses Ray Bradbury's writings on space. Throughout his career, Bradbury expressed his sense of writing in the Space Age, a time which he felt was characterized by the visual sublime, and from his earliest writings space was an important concern. For Bradbury, space was the big subject, constantly drawing him to explore its potential in his fiction, essays, films, and other projects. He not only saw flight into space as the ultimate physical and speculative act. He figured it as a willed realization of an evolutionary destiny somehow independent of physical form. As early as 1953, he was speculating “why build rockets at all?”; space retained a speculative and spiritual fascination for Bradbury throughout his career.