Ray Bradbury Speaks Out

As one of the world’s leading science fiction writers, Ray Bradbury has explored the boundaries of human imagination, the future, and the cosmos for more than six decades. Most famous for his landmark titles such as “The Martian Chronicles” and “Fahrenheit 451,” he is also a widely successful playwright, poet, and screenwriter – including series episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Twilight Zone.” Bradbury’s writing about space travel to the Moon stirred skeptics....until the Apollo 11 astronauts set foot on the Moon in 1969. In a tribute, the Apollo 15 astronauts named the Dandelion Crater after a Bradbury novel. In conversing with Bradbury about the future, Green Car Journal learns what he envisions for society, transportation, and the motor vehicle of tomorrow.

Green Car Journal: What is it about society that may explain why some people embrace future possibilities introduced in science fiction as plausible, while others remain skeptical until they actually see humanity’s breakthroughs?

Ray Bradbury: “Well, science fiction is very helpful, but it doesn’t sink in with the average person. It never has and I don’t suppose it ever will.”

GCJ: Yet humanity has come up with many inventions and innovations throughout history. Do you see a tendency for our modern culture to resist new ideas?

RB: “At no time in history has there been a population open to new ideas. The future just happens to them, and then they react to it. Unusual circumstances made for an acceptance of space travel. The Russians made the first effort and circled the Earth, so President Eisenhower created NASA. He doesn’t get any credit for it because he was in the wrong political party…and then Kennedy followed later. But the population was not ready to go to the Moon. There was no real preparation; there was no real acceptance by the public. It was a political, Cold-War decision, thank God.”

GCJ: Then what do you see helping drive humanity toward new ideas and imaginative new approaches to today’s challenges?

RB: “We’re going to be forced into new solutions just as we were forced into space. So during the next five or six or seven years, we’re going to be forced to look at the automobile and freeways because they’re not working. The traffic is going to freeze, and only when it’s frozen will people decide to change their habits.”

GCJ: How might our society create a more
welcoming attitude toward original ideas and imaginative new solutions?

RB: The answer to that is…I don’t know how you push the boundaries. We’re having trouble right now with our educational system, where we’re not pushing any boundaries. We have to redo our total education system to help young people and their imaginations. The President is saying we’ve got to have an educational system that by the third grade people know how to learn to read and write, but that’s too late. It’s got to happen when children are eager to learn – that’s Kindergarten, first grade – so that by the time they arrive at the second grade they are reading and absorbing. The ability to increase the imagination of our children is destroyed because you can’t increase the boundaries of imagination if the children don’t know how to read and write. Your basic problem has to be solved first.”

GCJ: Let’s explore how you envision transportation in the coming years. After more than a century of reliance on fossil fuel, what form of transportation and propulsion captures your imagination for what’s ahead in 2015, 2025, and beyond?

RB: “Well, it’s obvious the automobile is not solving the problem and the freeway is not solving the problem. So, I make the bigger leap of saying we need to provide other means of transportation, which means the monorail that is above traffic. And until we do that, people are going to be increasingly angered by the limitations of the automobile and its inability to function. I’ve read of the idea of monorails north and south over Los Angeles, for instance, and monorails running east and west so that people have an alternative to the bus system.”

GCJ: So specifically, are you talking about one monorail going each direction, or a grid of multiple monorails?

RB: “Right, not one monorail system going north and south, but ten monorail systems going north, south, east, and west. We’re talking about eliminating cars here. Cars don’t work in the city. You’ve got to eliminate the cars. The monorail will eliminate the car. Fewer cars will mean that the freeways begin to unclog.”

GCJ: Europe has their subway, London has the Tube, and Paris has the Metro – and even with these successful systems, these cities still have volumes of cars.

RB: “Yeah, but not that many, thank God. I predict that 100 years from now the day will come when the car will just disappear.”

GCJ: While you’re envisioning that you can take the monorail to commute around the city, there are still going to be people who want to drive off to the Grand Canyon or up to Montana.

RB: “Any kind of vehicle can do that. It’s the car and the city environment that doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter whether you have hydrogen cars or not. There has got to be other means of transportation. The Japanese can teach us because they have the high-speed bullet train between cities in Japan, and we should have developed a similar high-speed train system to San Francisco (from Los Angeles) years ago.”

GCJ: So when it comes to cars, would you say that we’ve been too content with the status quo?

RB: “Yes we have. I had lunch with the head of the Automobile Association 30 years ago and he looked me right in the face and he said, ‘I want things just the way they are right now, I don’t want anything to change. I love the millions of cars, I love the millions of members of the Automobile Association, so I’m not going to do anything to change it.’ I looked at him and I said, ‘You don’t want to change things because things go your way and continue to go your way for the next 40 or 50 years. I can’t look at you as an agent of change because you don’t want any change.’ And the average man doesn’t want any change.”

GCJ: Let’s say it’s 2030 and we’ve got the monorails in place. But people are still inclined to drive these individual vehicles.

RB: “No, they won’t do that. If they have a chance to leave their houses and go to the monorail and go where they want to go, they’ll leave the car behind.”

GCJ: Okay. But what about places like China, India, and other areas of the world where the automobile is just being introduced to the masses?

RB: “Well, they’re going to wind up with the same damned problems.”

GCJ: Once they’ve all arrived at the point where they have had to live with the traffic congestion and threatened environment? Let’s go forward to 2050 A.D. Why has humanity been slow to embrace respecting the planet?

RB: “Because they have no imagination and they selfishly want a car all to themselves. The average guy wants to own a car all to himself.”

GCJ: And that’s a problem?

RB: “Women don’t think the same way. But the average man is very selfish and he wants to have a car all to himself.”

GCJ: How are women different?

RB: “Because they’re more sensible. In a really smart family, the woman does the driving. If a man is smart, he says to his wife, ‘You drive because I’m not a good driver.’ Women are better drivers than men, and I know a lot of families, my own included, where my wife handled the driving. I never learned to drive myself, but my wife was the driver for the entire family.”

GCJ: What do you believe makes women better suited for driving?

RB: “They don’t compete, they’re not males. So the good thing about women is that they’re women. They’re not competitive.”

GCJ: So in your view, women may be better suited to make the decisions that look out for the planet tomorrow?

RB: “I think they should. They’re smarter than we are.”

GCJ: So women of the world should unite and save the planet?

RB: “You’re damned right, yes.”