Essays on literary works - 2024

The Philosophical Nature of Ray Bradbury's Science Fiction

Let’s just say it outright: Ray Bradbury did not write sci-fi. Or at least, not the kind you think of when you hear “sci-fi” and picture sleek chrome ships, wormholes, Elon Musk, and AIs softly whispering “I’ve learned to love” before obliterating a planet. Nope. Bradbury didn’t care about technology like a tech bro. He was haunted by it. Like, Catholic guilt but make it Martian.

This dude? He wrote philosophical ghost stories with rockets in them. And we’ve been sleeping on that.

Wait—So You’re Telling Me Fahrenheit 451 Isn’t About Censorship?

Correct. Well—yes and no. And that’s where it gets gooey and human and deliciously chaotic. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 gets passed around like a crusty PDF in every freshman English class with the moral “book burning is bad.” Which, yes, of course. But dig deeper, and it’s not really about censorship. It’s about... numbness.

It’s about being so emotionally sedated by screens, so spiritually anesthetized by algorithmic entertainment (👀hello TikTok), that you forget how to want things. Not capitalist wants, but soul wants. Inner scream wants. You forget the itch.

Bradbury called it before the iPad was even a glimmer in Steve Jobs’s turtleneck. The walls in 451? Literal surround-sound screens that talk back. The wife? So plugged in she’s emotionally ghosted her husband for an endless stream of digital nothings.

I mean—what’s more 2025 than that?

Martians, Memories, and Midlife Crises in Space

Enter The Martian Chronicles. Which honestly reads like what would happen if Wes Anderson and Bojack Horseman co-wrote a space opera on mushrooms.

It’s not about Mars. It’s about earthlings. Specifically, how humans drag their trash—emotional, spiritual, and literal—to every new place they colonize. (Sound familiar?) They go to Mars, find this ethereal, ancient civilization... and then wreck it. Strip malls on sacred ruins. Suburban grief on red dust.

Bradbury doesn’t write space as a frontier. He writes it as a mirror. Space is just a stage for humans to perform their same old heartbreaks, their compulsive need to fill silence with noise, their existential panic at facing themselves in a vacuum.

He makes Mars feel like an ex-lover’s voicemail you keep replaying, hoping to hear something new—but it’s always just silence. Echoes. Maybe that’s why the Martians disappear. Maybe they couldn’t handle the vibes.

Is Ray Bradbury a Vibe?

Yes. Yes, he is. A whole aesthetic. Like if melancholy and moral dread had a Tumblr account in 2013.

His writing is like stepping into a dream that starts soft and golden-hued and then — BAM — you realize you’re trapped in a world where everyone smiles too much and nobody remembers why. He’ll lull you into nostalgia, make you think of fireflies and lemonade and that time your grandma read to you on the porch—and then rip it apart like tissue paper.

Because that’s the thing: Bradbury’s science fiction isn’t predictive. It’s reflective. It’s your own fear, magnified. Your longing, put in a glass case. Your inability to face death, but with robot dogs.

Philosophy in the Form of Soft Horror

Bradbury’s stories hit harder the more you spiral. Like, if you’ve ever laid in bed at 2 a.m. wondering if your phone loves you back, you’re basically living in a Bradbury short story. (“The Veldt,” anyone?)

Let’s talk about The Veldt, because that’s a terrifying little nugget.

Kids build a virtual reality jungle that starts thinking for itself. Lions eat their parents. End of story.

But the real horror? Not the lions. Not even the kids. It’s the total absence of intimacy, the erosion of trust, the way the parents outsource love to a machine and then are shocked when it bites back. It’s a meditation on emotional abandonment disguised as a Twilight Zone episode. It’s Freud in Fortnite skin.

And that’s where Bradbury lives: in the space between technological terror and emotional emptiness. He’s not scared of AI taking over. He’s scared of us not caring when it does.

Bradbury Was Low-Key Anti-“Progress”

This man was not about the Jetsons life. His whole vibe was: “You’re trying to fly faster but you’ve never learned how to sit still and feel.”

Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (which is basically sci-fi’s weird cousin who wears a flower crown and reads Rilke) is a whole book about summer and death. Literally. It’s childhood joy fused with mortality. He captures that moment when you first realize time is real and it’s coming for you. And somehow, he makes it feel... beautiful?

Like, yeah, we’re all dying. But the grass is soft. And there’s lemonade. And if that isn’t philosophy dressed in a sundress and anxiety, I don’t know what is.

Why Bradbury Still Hits (And Probably Will Until We’re All Dust)

Here’s the wild part. Bradbury’s stuff should feel dated. Retro-future vibes. Jetpacks and paranoia. Analog futures. But it doesn’t. At all.

Because what he’s actually writing about? The anxiety of existing. The hunger for meaning. The terrifying quiet that comes when you log off.

In a world of Black Mirror and Her and I’m Sorry Dave I Can’t Do That, Bradbury still feels more relevant than 99% of tech panic fiction. Because he wasn’t warning us about tech becoming sentient. He was worried about us becoming numb.

Final Thought Drop (No Wrap-Up, Just Vibes)

If you want to know what kind of science fiction Ray Bradbury writes, don’t ask a lit professor. Ask your inner child. The one who was terrified of the dark for reasons they couldn’t name. The one who saw a light in the sky and whispered “maybe aliens,” not because it was logical—but because it made the night feel less empty.

Bradbury writes sci-fi for people who dream like poets and panic like philosophers.

He writes for those of us who can’t stop checking our phones but also miss the stars.

He writes for now.

And we should listen.

Before the lions come.