In the course of my tech research I found the following video of Mike Wallace interviewing Ray Bradbury in the wake of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Wallace: This is Ray Bradbury. For me, the most evocative, the most persuasive of the science fiction writers.
Is this the way that you wrote the script? I think it is. Ray Bradbury. Bradbury: Yes, and a lot of other people before me. Jules Verne and H. Wells, the great uncles and grandfathers of all of us.
When I was down in Houston a few years ago, I discovered in meeting the astronauts that they had read Jules Verne. They had read H. And in a few cases they had read some of my work, which made me feel very good at the time.
Wallace: But it is astonishing, really, because they are following a script that seems to have been written by various writers over a period of the last half century. Bradbury: Yes. Well, I look upon the function of the science fiction writer as being the romantic who starts things in motion, and the astronauts are the actors who come along and flesh it out and put bones inside the dream. Wallace: You have said that a single invention, the rocket, is redesigning mankind.
Would you elaborate on that? Bradbury: Because of space travel. Wallace: Some people suggest that the very fact that we have now gone into space and have been on the other side of the moon has proved that there is no. I believe firmly, excitingly, that we are God himself coming awake in the universe.
