When science fiction seemed almost exclusively a literature of technophiles, Bradbury became a lone symbol of the dangers of technology, even to the point of refusing to drive an automobile or fly in an airplane. But when science fiction came increasingly to adopt an ambivalent attitude toward unchecked technological progress, Bradbury became an international spokesman for the virtues of spaceflight and technological achievement. Clearly Bradbury cannot be accused of following trends. He is his own most important referent, and despite his widely avowed love of earlier writers from Poe to Thomas Wolfe to Hemingway, it is in Bradbury's own midwestern background that one finds the most important sources for his fiction.
Bradbury is perhaps the most autobiographical of science-fiction writers, and this, too, seems anomalous: how, after all, can one construct meaningful future worlds from so much reference to the past and so little to the present? One answer, of course, is that Bradbury's science fiction is, in fact, seldom extrapolative, for the values Bradbury seeks to express are the values he associates with his own past. Bradbury was born and spent most of his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, a small community north of Chicago, which was to become the "Green Town" of many later stories.
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