Bradbury's 'Zero Hour'

Above: My beat-to-shit copy of The Illustrated Man, purchased at a garage sale sometime in the 1980s. 

Readers who don’t like science fiction often complain the genre is unrelatable. Robots, ray guns, little green guys in spaceships—what does any of it have to do with the so-called real world? It’s a fair question, but a misguided one. Like horror, another unappreciated genre, science fiction deals in metaphor, dressing up contemporary issues until they are almost unrecognizable, especially if the reader is blinded by the strangeness of it all. But beneath the odd names, alien landscapes, and cryptic languages are bedrock truths that speak to the issues of each writer’s time—and that sometimes speak to future times in ways the author may have never imagined.

Ray Bradbury is a case in point. Known today primarily for Fahrenheit 451, a novel about a dystopian society where firefighters burn books in a totalitarian government, Bradbury began his career as a short-story writer, grinding out pieces for popular men’s magazines of the 1940s and 1950s. One such story, “Zero Hour,” published in 1947 in Planet Stories and collected in 1951 in The Illustrated Man, forecasts many of today’s concerns, even if the author himself couldn’t have known it at the time.

“Zero Hour” is the story of a future society—the audience knows this because “rockets hovered like darning needles in the blue sky” and “arm in arm, men all over earth were a united front” (Bradbury, 1951, p. 170)— where children are the entry point for an invasion from another world. The story is told from the perspective of the Morris family, whose youngest member, Mink, and her neighborhood playmates borrow innocuous tools from kitchens and garages at the behest of a mysterious invisible friend. This friend, Drill, whispers plans from beneath rose bushes because no adult would think to look for him there.

As the story progresses, Mrs. Morris realizes that similar scenarios are playing out across the country, with multiple children listening to their own versions of Drill, all of them playing a game called “Invasion,” set to culminate at 5 p.m. Then, the seemingly random collection of tools and kitchen implements, along with byzantine math formulae, is used to open a gateway from the fearsome invaders’ dimension into our own. The story ends with Mink’s parents cowering in fear in the attic. It is strongly suggested that Mink and all the other Earth children are willing to sacrifice their parents’ lives for their new friend, Drill.

Bradbury’s story predates the expression “generation gap” by at least twelve years, yet the author was likely aware that “kids these days” were acting in ways that alarmed their parents. At the time of the story’s writing, the very concept of teenagers as society knows them today was a relatively new phenomenon, created by marketers who realized the ’tween-12-and-20 set was an under-exploited consumer demographic. So, for a writer looking for a scary sci-fi premise, why not tap into the primal fear that children could and were being manipulated to dress differently, talk differently, and behave differently from their parents?

Bradbury’s story also anticipates modern social media, which makes the fears in the story more acute for today’s readers than for those in the author’s own time. The mechanism by which Drill and his invading buddies pierce the sanctity and security of the home reads a lot like today’s internet. When Mrs. Morris talks to her friend, Helen, via “audio visor,” they realize their kids are playing the same Invasion game, despite one family living in New York and the other in New Jersey. They speculate that Drill “must be a new password” and talk about how the game is “sweeping the country” (Bradbury, 1951, p. 174). Still, they laugh off any serious implications.

Viewing “Zero Hour” through a twenty-first-century lens, it’s easy to see Drill as a social media influencer akin to Mr. Beast or Logan Paul, grooming children with messages that run afoul of their parents’ teaching. Like Mrs. Morris, today’s parents may sometimes shrug their shoulders over the ubiquity of TikTok and Snapchat in their children’s lives, believing they can’t keep their children away from these platforms even if they tried. Drill is an invisible force in the lives of Mink and her friends, just as parents often can’t see the scrolling TikTok screens or hear the messages their children are ingesting, over and over, as algorithms lead them down rabbit holes to new, exciting, and often spurious information.

And, like Drill, TikTok influencers—and the teen’s own peers—can lead them to actions that are antisocial, dangerous, or even criminal. Readers may remember the various TikTok challenges of the past school year, where teens were enticed to vandalize restrooms and punch teachers, all while filming their antics for later uploading. In “Zero Hour,” Drill cajoled kids to essentially become Fifth Columnists, traitors to their own people. TikTok hasn’t gone that far—yet.

Noted fantasy writer Neil Gaiman once observed, “Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future” (Gaiman, 1996, p. vii). This is evidenced by some of Bradbury’s naming conventions in “Zero Hour,” comical by today’s standards: the aforementioned “audio visor,” “electro-duster” magnets, and “beetle cars,” which appear to be self-driving electric vehicles. But while Bradbury’s names may be less than gripping, he was eerily accurate when we compare those concepts to today’s Zoom and Facetime, Roombas that clean while homeowners are away, and all-electric and hybrid cars.

More telling, however, are the interpersonal dynamics and societal fears that Bradbury cloaks in the garb of an alien invasion, that hoariest of science fiction plots. Mr. and Mrs. Miller represent all parents who fear their children are growing up to be far different than they were at the same age, Mink and her friends are all kids who resent adult authority and await the day when they can rule the world, and Drill is every new technology that threatens to upend the social order.

Unrelatable? Science fiction is just the opposite. It spices up the truth to make it more palatable, and creates a mirror to reflect the audience’s and author’s own loves and hates and prejudices. It’s about the future, yes, but it’s also about the present. And sometimes, if it was written long enough ago, it’s about today in ways even the authors themselves, with all their imaginative faculties, could never have dreamed.

References

Bradbury, R. (1951). Zero hour. In The illustrated man (pp. 169-177). 

Bantam.

 Gaiman, N. (1996). Of time, and Gully Foyle. In Bester, A. The stars

 my destination. Vintage.

I wrote the above essay earlier this fall as an example of an analysis paper for a composition class I teach. Citations are in APA format, which specifies sentence case instead of title case for book and article titles on the References page.