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. 

 

My favorite monsters

Halloween is close at hand, a time when I trot out some of my favorite cinematic and literary horrors.

In the former category is almost every fright film made by Universal Studios in the 1930s and ’40s, black-and-white gems like Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula,” Boris Karloff’s “Frankenstein,” Lon Chaney Jr.’s “Wolf Man” and a boatload of sequels, mostly of lesser quality. They exude atmosphere — crackling bolts of lightning, cobwebbed castles, foggy marshes — and practically define the iconography and conventions of the horror genre.

On the literary side, my tastes run further afield. Many of the early works of Ray Bradbury, especially the short stories “Night Fever” and “The Jar,” eschew the creaky staircases and midnight settings of the Universal front. In the same vein (pun intended), Richard Matheson modernized many of the traditional conventions of horror in the 1950s by finding a pseudo-scientific explanation for vampirism (“I Am Legend”) and placing stories on passenger planes (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”) and highways (“Duel”). Stephen King picked up the torch — not to march on Baron Frankenstein’s castle — and shredded nerves with rabies (“Cujo”), a mutated flu virus (“The Stand”) and psychotic fans (“Misery”), to name just three.

But a short novel I read every year — both because I assign it to students and because it never fails to make me think as well as shudder — is Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” Originally published in 1898, the novel avoids most of the conventions the cinema would enshrine as standards decades later and anticipates the psychological suspense that drives modern horror.

Like Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” “The Turn of the Screw” is a frame story, beginning on Christmas Eve in an old house where revelers gather to tell ghost stories, a mostly British tradition at Yuletide that I wish would catch on here in the States. The discussion ’round the fire turns to one-upmanship, and a guest notes that ghost stories involving a child give an already frightening subject an additional layer of terror.

“If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw,” he says, “what do you say to two children?”

The story that unfolds from this observation is purportedly from the manuscript of an old governess who, as a young woman, is placed in complete control of two orphans on a rambling country estate. James never gives the governess a name, but allows her story to unspool in first-person, creating a simultaneous sense of familiarity and distance that serves the tale well.

In short order, the governess becomes convinced the children are being haunted by ghosts of their former governess and valet, Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, who were having an affair in the months before their deaths.

For years after the novella’s publication, it was accepted as a quintessential ghost story. But critics soon began digging beneath the surface, questioning the mental state of the children’s second governess, who claims to have saved the two from demonic possession by these spirits. Do the ghosts exist, or are they figments of her imagination?

In a parallel interpretation, critics have found much in James’s portrait to support a reading of catastrophic class differences, as the affair between the first governess and the valet required the crossing of several social strata. Further readings have looked at the novella as a prototypical feminist text, a study in sexual repression and possible pedophilia involving multiple characters, living and dead.

While some of these analyses range far afield, they can all be supported, more or less, by the ambiguous — and, to my mind, perfect — narrative techniques that James employs, which allow multiple readings without decisively refuting any.

And the final pages, when little Miles and the governess are alone in the house, fending off what she believes to be the Quint’s final attempt to corrupt the boy’s soul, are among the creepiest in literature. James’s ending, soberingly final, allows readers to see the governess as either hero or villain.

For his part, James stolidly maintained that he had written a traditional ghost story, and that alternate readings should be viewed with suspicion. But writers are notoriously reticent to discuss what their work “really means,” and even when they make such pronouncements, their opinions should be taken with a degree of skepticism. Once a work is published, its interpretation belongs no longer to the writer, but to the audience.

And “The Turn of the Screw” is a many-layered delight, one that thumbs its nose at the conventions ascribed to “traditional” horror stories (including my beloved Universal movies), becoming all the more frightening because its monster, if one even exists, lives not in the attic or the basement, but in the human heart.


If this column inspires you to read “The Turn of the Screw,” I’d love to hear your interpretation. Email me at chris.schillig@yahoo.com or tweet me @cschillig on Twitter.

This was originally published in October, 2015, but I'd still welcome comments today. 

Where are all the kids?

Originally published in 2014.

Dusk on a residential street. Lightning bugs pulse first here, then there. A lawn mower whirrs far in the distance as somebody races darkness, hoping to find not too many missed lines the next morning. Otherwise, quiet. Too quiet.

Where are all the kids?

It’s something I ask my wife more and more frequently on our evening walks. There are no kids. No kids catching lightning bugs. No kids playing hopscotch. No kids riding bicycles up and down driveways or wrestling in yards or turning cartwheels or.

Or anything.

I feel more and more like a character in a Ray Bradbury story, strolling down some woebegone street in a slice of small-town America that has been scooped up in its entirety and re-planted on Mars. Everything perfectly replicated — houses, garages, shrubs, roads and stop lights.

Everything but kids.

I know this city has children. I see buses filled with them on weekday afternoons during the school year. I see their photos in the paper and on friends’ Facebook pages. I see them in malls and restaurants.

I just don’t see them outside. Not at dusk, not anytime.

When I mention this to other people, I always get the same answer. “Oh, when I was a kid, Mom pushed me out the door in the morning and only let me back in for lunch and dinner and when the streetlights came on. We didn’t sit in front of the TV all day or play video games or text on phones like kids these days.”

This is the answer no matter the age of the respondent, including people who were just kids themselves a few years ago, when older people said the same thing about their generation.

In my own youth, my sister and I played outside a lot, but I’m not fooling myself — I was never an outdoorsy-type. The big difference between summer and winter was that I could read a book on the porch in the summer instead of on the couch in the winter.

Still, we went outside. We set up Slip N’ Slides and got sunburned and played basketball and blew bubbles and built makeshift ramps for our bikes and just ran around.

Maybe parents don’t think it’s safe for kids to do that nowadays. Too many stories about too many creeps. Maybe in a lot of single-parent or two-income homes, kids have to come in early, even in the summer, and go to bed to get up before dawn the next day to be carted off to childcare. Maybe spontaneous play really has been replaced by more scripted scenarios — organized sports, playdates at the movies or crawling through plastic, yellow tubes that spill out into boxes of rubber balls at fast-food franchises.*

Or maybe kids really are content to stay indoors, even on beautiful early summer evenings, when dusk hangs in the air like a gauze curtain, and watch TV and play video games.

One house on our walking route, however, is like an oasis to my soul. There, kids are doing all the things that I expect to see kids do on a beautiful summer night. They’re skipping, yelling, playing catch, and doodling with chalk. They look dirty — the glorious kind of dirty that comes from lots of exercise and from finding worms in the drive after a hard rain, the wonderful kind of dirty that parents have to scrub off in the bathtub once the sun goes down.

But in the surrounding yards, nothing. Silence. The flickering of TV screens through picture windows, and uncaptured lightning bugs holding sway over all.

Where are all the kids?

*In 2022, I would add extreme heat to the list of reasons why children might not be outside as much.