Kaleidoscope
by Ray Bradbury
Commentary on a Great Mid-20th Century Science Fiction Short Story
Basic Information:
First published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1949
Collected in a number of anthologies, including The Stories of Ray Bradbuy; Omnibus of Science Fiction; Great Science Fiction of the 20th Century; & The Illustrated Man.
Sci-fi theme: Space travel (subcategories: solar system space travel; space disaster)
Opening paragraph:
The first concussion cut the ship up the side like a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on like a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.
Thoughts:
As always, please read the story first, as there are many spoilers.
Bradbury has a tendency to write in a deceptively simple way, so when he does drop in a sentence that doesn't just describe something in a straightforward way, pay attention. This story packs quite a few of those into the first page.
The juxtaposition of "childhood" and "the long autumn," a time of year associated with old age - as in "the autumn of our lives" - is arresting. The crew does not seem to be made of old men. Even though we do not know their ages, we might guess them to be ranging from fairly young men in their 20s (perhaps Stimson) through the Captain, who may be in his 50s. Bradbury withholds that information, however, so we can only guess. In fact, the narrator is largely limited to describing the falling of the crew, and is otherwise consigned to the background. Why did the ship explode? What was the purpose of the mission? What about these human colonies on Mars and Venus and Jupiter which are implied by Lespere's story? What year is it? We're simply not told.
This sentence raises other questions. How do (or how did) pebbles fall in "the long autumns of childhood?" I assume it is the falling men who are silver, dressed in their silver space suits (but Bradbury does not say they are silver), and that their paths describe a "thin" line in the enormity of space. This is one of those speed-bump Bradbury sentences that should slow the reader way down.
As noted, I see the narrator being the voice of the laws of motion and gravity, the randomness of the various directions the crew goes in:
Again, Bradbury alludes to childhood (jacks being a childhood toy), but now he also brings in chance. (While it would probably be more scientifically correct to have the crew all headed in the same direction - continuing with the momentum the ship - Bradbury needs their trajectories to be spread out, and who's to say the nature of the "concussion" could not have produced this effect? We know nothing of how the ship was cut "up the side.") The "jacks" simile points towards the randomness of the "throw" that cast them from the exploding ship, and as with thrown jacks, the laws of motion wholly dictate what happens afterwards. The universe is impersonal, and the narrator is as well.
Between the first paragraph and the two sentences above, Bradbury compares the sounds of their voices calling out to each other to "lost children on a cold night." This is actually the first sentence comparing the men to children. This is a change from the initial simile, where they are "wriggling silverfish" "scattered into a dark sea." The shift, from comparing the men to fish to comparing them to children, occurs immediately after the first spoken line ("Barkley, Barkley, where are you?"). In other words, the visual image of paragraph one is revised as soon as we get sound. (I always imagine the first paragraph as soundless, as would be appropriate in the vacuum of space; it recalls the soundless hatch-blowing scene in 2001: A Space Odessey.)
The introduction of a voice means these scattered jacks have to be seen as humans, and so they can no longer be compared to fish. The central problem they are facing is that they do not belong here, floating free in space. Silverfish do belong in the sea and will survive there, so once the "fish" speak, the simile has to be revised. Water references will persist, however.
As if to confirm that shift, Bradbury then gives us, "And now instead of men there were only voices." Fish become men, but as they quickly lose sight of each other, the men are reduced to disembodied voices. Here the story switches to Hollis' point of view, appropriately, as voices are all he will know of his shipmates for the rest of the story, with one notable exception. There are further similes and metaphors, but they are Hollis', not the narrator's.
This simile "revision" mirrors what happens in the remainder of the story, which is essentially a meditation on how to face death and what constitutes a good life. We remain with Hollis for the rest of the story, and Hollis' mind changes several times, each punctuated by a remarkable event, as he speaks and listens and reflects in his drifting solitude.
First event
The first action of significance after the accident is Applegate's defiance. "Come and shut me up," he directs at Hollis. This is a mutiny made possible by both the distance between the falling crewmen and the technology which allows them to remain in contact. Order breaks down, and "Hollis for the first time felt the impossibility of his position." (This is an incredible statement given at least 20 minutes have elapsed since they were expelled into space, when it seems the "impossibility" is merely not being able to order others around anymore!) "A great anger filled him, for he wanted more than anything in existence at this moment to be able to do something to Applegate." This regret for not taking revenge against a man with whom he just didn't get along. With Applegate out of range, Hollis wants to strike out and hurt someone, and when he can't make the screaming men shut up either, and one drifts close enough, he calmly kills him. Bradbury's underplays all these events (a trait of his writing, which is often deceptively understated). Here the man is clawing "frantically, like a drowning swimmer" (water imagery returning from the opening paragraph), but Bradbury gives us the act in one simple sentence where only the word "iron" stands out: "He smashed the man's glass mask with his iron fist."
Consider that this will be the last physical interaction Hollis will have with another human, a murder justified because their "screaming filled the universe." "One way or the other," he rationalizes, they will die, "so why not now?"
Second event
Applegate continues to agitate Hollis, telling him "I was the one who blackballed you with the Rocket Company five years ago." Immediately Hollis loses his left hand to a meteor. (Consider that the [crewmen = meteors]; they have already been compared to stones, after all, and what is a meteor if not a stone? So, is this just two meteors colliding, one getting the better of the other? More on meteors below.)
Applegate insists on knowing Hollis' reaction. "Are you angry, Hollis?" Hollis' anger, so easily raised a few minutes ago, is spent. The missed career advancement is no longer important. Nothing that happened was. "There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one, the film burned to a cinder, the screen was dark." (Another Bradbury sentence to slow down on.)
This is nihilism, and leads him to go from anger to meanness, as Lespere points out. Lespere's life of adventure is meaningless now they are dying, says Hollis, even though he was jealous of Lespere's lust for living life before the accident. Now, "with everything over... it's like it never was." They are the same. Lespere argues against this, and while Hollis caves inside (more water imagery: "With a feeling of cold water gushing through his head and his body, Hollis knew he was right."), he continues to argue: "What good does it do you?... When a thing's over it's not good any more."
Third event
Lespere stops cooperating in sustaining the argument, forgiving Hollis. Hollis, meanwhile, "knew he was rationalizing, for it was like trying to tell the difference between a live man and a corpse... The quality of death, like that of life, must be of infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what is there to look for in dying once and for all, as he was now?" Immediately following this, a second meteor takes his right foot.
Hollis is being reduced, but his technology makes the injuries meaningless physically and as his impending death removes any long-term concerns. The real reduction is psychological, as he sheds his defensiveness and lets go of ego. First, he has to confront his need to be obeyed, to be in control, and his violent reaction to that is clearly inappropriate. Then, coming to understand his striving for prestige and professional advancement means little to him now, he falls into nihilism, also incorrect. Here, his realization that fear kept him from truly living is accompanied by loss of a foot. (These "trials" correspond loosely to negative aspects the first three chakras: the will to power and a desire for social dominance; fear; jealousy and lust.)
Ending
Hollis is reintegrated into the group at this point, shifting from those selfish impulses towards compassion. He and Applegate still do not like each other, but Hollis is able to relate to him as a human being. Applegate continues to rib him, gently: "I want you to know I was an idiot, too. There's not an ounce of truth in what I said. To heck with you." And right there, "Hollis felt his heart began to work again... He felt like a man emerging from a cold shower in the morning, ready for breakfast and a new day." Again, we have cold water.
Echoes of earlier events occur. Hollis thanks Applegate (who replies with Bradbury's perfect, "Don't mention it. Up your nose, you slob."), in contrast to the hatred he expressed towards Applegate earlier. And where Hollis had shouted "Shut up!" when Stimson had his breakdown earlier, now it is "...how is he?", and he takes the time to listen for Stimson's breathing.
Then there's Hollis' conversation with Stone. Remember they are all falling, but in different directions. This is the fall of Adam (although none of this is coded in biblical terms), the universal fall, the way we in which we all fall short, all fail, each in our own way. Everyone is uniquely flawed, and each falls in a different direction. The Captain to the Sun, Applegate to Pluto, opposite directions for the authority figure and his mutinous opposition. Then there is Stone, who on page one asked, "Which way is up?" Well, now he has oriented himself to the cosmic map, as he figures out he is joining Myrmidone asteroid cluster (a Stone among stones).
As we have seen Hollis reckon with his life choices, considering what it all amounted to, Kaleidoscope also explores shifting thoughts on the "purpose" of death. What can we make of falling into the Sun, falling out towards the Ort cloud, and circling endlessly out past Mars and back near Earth? Each is suggestive. The contrast of the first two is rich, one in the center (appropriate for a leader), one isolated on the fringes, and one hot, one cold - both extremes show up in mythological afterlives, particularly depictions of Hell. (Side note: there's been a fair amount of cold and hot imagery, including Hollis comparing himself to a burning match and a snowflake over the span of just a few sentences.) Stone's asteroid adventure, "passing in and out of the planet's ken for the next million years," evokes cyclical mythologies, from reincarnation to Sisyphus.
And Hollis is falling to Earth, completing a circle, perhaps also a kind of reincarnation, a return to his home planet. Notice the thoughts Hollis has near the end of the story, of the crew being like one organism whose parts were "dying off one by one" so that the "meaning of their life together was falling apart... what they had meant to one another was dying." Hollis has come to an understanding that "meaning" comes from the individual's context within a group, which could be your dozen crewmates or all of humanity. "Applegate was now no more than a finger blown from the parent body," echoing Hollis' missing hand and foot. They are the "shards of the kaleidoscope," meaning the ship, but there are bigger kaleidoscopes; the Myrmidone cluster is "like a big kaleidoscope... eternal and unending, shifting and shaping like the kaleidoscope colors when you were a child and held the long tube to the sun and give it a twirl." (And so "childhood" returns on the last pages of the story.)
I think Hollis' fate is pointing to the idea of giving to the next generation, being part of the great continuity of humanity. He answers his own question to Lespere, and now sees that "when a thing's over," it can still be good. Hollis imagines his contribution to the land, to which his ashes will be added, a materialistic contribution to future generations, and a minimal one at that; it's ok to live life just being a finger. Hollis falls like a pebble, "objective all of the time now," just as any object would be.
However, Hollis hopes to be more than just an object, and he ultimately gets his wish that "he could do a good thing now that everyone was gone." Newton's laws have long since taken over the crews' fates, and the human being named Hollis has been transformed from a pebble into asteroid, and his return to earth transforms him again, into a meteor, and what is a meteor but a falling star, and to a child, what is falling star but a wish?
Postscript: Is Kaleidoscope still a sci-fi story?
Ray Bradbury's Kaleidoscope, written more than a decade before any human had gone into space, fit Theodore Sturgeon's definition of a science fiction story when it was written, as it is a story built around "human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content," which I read to mean the fictional scientific element(s) of the story. But the development and advancement of space programs since 1949 essentially removes the sci-fi element of the story. That is, space travel by people who have space suits with built in communicators went from science fiction to science fact. This change poses an interesting question about how to view such a story, although I do not believe it diminishes it.
While this is not a story primarily about its "scientific content" (like all Bradbury stories, it is about the human beings, which I think was exactly the point Sturgeon was making), I think it is interesting to look at what Bradbury gets right and wrong.
I would argue the only thing he really gets wrong is that spaceships tend to catastrophically fail while in the Earth's atmosphere, coming back or going up, and not in open space; and that people don't live through those failures. (Of course, Apollo 13's near-disaster occurred mid-flight; our sample size is still not large.)
Bradbury cheats, however. He avoids getting a lot wrong by providing very little information. Things work the way they work, and the people who live in the story don't have any need to explain them, acting just like normal, real people act, especially when they are facing death. Bradbury gives us impressions, with only a bit of detail. The space suits have glass tubes and glass masks, so he missed the mark, but otherwise what little we're told doesn't suggest anything much different than real spacesuits. The missing "force units" are jet packs. Their communication devices work until they get too far apart, which sounds reasonable, but how they work, we're not told. Most notably, the story starts with the consequences of some disaster, so there is no need to get into the spaceship's operation, destination, purpose, or origins, and he decides to reveal nothing of the cause of the disaster, so we learn nothing about how spaceships work, or fail to work, in whatever year this story is supposed to take place.
All of that is to the story's advantage. I'll argue that if the main thing to recommend a story was its ability to predict the future, it's not going to be a good story. It may be a very good piece of non-fiction about the future, however, as most prognosticators fail spectacularly at their profession.