SOURCE: "Two Views: Ray Bradbury—Past, Present, and Future," in Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976, pp. 167-75.

In the following excerpt, McNelly purports that Bradbury's short fiction is thematically tied to mainstream American tradition.

Ray Bradbury, hailed as a stylist and a visionary by critics such as Gilbert Highet and authors such as Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, remained for years the darling, almost the house pet, of a literary establishment other wise unwilling to admit any quality in the technological and scientific projections known as science fiction. Within the field of science fiction itself, Bradbury's star zoomed like the Leviathan '99 comet he later celebrated in a significant but ill-fated dramatic adaptation of the Moby-Dick myth. Fans pointed to Bradbury with ill-concealed pride, as if to prove that, at least with him, science fiction had come of...