SOURCE: Wolfe, Gary K. “The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End.” In The End of the World, edited by Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander, pp. 1-19. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.

In the following essay, Wolfe surveys the major characteristics of Bradbury's post-holocaust science fiction.

In Ray Bradbury's 1950 short story “The Highway,” a poor Mexican farmer who has lived for years beside a highway from the United States, enjoying such odd fruits of this link to technology as sandals made from tire rubber and a bowl made from a hubcap, is startled one day by the sudden appearance of cars speeding northward in great numbers, all filled with apparently panic-stricken American tourists returning home. The farmer, Hernando, cannot account for this sudden flood of traffic. At the end of the flood, however, comes an aging Ford, topless and packed with young Americans...