26 pages • 52-minute read
Zero Hour
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Background
Authorial Context: Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to a father of English descent and a Swedish immigrant mother. During Bradbury’s childhood, his family moved back and forth several times between Illinois and Arizona before settling in Los Angeles, California, around the time that Bradbury started high school. Even after the family put down new roots in LA, Waukegan remained important to Bradbury, turning up later in his fiction as Green Town, Illinois—the setting for several of his most famous stories, including “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” Small-town America provides an important backdrop for many of Bradbury’s works. For example, “Zero Hour” is set in an idyllic suburban neighborhood.
Bradbury was immersed in the arts from an early age. As a young child, he was an avid reader who could often be found in the library. By the age of 12, he had begun to write his own stories styled after the works of his favorite writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Edgar Rice Burroughs. These influences would be essential for the development of Bradbury’s writing—he would go on to credit reading and libraries with providing him an education since he did not attend college. Theater and film also became important to him when he moved to LA. He was a member of the Los Angeles High School drama club and spent as much time as possible in the Fox Uptown movie theatre near his family’s home. At the age of 16, he joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society.
Bradbury published his first short story in a fan zine around the time that he graduated from high school, then he went on to found and publish his own fan zine, which was largely filled with his work. Several years later, he cowrote and published “Pendulum,” which was his first professionally distributed story. This, along with the fact that his poor eyesight made him ineligible to join the military, started him down a path to the life of a full-time writer. His first book, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947. His most famous work, the novel Fahrenheit 451, was published in 1953.
At the age of 27, Bradbury married his first and only girlfriend, Marguerite McClure. They had four daughters and were married until Marguerite’s death in 2003.
Literary Context: 20th-Century Science Fiction
Many literary scholars argue about when the genre of science fiction came into being. Some claim its origin as early as The Epic of Gilgamesh, while others claim that the scientific revolution was necessary to make the genre possible. Regardless, it is inarguable that science fiction underwent a period of extreme growth and development during the 20th century. The 19th century saw the initial development of popular European science fiction such as the works of Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne, as well as American proto-science fiction by Edgar Allan Poe, L. Frank Baum, and Mark Twain. The birth of American science fiction as a specific genre—replete with spaceships, aliens, and questions about the technological and existential future of the humanity—took place in the 1920s with the invention of pulp magazines devoted entirely to science fiction stories. The first pulp magazine Amazing Stories was founded in 1926 by publisher Hugo Gernsback (for whom the prominent science fiction writing awards known as the Hugos are named). Bradbury’s “Zero Hour” was published in a similar magazine called Planet Stories a couple decades later.
The advent of pulp magazines was essential in the success of Bradbury’s early works—even when he no longer relied upon his self-published zine. His first traditionally published story, “Pendulum,” was published in the pulp magazine Super Science Stories. Although Bradbury began to publish in more established literary venues, earning the notice of literary institutions like the O. Henry Awards, he continued to publish in dedicated science fiction magazines.
Twentieth-century science fiction was heavily influenced by modernist writing, which was concerned with responding to and attempting to make sense of a world post-World War I. Works of modernist literature helped form the backbone of the science fiction genre. The mid-20th-century was also a period fascinated with space exploration and the possible consequences of the existence of extraterrestrial life, so “alien invasion” became a common sub-genre of science fiction. Although Bradbury considered stories like “Zero Hour” more fantasy than science fiction, the same tropes and modernist influences are present within them: a juxtaposition of the everyday and mundane with strange behaviors. “Zero Hour” closes with a powerful moment of alienation, where indeed the word “alien” is used to describe the sound of Mink’s voice just before a literal alien arrives.
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