Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury
Read it here in about 10 minutes.
Thinking about why I love it…
The opening paragraph is a mixture of metaphors (‘can opener’ / ‘silverfish’ / ‘sea’ / ‘meteor swarm’), which shouldn’t work, and writers are told not to mix metaphors because of this, but it does work, because it perfectly captures the confusion of a group of men who were moments earlier inside a spaceship, and now all of a sudden are outside of it. It’s so poetically beautiful (‘thrown into space’ / ‘scattered into a dark sea’ / ‘seeking a lost sun’). It doesn’t explain what’s happened – we know there’s been an accident, but what caused it is not even hinted it, because it doesn’t really matter, it’s too late to do anything about it. It’s also quite obvious there will not be a way for the men to escape this terrible situation. I love this as an opening – so bleak and shocking, and a really unexpected way to begin a story. As an aside, Bradbury wrote this before the first human had even been into space, so wow, what imagination he had – a great example of ignoring the write what you know rule!
As the men fall through space, some of them panic, but some are calm. In this moment, they crave human connection (‘”How long can we talk by phone?”‘). There is violence (Hollis kills a screaming man, because he wants silence). There’s rebellion (Applegate tells the captain he won’t follow any more orders). There are confessions (‘”I was the one who blackballed you with the Rocket Company five years ago.'”). There’s the sharing of memories (‘Lespere reminisced on the past, happy, while he fell to his death’). There is regret (Hollis feels jealous that he didn’t live as full a life as he could have). There’s acceptance (‘”That isn’t important,” said Hollis. And it was not.’) There’s beauty (Stone gets caught in a meteor swam, and remarks ‘”It’s like a big kaleidoscope. You get all kinds of colors and shapes and sizes.”‘). In a way, the men are lucky, to have had time, as they fall, to find some kind of peace.
The word ‘falling’ is repeated 18 times throughout the story, and the word ‘fell’ 7 times. This repetition helps to impress upon the reader that the men are getting further and further away from each other, that they’re not in control, that there will be no happy ending. But the choice of verb in interesting, because it’s not necessarily negative; there is beauty in ‘the first falling snowflakes of a winter season’ and a ‘falling star’, while there is horror in ‘falling down space’ and ‘forever falling nowhere’. The final five paragraphs are beautiful: Hollis wonders, as he reaches the end of his fall, ‘Is there anything I can do now to make up for a terrible and empty life?’ And there is something – as he reaches Earth, he resembles a falling star, and is noticed by an excited child, who makes a wish. Hollis gets his wish, too; his life, and death, mean something. This is not the ending I envisioned when I began the story, but I think it’s extraordinarily beautiful and meaningful, and really, it’s a perfect end to the story, and to Hollis.
Mina Ma 