Dear Ray Bradbury

Dear,
Ray

I just read what is, probably, one of my strangest stories. It is the one titled "Utopia".  You had once said not to mess with a younger author's work. Or in your words, "It is a sin to alter a young author's work."

May this gem be the work you talk about, as it is rife with preaching, rife with my cultish religion I had in the past. Rife with all sorts of cringe worthy dialogue. At parts it bored me. Yet, it expressed everything I wanted to say at the time.

How much further we go in society, where Christians are maligned and people are made into laughing stocks. I thought you would find it cute that Baryon found God by discovering Infinity. How modern minds, like Richard Dawkins, would be upset by it, for to him science could only prove God doesn't exist. Yet, to Baryon, the Queen telling him to prove God doesn't exist by proving infinity doesn't either, I found clever.

Yet, I read it with Mr. Dawkins in view. And I might have had his mind reading it, and felt myself flushing at some of the more preachy parts. Yet, as I read it as if I were him, I found the work faithful. It explained all the moral problems of my religion, as it ought to have. It showed why men would fight, and what the religion was that God had Israel wipe out.

You say not to try to change the world with a piece of literature. I do not change it, nor do I try.

Contained in my work is uncensored truths. I use the forbidden words to arouse a dialogue about speech. And I myself was a proponent of censorship once. For that I am deeply ashamed. I tell you that, personally, because I know you would forgive me. And I tell you that because my great work, Utopia, is a salvo across the bow of tyrants like he I spoke to. It is the world they march toward.

I think you would love my work. It is rife with metaphors, unconscious and well worth the horror story. As Utopia is a horror story. It is a horror story of one of these blasted billionaires gaining power, and exercising their brand of religion on the rest of us. We don't want it.
 
I do not know what to do with the preaching, but since it is so old, and I wrote it while young, I will not alter it. As perhaps though I broke some of the rules, it was more fertile than my period of stupidity. I would recant those words---which perhaps I spoke in a dream, I don't know. I begin to think I had spoken them in a dream.

I do not conjure your spirit, Ray. Rest in peace. But I speak to your letters, the man I know through your many interviews and many books. I say this, having a compendium of knowledge of the literatures, those I found acceptable. What I am afraid of is a man trying to make Utopia. Even in my Utopian novels, there was a distinct realization that we ought not strive to perfect man's government, for in their perfection--- well, it is just true that men are never going to be perfect.

And there in lies the problem, of course. We forget the agrarian truths--- the Grass Roots of Knowledge---and we replace them with something mechanical. Utopia is that. It is the replacing of the Grass Roots with a cult.

In that same book I counterbalance two societies, one being a disaster and the other an ideal. Yet the preaching of the work Utopia--- You had said, "It is a sin to alter a young author's work." Frankly, your approval on that project is important to me. I am not being a spiritist--- you cannot counsel me one way or another from the grave. But, it is my best, being perhaps my weakest output as a writer. Because it is written with a cognizance of trying to fix something; to save the world. But in that work, I taught myself so to speak. Where the story is strong, and the preaching weak;  but perhaps that weakness is the strongest part of the book.