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The SSAATTBB setting of Teasdale's words by Latvian contemporary choral composer Ēriks Ešenvalds is fittingly powerful and a guaranteed source of chills:

https://youtu.be/qwSSVDgY-Sw

The choir I sing in performed the piece for the first time in spring 2022, and against the backdrop of the pandemic and Russia's invasion the words felt incredibly topical and poignant. We're performing it again this spring.

While we're at it, a couple of other ethereally beautiful Ešenvalds settings of Teasdale's texts:

Only in Sleep – https://youtu.be/fvPynMI6Umc (for choir and a soprano soloist)

Stars – https://youtu.be/SK2Rd3qgIGE (for choir and tuned wine glasses!)

https://soundcloud.com/henrisokka/there-will-come-soft-rains

"Ray Bradbury has preferred (unknowingly, perhaps, and by secret inspiration of his genius) an elegiac tone. Martians, who at the beginning of the book are horrible, deserve his pity when annihilation reaches them. Men vanquish and the author is not proud of their victory. He announces with sadness and disappointment the future expansion of mankind over the red planet - that his prophecy reveals as a desert of vague blue sand, with ruins of chess-like cities and yellow sunsets and ancient ships to wander on the sand.

Other authors stamp a coming date and we don't believe them, because we know it is a literary convention; Bradbury writes 2004 and we feel the gravitation, the fatigue, the vast and vague accumulation of the past - the 'dark backward and abysm of Time' from the Shakespeare verse. Already the Renaissance had noted, by mouth of Giordano Bruno and of Bacon, that the real Ancient Ones are us, and not the men from Genesis or Homer.

What has this man from Illinois done, I ask myself when closing the pages of his book, that episodes from the conquest of another planet fill me with horror and loneliness?

How can these fantasies touch me, and in such an intimate way? All literature (I dare reply) is symbolic; there are a few fundamental experiences and it is indifferent that a writer, to transmit them, recurs to the fantastic or the real, to Macbeth or to Rascolnikov, to the Belgium invasion in August 1914 or to an invasion of Mars. Who cares about the novel, or novelry of science fiction? In this book of ghostly appearance, Bradbury has placed his long empty Sundays, his American tedium, his loneliness, like Sinclair Lewis did on Main Street."

Clarke wrote good stories. Asimov had some good ideas but was a fairly poor writer of fiction (his characters and dialog, in particular, are rarely better than terrible, and many of his stories hinge on a single gee-what-if shower thought and have little more going for them) and is in my estimation easily the weakest of the three.

Bradbury… is good good. He had a combo of talent and a mind to put it to a certain kind of use, some (or many) elements of which the other two did not possess. I would unhesitatingly recommend Bradbury to a literary fiction reader who’s not much on genre fiction for its own sake, and might not even bother to suggest where they start. I would selectively recommend bits of Clarke’s work where he’s treading a bit closer to the sublime than usual, or some of his short stories that are at least competent, fun short reads with some ideas or imagery or the odd line that sticks with you. I might not recommend any Asimov at all.

Some authors are good, no italics. Bradbury is good.

+1. I loved Desolation Road in particular; a sort of 100 Years of Solitude but on Mars and with more than 2 names for its 3000 characters.

Maybe this is why I never really got Bradbury. When I read scifi, I can't help but consider the logic of the world that's being described, and Bradbury's worlds aren't really logical (e.g. who would live on such a strict timetable? wouldn't all the singing and rhyming be annoying? how is the house still being powered?). But it makes a lot more sense if the point is to convey feelings. Kind of like an impressionist painting I suppose.

I absolutely rever and adore Bradbury, probably because he has a knack of articulating so well, the emotions and esthetics that we have in common, that I leave unarticulated, more so now that I am no longer a teenager.

Almost politically incorrect woke?

Another Bradbury adaptation

https://youtu.be/02FgildTKMs

(Here there be Tygers)

One way to look at fiction is that it's a way to express an idea indirectly that defies explanation in literal non-fiction terms.

There are non-verbal thoughts and feelings we can all understand, but can't seem to put them into words in order to transmit from one brain to another without having to go indirectly through a metaphor or allegory.