30 pages • 1 hour read
Ray BradburyThe Other Foot
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. His father was a telephone lineman of English ancestry and his mother was an immigrant from Sweden. He spent his early childhood surrounded by his extended family, including an aunt who read him short stories and laid the foundation for his life as a writer. The family went back and forth between Tucson, Arizona, and Waukegan during the Great Depression as Bradbury’s father hunted for work. Bradbury’s memories of Waukegan in the 1920s became a kind of magical place in his fiction, the imaginary town of Green Town, Illinois, which appears in many of his later works. In 1934, when Bradbury was 14, the family settled in Los Angeles, California, where Bradbury would live for most of his remaining life.
Bradbury is best known as an author of classic science fiction and dark fantasy, most notably the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), the anthology The Martian Chronicles (1950), and the spooky, mysterious Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). Bradbury took a lyrical and intensely humanistic approach to his writing, emphasizing beautiful, almost magical language and focusing on the fundamental humanity of his characters. Today his stories are regarded as classics, and his shorter works, such as “All Summer in a Day” (1954) are commonly assigned reading as early as elementary school while his novels fill out high school and college reading lists. In 1946, one of his short stories had appeared in the annual anthology Best American Short Stories, and in 1947, his short story “Homecoming” received the prestigious O. Henry Award for short fiction. Bradbury published short stories with science-fiction elements in mainstream magazines like Mademoiselle rather than sticking to pulp sci-fi publications.
Bradbury was an intensively creative child: He wrote stories from an early age, was active in dramatic performances at school, and sold his first piece of creative work at 14 when famous radio and film comedian George Burns bought a joke from Bradbury to use on the popular Burns and Allen radio show. Bradbury was a great fan of genre fiction from an early age; he spent hours at the library reading Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne. He was also immensely fond of comic books and the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan; he wrote his own sequels to Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars stories and drew his own versions of the Sunday edition of the Tarzan newspaper comic strip. Living near Hollywood in his teens, Bradbury often roller-skated around town, trying to meet celebrities. Movies such as King Kong were another strong influence on his work.
Bradbury resisted being categorized as a science-fiction writer. He insists that his only science-fiction novel was Fahrenheit 451 because only that book was based on elements he considered real. The rest of his fiction, he claimed, was fantasy and myth, which was why he expected it to endure.
Bradbury’s politics varied throughout his life. He described himself as a political independent. Generally, he supported liberal policies and the Democratic Party until he became disenchanted with Democratic president Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, after which he supported conservative and Republican candidates with increasing fervency. By the 1990s, he was known to criticize affirmative-action policies and “political correctness” in interviews. “The Other Foot,” coming from the pre-Vietnam period of his life, reflects a progressive and somewhat utopian view of race relations for the years in which it was written.
Ray Bradbury died in 2012.
Historical Context
The historical context of “The Other Foot” is significant. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the beginning of a wave of social change in the United States that came to be known as the Civil Rights Movement. After the Second World War ended in 1945, Black soldiers who had fought for democracy in Europe and the Pacific theater returned to their racially segregated homeland and found themselves emboldened to demand the legal rights that white society had denied them. The United States had legally separated Black and white Americans in schools and public accommodation since the 1870s in what was known as the Jim Crow system. Black children attended separate schools that weren’t as well-funded or well-maintained as the ones white children attended. Public accommodations such as buses, restaurants, and hotels often confined Black patrons to less desirable areas (such as the back rows of a city bus) or prohibited them entirely. While these rules were later found to be in violation of the US Constitution, at the time they were enforced with the threat of violence, both from civil authorities and from mobs of angry white citizens. Lynching was a common practice in which Black citizens, particularly men accused of having some kind of contact with white women, were murdered by white mobs, often by being hanged from large trees. The killers were rarely punished; in fact, lynching was considered so socially acceptable that many white people had their photographs taken with the mangled and charred remains of lynching victims. These photographs were often reproduced as souvenir postcards, many of which remain in museums and collections today.
Literary Context: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and the New Wave
Although Bradbury disliked being referred to as a science-fiction writer and maintained that the stories in The Illustrated Man were not truly science fiction, “The Other Foot” conforms significantly to characteristics of science fiction in the mid-20th century. The story takes place on the then-mysterious planet Mars. The story’s climax—where the tension reaches its peak—is the arrival of a rocket ship from another world; references to the nuclear annihilation of Earth were common in science-fiction stories of the time.
Science fiction deals with the application of hypothetical science to human life. “The Other Foot,” in a manner unusual for science fiction of the period, explores how then-contemporary social issues would play out against the backdrop of interplanetary colonization. Readers in 1951 would have been familiar with many of the conflicts in the story, such as the racist violence that caused the Civil Rights Movement and the mass movement of refugees at the end of the Second World War, which parallels the arrival of the rocket ship from Earth in the story. The development of space colonies and their implications for both the colonists and the colonized environment is another classic theme in science fiction, going back at least as far as H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds in 1898.
There are obvious similarities between the treatment of Black Americans in the United States at the time and the proposed treatment of the refugees from Earth. Additionally, there are affinities between the arrival of the rocket and the arrival of European refugees to the Americas after the war—in many cases, to communities that had previously taken in waves of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust. Science fiction often examines questions like this, as placing tension in space or on another planet effectively removes it from Earth’s politics and allows readers to consider these issues with clearer heads.
However, Bradbury was among the first American science-fiction writer to use sci-fi to address contemporary social issues. The approach would become common in the 1960s with the arrival of a group of younger writers who would become known as the New Wave; Bradbury is often seen as a bridge between Golden Age authors like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and New Wave writers like Harlan Ellison and Frank Herbert. Golden Age authors focused heavily on scientific accuracy and paid relatively little attention to the social implications of their hypothetical technologies; characters in Golden Age stories behaved almost exactly like Americans or Europeans in the years in which the stories were written, with little thought for how changing technologies alter societies and the people who live in them. New Wave writers also focused more on using vivid, lyrical language. Bradbury’s focus on society and his writing style identify him as a forerunner of the New Wave.
Fantasy, the genre Bradbury preferred, also has a strong influence on this story. Because fantasy tends to rely on impossible, often mythical elements to create its settings and plots, fantasy fiction often reads like folklore and spends little time explaining itself or its worlds. Plots are comparatively simple, often with characters that can easily be connected to a larger literary or folkloric tradition. “The Other Foot” takes a more fantastical approach than other science-fiction stories of its time. It doesn’t bother to explain the mechanics of the “atom war” or the rocket that brings the old man to Mars, and it assumes that Martian society would resemble the then-contemporary society of the United States—ordinary items like cars, shotguns, and pots of boiling soup are scattered throughout the story without comment or ornamentation. Characters have names that would sound ordinary for Black Americans at the time, like Hattie and Willie, and the only religion mentioned is Christianity, not any kind of homegrown Martian faith. For Bradbury’s purposes, it doesn’t matter whether the white man arrives in a rocket ship or on the back of a spacefaring dragon; what matters is how his arrival affects the lives of the Martian characters.
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