Post 3, Group C-- "The City" and some Biological bois, By: Kyle Gardner

While deliberating what media source I wanted to analyze, I figured that one of the short stories from class would be the best way to go. The short story that resonated the most with me was, “The City” Written by Ray Bradbury. I’m a big’ol sucker for pretty much anything science fiction and “The City” was something that was right up my ally. Additionally, having a pretty hefty background in medicine, the idea of an epidemical infection that wiped out a whole planet was made this a very enjoyable read for me. Throughout this short story, Bradbury brings up the use of biological warfare and infection quite frequently. This got me thinking, what was going on concurrently in real life to influence the themes of “The City”? Bradbury’s “The illustrated man” was published in 1951, coincidentally during the United States war with China and North Korea, called the Korean War. During the Korean War, there were heavy allegations against the United States purposing that the United States military had used biological warfare, a highly illegal act of war declared by the GenevaConvention in 1929. I stand by the idea that the short story, “The City” was prompted by the unclear allegations of the United States military and their use of biological warfare during the Korean War.

Bradbury heavily hints of the idea of war and military in his short story, “The City”. For example, he never actually refers to the humans that visit the city as soldiers and we as readers only assume they are by their descriptors. From the very beginning Bradbury introduces them as having, “booted footsteps” and “carrying weapons”. Now from what I understand, most astronauts nowadays don’t carry guns into space with them, probably for good reasons. Additionally, we as readers usually associate booted footsteps with the hustle of soldiers. He writes, “Then they went off to live in another galaxy to escape that disease which they visited upon us after ransacking our world. They have forgotten that war and that time, and they have forgotten us. But we have not forgotten them.” Obviously, this a big hint by Bradbury that there was once a war waged on the planet, but again, he never referred to these men on the planet as soldiers. Finally, Bradbury hides another hint in his story by having the main human-person name as “captain”. Now, on a superficial level, the men are probably addressing him as the caption of the ship. Captain could have a second meaning with some militant undertones to it.

I came up with the idea that the uses of some of the biological infections throughout the short story could’ve been symbolic of the alleged biological weapons used in the Korean War by the Unites States. Conrad C. Crane in his journal article, Chemical and Biological warfare during the Korean war: Rhetoric and Reality, stated that “allegations about U.S. bacteriological warfare research and employment were nothing new, dating back to at least to 1949, and continued on through 1951. North Korea claimed that the retreating U.S. troops had spread smallpox during 1950” (Pg 63). Now, this information caught the ear of all major world powers quickly because it was under strict ruling of the Geneva Convention in 1929 that the use of biological weaponry was strictly forbidden. This is because once something like smallpox becomes endemic in a population, there is stopping it from spreading to innocent populations due to the virulence of the pathogen. These allegations seem pretty consistent with what happens in “The City”. Bradbury wrote, “The old race who once lived here. The people whom the Earthmen left to die of a terrible disease, a form of leprosy with no cure.” Two beings waged a war in which spread leprosy throughout the planet, those of whom who didn’t contract the disease fled, only to be later met by the same fate. At the end of the story, Bradbury wrote, “Nine men hurried the golden bombs of disease culture into the rocket. ‘These are to be dropped on Earth.’ ‘Right, sir!’”. The city had captured the purposed soldiers and turned them into vectors of biological warfare, to bring those who infected their ancestors with the same fate that they once faced.

The pieces are all there for a perfect explanation as to rational of Ray Bradbury writing, “The City”. However this is all speculation, but I believe that the use of subtle military symbolism and the ideas of biological warfare align pretty well to give my assumptions some sustenance.

Works Cited

Crane, Conrad C. “CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE DURING THE KOREAN WAR: RHETORIC AND REALITY.” Asian Perspective, vol. 25, no. 3, 2001, pp. 61–83. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42704325.

Bradbury, Ray. The Illustrated Man. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2012.