Here There Be Tygers

Image Gallery The world is a dangerous place, beware of tigers.

This is a first. As we go into MOTHER`s ninth year of publication we are, for the first (and, perhaps, the last) time, printing a work of fiction in this magazine's pages. This story was copyrighted in 1951 by Ray Bradbury, and reprinted with permission.

But not just any ole work of fiction. And not something that we wanted to bring to you because it's the "latest, hottest " piece by the most "super-in author of the day. 

No. The short story which follows is one we've been thinking of running in MOTHER for at least five or six years ... one that we first read at least 15 or 20 years ago ... one that was originally copyrighted "a long time ago" in 1951. 

Now 1951 is a "fur piece" back — almost ancient history — when measured up against today's environmental and ecology movement (which really began to flex its muscles only in the very late1960's). And that means that Ray Bradbury (author of the following story) exhibited a great deal of vision and foresight and was very definitely ahead of his time when he wrote Here There Be Tygers 27 or 28 years ago. 

Because this story — as entertaining as it may be on the surface — is far, far more than a merely diverting and enjoyable tale. It is, in the truest sense, an allegory (allegory: a story in which people, things and happenings have another meaning, as in a fable or parable) ... and a multileveled allegory, at that. 

Read this little piece carefully and — if you're ready for it — you'll begin to realize just what this beautiful planet (not "planet 7 of star system 84") is anxious to do for us if we'd only relax and let it ... and what the true possibilities of life really are ... and why man- and womankind seem so blindly intent on throwing themselves (and every other living creature) out of the Garden of Eden as rapidly and as violently as possible. 

A pox on O'Neill and his space colonies. We already live in (and daily ravage) magical, wondrous Elysian fields. Ray Bradbury knew that a long time ago. Most of us don't know it yet. 

"You have to beat a planet at its own game," said Chatterton. "Get in and rip it up, kill its snakes, poison its animals, dam its rivers, sow its fields, depollinate its air, mine It, nail it down, hack away at it, and get the blazes out from under when you have what you want. Otherwise, a planet will fix you good. You can't trust planets. They're bound to be different, bound to be bad, bound to be out to get you, especially this far out, a billion miles from nowhere, so you get them first. Tear their skin off, I say. Drag out the minerals and run away before the nightmare world explodes in your face. That's the way to treat them."

The rocket ship sank down toward planet 7 of star system 84. They had traveled millions upon millions of miles; Earth was far away, her system and her sun forgotten, her system settled and investigated and profited on, and other systems rummaged through and milked and tidied tip, and now the rockets of these tiny men from an impossibly remote planet were probing out to far universes. In a few months, a few years, they could travel anywhere, for the speed of their rocket was the speed of a god, and now for the ten-thousandth time one of the rockets of the far-circling hunt was feathering down toward an alien world.