All Summer in a Day is a short film production funded via Kickstarter, the crowd-funding website. It's based on the Ray Bradbury short story, which has been filmed once before. The Kickstarter target was a modest $5000 or so, which was reached in April.

You can read more about the production here, and here is the trailer/pitch:

Labels: All Summer in a Day, short film

It was reported today that animator Ray Harryhausen has passed away. He was 92 years old.

He and Ray Bradbury were born in the same year, and first met in Los Angeles when they were both in their teens. They shared a passion for dinosaurs and King Kong, and remained friends across the decades.

The two Rays never directly collaborated, but they both had credits on the 1950s movie The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Bradbury wrote the story the film derived from; Harryhausen brought the Beast to life with his amazing animation, achieved on a remarkably low budget.

Some years later, Bradbury wrote a short story called "Tyrannosaurus Rex", about a monstrous film producer and the stop-motion animator who wreaks sweet revenge on him. Harryhausen was clearly the model for the animator (but I don't think the real-life producer has ever been identified...).

Later still, Bradbury made a fictionalised version of Harryhausen into a central character of his Hollywood novel Graveyard for Lunatics.

As the two Rays aged, and travel became difficult, they saw less of each other. Their last meeting was about six years ago when London-based Harryhausen made his last trip to Los Angeles. The photo above shows the two at a public event in 2007.

Three years ago, Ray Harryhausen announced that he was donating the life's work - models, papers, the lot - to the National Media Museum in Bradford, England. This should ensure that his work is properly memorialised, and that researchers will be able to gain access to his sketches and working papers.

Looking back, I am surprised to see how often I mentioned Harryhausen on this blog, but when you consider the importance of the two Rays to each other, there is no real surprise. Click here to see previous posts about the late, great Ray Harryhausen.

Labels: Harryhausen

It's nearly a year since Ray Bradbury died, but interest in his work continues, as evidenced in a number of books newly released or announced.

Searching for Ray Bradbury is a slim, inexpensive volume from Bradbury's friend and collaborator Steven Paul Leiva. It collects Steven's writings on Ray, previously published in various newspapers, magazines and websites. I'm currently reading this book, and will be reviewing it here in the near future. For now, I'll just say that it captures some of the spirit of celebration of the events Steven co-ordinated in recent years, such as Los Angeles' Ray Bradbury Week and the dedication of Ray Bradbury Square.

Nolan on Bradbury is William F. Nolan's return to writing about his lifelong friend. A highlight of Nolan's early career was his publication of The Ray Bradbury Review, the first study of any aspect of Bradbury's work. Nolan would soon develop a career as a creative writer which paralleled Bradbury's, with work in the fields of SF, fantasy, horror and crime fiction, and with significant excursions into screenwriting. Nolan's list of significant books includes the novel Logan's Run (written with George Clayton Johnson) and the scrapbook-style The Ray Bradbury Companion. Now Nolan on Bradbury promises to collect "sixty years of writing" about Bradbury, and is adorned with a Joe Mugnaini rendering of Bradbury's "The Pedestrian". I hope to review this book soon.

Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys is William Touponce's latest study, attempting to map Lovecraft's notion of spectral literature as "literature that involves the gothic themes of the supernatural found in the past but also concerned about modern society and humanity", and showing how his tradition or mode of writing developed through the twentieth-century. Bill's previous work on Bradbury is extensive, including the study Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction (written with Jon Eller) and directing the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies from 2007-2011. This book is listed for publication in October... the ideal month for Bradbury.

Finally a brief note on The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: a Critical Edition, Volume 2. I am pleased to report that I have been appointed as a consultant on this volume, which is currently approaching it's final shape. The contents of the volume are more or less settled, with just a few items of the critical apparatus still to be completed. I'll give more details when I can. (Volume 1, of course, is already available.)

Labels: Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, Eller + Touponce, Nolan, Ray Bradbury Square, Ray Bradbury Week, Steven Paul Leiva

I recently had to produce a poster outlining my PhD research project in terms that could be understood by a non-expert. I went for a straightforward approach of a brief description and some simple illustrations drawn from book covers, film posters and DVD sleeves. As it was produced for viewing online, I opted for a landscape design.

The poster was on display for two weeks on the website of Liverpool University during the "Poster Day Online" event. The event is now over, so I can make it viewable here.

Click here, then, to view the full-size PDF of The Cinema of Lost Films: Ray Bradbury on Screen.

Labels: poster, research

Last week I attended the Eaton Science Fiction Conference (which this year was combined with the Science Fiction Research Association conference) in Riverside, California, to present a paper on the screenwriting styles of Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison.

The overall conference programme was ridiculously full, with seven simultaneous panels for most of the conference's three days. This is an amazing expansion since my first Eaton in 2008, which just had a single strand of panels.

My paper was part of a panel I had proposed on screenwriting. The paper title was "Screenwriting: Spectacle, Specificity and Speculative Fiction", and my intention was to illuminate the challenge of writing a screenplay for an imagined world, using examples from the scripts of Bradbury and Ellison to show two distinct strategies.

Bradbury tended to write non-technical scripts, resulting in a style of script which looks for all the world like a modern-day "spec script" - although he developed this style as early as the mid-1950s. Ellison, on the other hand, developed his craft in television in the early 1960s, in a time when it was common practice for the scriptwriter to write more or less in a shooting-script format, a style which is generally more prescriptive and more technical in terms of camera directions.

Over time, Bradbury's style became more and more simplified, and his scripts tend to read like very clear short stories. The heavy use of metaphor we often find in his short stories is largely absent, however, as he recognised how important it was to be unambiguous in describing a fantastical world in a screenplay. Ellison, on the other hand, developed a remarkable specificity in his scripts, which makes for some stunning visual concepts which challenge the director and production team to match his vision.

Time permitting, I intend to develop the paper for journal publication.

The other contributors to the panel were Julian Hoxter of San Francisco State University, author of Write What You Don't Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters (New York: Continuum, 2011) and Michael Klein of James Madison University. Julian spoke on the emergence of the "spec script" format and its impact on action in blockbuster movies. Michael spoke on the mythos of Frankenstein as it developed in both Shelley's original novel and its first film adaptation. I learned a lot from both presentations, and appreciated both speakers' contribution to the panel.

Labels: conferences, Eaton, Harlan Ellison, screenwriting

Mark DiPietro of the Edge Ensemble Theatre Company contacted me to pass on news of an event on 11 May 2013: a marathon reader's theatre presentation of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The venue is Heberton Hall-Keene Public Library Annex in Keene, New Hampshire.

Mark writes:

"The whole idea is that 'getting lost in a good book' is something that's disappeared for many people, especially young people, with smart phones, iPods, iPads and earbuds stuck calling to them continuously. (Bradbury even foretold the earbud sensation in Fahrenheit 451, with the omnipresent 'seashells' that preoccupied Mildred Montag.) Marathon reads - i.e., reading an entire work of literature in a single setting - have been catching on at many colleges and high schools. (Here's a story from the New York Times about college campuses doing marathons of War and Peace, Paradise Lost, and other literary works.

We got the idea after hearing about these other marathons and decided that Bradbury's novel would be the perfect length and subject matter to stage our own marathon. The Edge Ensemble has recruited students from four schools in Southwestern New Hampshire as our readers/performers, along with community members and Edge Ensemble performers. We're also working with 5th- through 8th-graders who are members of an Opera Club at a local elementary school. The students are writing an original opera based on Fahrenheit 451 called "Operas Burning," which they'll perform in June at the Colonial Theatre in Keene. The Edge Ensemble is working with the students on performing techniques, and the students will attend the marathon theatre production on May 11.

Our goal is to make this a public event and get as many people to come out and participate in the Fahrenheit marathon as possible - to get them reading Bradbury's novel, and to get them reading, period."

Thanks, Mark, for all the detail on this event.

For more information, visit the Edge Ensemble website.

Labels: Fahrenheit 451, marathon read

The writer Jason Marchi tells me that on 28 April 2013 he will be giving a lecture in the Bronx, New York, about being mentored by Ray Bradbury, and their close friendship over the last 12 years of Bradbury's life. It's one of the many events being held in the Bronx, which has adopted Fahrenheit 451 for its community Big Read programme. The full programme of events can be seen here.

Other US cities have also adopted Fahrenheit 451, which continues to be a popular book in this scheme. Find out where else has chosen Bradbury using this interactive map.

Labels: Big Read, Marchi

The question I am most often asked (apart from "What's the title of that story where the summer only lasts a single day?") is: "Do you like everything Bradbury did?"

The answer is quite simple: No.

While it's true that I tend to use this blog to focus on positive stories about Bradbury and his work, there's plenty that I don't like. But I just don't see the point in wasting my energy on things that don't interest me. So you won't very often hear me discuss Bradbury's later short story collections, which contain some very slight stories (or should I say "stories"). And you won't hear much from me about Let's All Kill Constance, the weaker of Ray's three mystery novels.

And you won't hear much about... operas or musicals.

Bradbury had a fascination for these forms of theatre, and devoted quite a bit of time from the 1960s onwards to developing all sorts of things for the musical stage: Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, Leviathan '99 and more. I haven't seen a single one of these performed, mainly because they were staged only briefly, and on a whole 'nother continent. But even if they were staged just around the corner from me, I would tend to stay away for the simple reason that I can't stand musicals!

The only exceptions I make are: cartoon musicals, and musicals involving puppets. But even these can try my patience.

Imagine my mixed feelings, then, when I learned that Daniel Levy and Elizabeth Margid had developed a new opera based on Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

The website for the project includes a substantial amount of the text and music for the show, some of it placed alongside Bradbury's original text, and I actually quite like being able to sample sections of the production in audio and/or video and/or text. I suppose it allows me to take it in small doses, whereas I would never be able to sit through an entire opera.

As a book, The Martian Chronicles does have a lot of musical content. The first time that Earth people "appear" to the Martians is through a song which Ylla hears in her head. Then comes a Martian opera, where the singer loses control and finds herself channeling a strange alien language. And when the Earthmen of the third expedition arrive on a Mars that resembles a small American town, they are greeted by the sound of Beautiful Ohio. There is clearly a lot of potential here for musical interpretation, and I would hope that this is reflected in the new opera.

Levy and Margid should be congratulated for managing to interest this opera skeptic. But I wish they would change the awful "sci-fi" label on the splash page of their website. Bradbury himself fought against labelling The Martian Chronicles as any kind of science fiction, let alone the downmarket kind suggested by the term "sci-fi".

Labels: music, opera, The Martian Chronicles

For many years, a group of Los Angeles-area writers got together for mutual support and to review each other's works in progress. Ray Bradbury was one of them.

What I didn't know is that the core of the group was established as far back as 1948, with the publication of Best American Short Stories 1948. Apparently some enterprising soul went through the book, found out which of its authors lived within easy distance of LA, and invited them to join the group.

Terry Sanders' 1963 documentary Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer includes a short sequence showing the group reviewing Bradbury's "Dial Double Zero", although I'm not sure whether this reflects how the group really operated, or whether it is highly staged.

Now E.E.King has blogged about "the group", and reproduced a 1973 article by Bradbury's writer friend Sid Stebel, who Ray apparently described as "the best writing teacher that ever was!" The article is taken from the Los Angeles Times, Calendar section, 24 June 1973.

Labels: Best American Short Stories, E.E.King, Sid Stebel, Story of a Writer

Without Whom is a one-act play by R.J.Downes, inspired by Ray Bradbury and his wife Marguerite. It will shortly be seen in a new production at the Springworks Indie Theatre & Arts Festival at Stratford, Ontario.

"This play is not a biographical work," says its author, "but rather a fantastic tale with veiled elements of [Bradbury's] life and my own".

Downes first put on the one-act play in 2008, when Ray Bradbury was still alive, but Maggie Bradbury had passed away. It was Maggie's passing that indirectly provided the trigger for Downes, who was inspired by Sam Weller's appreciation of Maggie published on the official Ray Bradbury website.

Downes says he was unable to find anything that Bradbury had himself written about his wife's passing, which made him think one of two things: "Either he is too self-absorbed to bother to say anything or her death hit him so hard that it actually silenced the man."

The latter would seem to be the truth, as in the introduction to The Cat's Pajamas (2004), Bradbury's first collection of short stories to be published after Maggie's death, he wrote:

During the last six weeks a strange and surprising thing has happened. My wife became ill in early November, wound up in the hospital, and passed away just before Thanksgiving. During her illness and in the time since, for the first time in seventy years my demon has lain quiet within me. My muse, my Maggie, was gone, and my demon did not know what to do.

As the days passed, and then the weeks, I began to wonder if I would ever write again; I was unaccustomed to waking in the morning and not having my private theater acting out its ideas inside my head.

Playwright Downes says that "the play was my attempt to fill that silence. The marriage depicted in the play is a guess at best." His Ray and Maggie MONARCH spend forty years bickering, but Downes says "the bickering and fighting [...] is actually based on the relationship of my [ex-]girlfriend’s father and his third wife (who incidentally and quite ironically are also named Ray and Maggie)."

Ray Monarch is described as "a stubborn and opinionated man. Very smart in many ways but lacking in the emotional side of things. Having lost his wife (both his life partner and his sparring partner) he now finds himself at a loss for how to move forward."

Maggie Monarch is "a strong willed and independent mature woman who has lived a life she is proud of, caring for the man she loved in both the good times and the bad."

Ray and Maggie have a daughter,  Susan Monarch. Ray's agent is Harlan, whose "personal stake in his client requires him to worry about the fact that Ray seems more and more lost with each passing day."

Quotes from R.J. Downes are from 2008 when he talked about the first version of his play in this interview for Weird Tales. The character biographies and casting call for his new production are here. News about the staging of the new production can also be found here.

The photos of the real Maggie Bradbury that inspired R.J. Downes.

Labels: Marguerite, play, R.J.Downes, Without Whom

"The ability to fantasize is the ability to grow."

Labels: Oscars, tributes

Earlier this week, The Guardian reported that Ray Bradbury's books are finally to be released as e-books in the UK. No big deal, you might think - except that Bradbury was famously opposed to his works being made available in this form right up until his final year on this planet. I don't believe there was any great earth-shattering moment when he "caved in", or when he had some great epiphany; I think it was just a case of the new contract arriving, and the continued publication of the print editions of his works would be conditional on e-book rights also being made available to his publisher.

The Guardian faithfully reported this story, but slipped in a new piece of information which to me is much more significant. It appears that Dark Carnival is among the books which will be made available as an e-book.

Dark Carnival. Bradbury's first book. Not science fiction, but dark fantasy and horror. The book that he refused to be re-issued, on the grounds that he had re-written (improved?) all of its constituent short stories, which continued to be available in the collection The October Country.

Dark Carnival has only ever been available in three editions: the US hardcover, out of print since the 1940s; the UK hardcover, also out of print since that decade; and a limited edition re-issue from Gauntlett Press (2001), also long out of print.

At the moment, any copy of Dark Carnival is likely to set you back at least £600 (900 USD). The first edition typically goes for 2000USD.

So issuing Dark Carnival as an e-book is a very big deal. (Assuming, of course, that they use the original text from Dark Carnival. If they instead cobble the contents together from the text in The October Country, thinking that the stories are identical, they will be making a big mistake.)

Is there much of a difference between the stories in Dark Carnival and the re-written versions in The October Country? In some cases, not so much. But in other cases the stories are somewhat transformed. In general, the earlier versions of the stories are darker and a bit more raw; the re-writes are a bit more poetic, but sometimes read like a more "respectable" Bradbury has gone back and tidied up the work of his earlier self. This isn't far from what actually happened, as Dark Carnival came out when Bradbury was known only from stories in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, but The October Country was assembled when he had gone up in the world and was appearing in slick, upmarket magazines.



Speaking of Dark Carnival, BBC Radio 4 Extra this week broadcast a dramatisation of one of the stories from that book. "The Emissary" is a thirty-minute drama broadcast in the Haunted strand. Although marked on the BBC website as a "Radio 4 Extra debut", the closing credits of the show place it as a BBC World Service production, so it is probably not new... but I haven't been able to work out when it was made. Oddly, the late Percy Edwards is credited with playing the dog in the story, but he died a long time ago. Either it's a much older recording than it appears, or Percy is being played in as a sound effect!

"The Emissary" is still available right now for listening online, but it won't stay there forever. Get it while you can.

Labels: Dark Carnival, e-book, Emissary, radio, The October Country

There's a couple of free events next weekend (23 Feb 2013), one in Glendale, California, and the other in Indianapolis, Indiana:

Glendale's Mystery and Imagination bookshop, where Bradbury used to have his public birthday parties, is hosting readings by members of Bradbury's own theatre company. Here are the details:


Meanwhile in Indy, the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies' director Jon Eller will be speaking about Bradbury at the Irvington branch of the Indianapolis Public Library.

Details of the event are here.

Labels: Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, Eller + Touponce, Glendale, Indianapolis, Mystery and Imagination bookshop, theatre, tributes

Ray Bradbury Square, recently dedicated in Los Angeles, is now marked up on Google Maps.

Here's a screen grab (click to make bigger)... and here's a live link to it on Google Maps.

This means that it can now be found by doing a Google Maps search. My thanks to jkt and Steven Paul Leiva for making this happen.

Labels: maps, Ray Bradbury Square

In 1953, Ray Bradbury went to Ireland to write the screenplay for Moby Dick. John Huston was living there - reportedly because he was fond of Irish fox hunting.

While Bradbury and family holed up in central Dublin's Royal Hibernian Hotel (demolished in 1991), Huston was living it up in a lordly mansion which he was renting. Courtown Demesne was built in 1815, replacing a previous property which was destroyed. According to this report in the Irish Times, it's a huge building with three floors.

In 2012, Courtown Demesne was still up for sale, its asking price having been almost halved... to ten million euros. It is thanks to its proposed sale that we can see detailed shots of its exterior and interior: there is a gallery here on a property sales site; and you can download the detailed sales brochure for the property from sales agents Knight Frank here!

In Bradbury's account of his Irish experience with Huston, Green Shadows, White Whale, he describes a number of visits to Courtown. The most notable of these is in the chapter adapted from his short story "Banshee", where a fictionalised Bradbury visits his director with a finished draft of the Moby Dick screenplay, and manages for once to get the upper hand over Huston.

Bradbury's weekly trip out to Courtown - driven by Mike (in the book; Bradbury recalled his real name was Nick) - provided many of the ideas for his Irish tall tales which first emerged as short plays, later being re-written as short stories, before finally being incorporated into the grander narrative of Green Shadows, White Whale.

There's more about Bradbury's Irish experience in my earlier post on Bradbury's Dublin.

Labels: Courtown, Green Shadows White Whale, Huston, Ireland, Moby Dick

I am pleased to be able to report that Jon Eller's second volume of literary biography of Ray Bradbury is now with the publisher. Bradbury Unbound gives a detailed account of Bradbury's literary life and influences during the 1950s and 1960s, and is a follow-up to the well received Becoming Ray Bradbury.

Jon Eller (pictured here with with Bradbury) runs the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at University of Indiana-Purdue University Indianapolis, and worked with Bradbury on a number of publishing projects. The Bradbury biographies are the result of years of research, must of it assisted directly by Bradbury, who provided hours of interviews and extensive access to his private papers.

I've had the honour and privilege of reading and commenting on Bradbury Unbound as Jon has developed the manuscript over the last few years, and I believe readers will find it even more fascinating than the previous volume.

The editorial process for the book will naturally take some time, so it will be a while before the book is available to buy, but I will post updates when more information becomes available.

Labels: becoming ray bradbury, biography, Bradbury Unbound, Eller + Touponce

Ray Bradbury shares the cover of pulp magazine Stories from the Moons of Mars with his friends Henry Kuttner and Leigh Brackett.

You'll be forgiven for not recognising this particular pulp. It never existed! The cover on the left is a fake, but a beautiful one, generated by the magnificent Pulp-o-mizer.

This fun web gadget lets you choose a wide range of presets and customise the cover text, to produce hundreds of different designs. Hours of fun.

Try it here!

Labels: Pulp-o-mizer, pulps

I stumbled on a poem by the Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) and was struck by a couple of resonances with Ray Bradbury.

Miłosz was born in Lithuania, lived and worked in Poland for several years, and in the 1950s defected to the US. He wrote poetry and prose, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. The New York Times obituary for Miłosz characterises him as "a poet of memory and a poet of witness".

His poem "And Yet The Books" (1986) considers how books can survive long after individuals or civilisations have passed on:

I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

The whole poem is online at Poemhunter.
 
"And Yet The Books" reminds me of two Bradbury stories. Most obviously, I suppose, it recalls Fahrenheit 451, which is about books somehow surviving a cultural dark ages - although, of course, in Bradbury's novel it's not the physical books that survive, but the content of the books, the memorised texts.

The other Bradbury echo is of "And There Will Come Soft Rains", the poignant short story which describes a an electromechanical house which continues to serve its human owners after the human race has been wiped out by its own atomic bombs. In that story, even the house eventually must crumble into ruin, so Bradbury's story doesn't quite have the optimism implied by "And Yet The Books".

Fortunately for us, history has (so far) supported Miłosz's scenario. Despite great losses like the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, and the collapse of major civilisations, somehow great texts have survived down the ages.When books were physical objects, that is...

Labels: Fahrenheit 451, Miłosz, There Will Come Soft Rains

The photo on the left (click to embiggen!) is from the Harold Gauer Collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The one on the left is Harold Gauer himself, but he's not the reason I'm posting this.

Who are the other three people apparently standing on the wall?

None other than Ray Bradbury's writer friends Robert Bloch, C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner. The photo was apparently taken outside Bloch's parents apartment in Milwaukee, when husband and wife Moore and Kuttner were on a visit from California. The photo is undated.

Harold Gauer was a friend of Bloch's from high school, and the two collaborated on some fiction in the 1930s. In fact, Bloch's first published fiction was a story called "The Thing", which appeared in a magazine edited by Gauer. Gauer talks about Milwaukee and his escapades with Bloch in this interview from the Unofficial Robert Bloch site.

The Wisconsin Historical Society has many more Gauer photos of Bloch, many of them funny, quirky or just bizarre. Browse the complete set here.

Thanks to jkt for alerting me to the Gauer collection.

Labels: Bloch, C.L.Moore, Harold Gauer, Kuttner, Wisconsin Historical Society

I recently received my copy of Nemo! It's a new hardcover from Subterranean Press, containing a complete screenplay by Ray Bradbury. I would recommend that you buy it - but it's a limited edition, and is already sold out*.

Nemo! is another one of those unfilmed Bradbury screenplays, but this one is slightly different as it's based on characters and stories by someone else, the cartoonist Winsor McCay. Bradbury was a frequent self-adaptor, but only rarely did he adapt the work of others.

Nemo! was written in the early 1980s for producer Gary Kurtz (of Star Wars fame), but the film spent years in development hell. It's based on McCay's early twentieth-century comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, and although it uses McCay's characters and premise, it apparently takes off into a free-flowing narrative which is as much Bradbury as it is McCay. (I say all this based on what I have heard; I haven't yet had time to read Nemo! from cover to cover, and nor have I read all of McCay's original strip!)

Eventually a film based on Little Nemo was released, ten years after Bradbury began work on the screenplay: Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland. Virtually nothing of Bradbury's screenplay ended up in the completed film, but he did receive a credit for the screen concept.

This convoluted production history is not mentioned in the Subterranean book. Although it is a beautifully produced volume, it is completely devoid of any of the introductions, forewords, afterwords or contextual essays I have come to expect from this publisher. Nor does it have any illustrations or any visuals from McCay's strip. Maybe that would have blown the budget. It does have a delightful cover, which gives a tempting suggestion of what a Bradbury-McCay animated feature film might have looked like.

Subterranean's page for the book is here, and if you want to explore McCay's original adventures of Nemo, you can find a collection of them at The Comic Strip Library.



*Update: it has been brought to my attention that, although Subterranean has sold out of this book, Amazon currently has stock. Details are here.

Labels: Gary Kurtz, Little Nemo, screenwriting, Subterranean Press, Winsor McCay

In the 1980s and 1990s, Ray Bradbury's stories and essays would pop up from time to time in Omni, a glossy magazine which always claimed to be devoted to science fact and science fiction. (In fact, I seem to recall the magazine carrying articles on UFOs and other non-science topics, and the Bradbury fiction they published was almost entirely fantasy rather than SF.)

All four of Bradbury's fiction pieces in Omni were first appearances:

• "Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Home-Made Truly Egyptian Mummy" (May 1981)
• "I Suppose You Are Wondering Why We Are Here?" (October 1984)
• "Trapdoor" (April 1985)
• "Once More, Legato" (Fall 1995)

 The first three of these were later collected in Bradbury's book The Toynbee Convector (1988). The fourth was collected in Quicker Than The Eye (1996). Although these stories were what appeared to be a late flourishing of Bradbury's short story output, appearances can be deceptive. "Colonel Stonesteel..." was originally written in the late 1940s, and I think "Trapdoor" might also have originated in the '40s.

As for non-fiction, Bradbury supplied Omni with two essays:

• "Beyond Eden" (April 1980)
• "The God in ScienceFiction" (October 1980)

"Beyond Eden" was another of Bradbury's celebrations of the manned space programme, in this case extolling the potential of the Space Shuttle to inspire us. Writing at least a year before the first flight of Columbia, Bradbury wrote:

The Space Shuttle.

How will it profit the men of New Bedford? How many kegs of oil can it bring to your Nantucket Market? Is there a seed farmer in the American fields, a churchwarden on his knees, an idler on Manhattan's docks who, looking up and seeing the Shuttle fly high, will be a penny richer, a  half-ounce of philosophy better, less given to ill tempers, more filled with salvation? 

So might Starbuck have queried Ahab re the White Whale 50,000 nights ago. My answer must  imitate Ahab's, who said, touching his chest, "It will reward me here, Starbuck, here!" 

For if the Space Shuttle is not as much heart and blood as it is mind and fact, then we shouldn't fly in Space at all.

 Of course, at this time many proponents of the Shuttle were advocating the idea of the space truck, a rather mundane delivery vehicle that would get the job done routinely, quickly and cheaply. From this quotation we can see that Bradbury took a much loftier view. As so often with his pronouncements on space, Bradbury couldn't resist ending his essay with one of his poems, this one being "They Have Not Seen The Stars".

In "The God in Science Fiction", Bradbury observes that humankind's understanding of deities has evolved over time:

Somewhere back in time, the Sun God Apollo became the Sun God Christ, born in the week of the winter solstice to prove that the world had not died but would rise again in the New Year that was truly that week and not January 1.

Somewhere further along in Time. Christ moves in Space, cargoed on missions that, for Now anyway, take the name of Apollo. So old myth and new circumnavigate the stars, rebuild old dreams, promise again better destinies on faraway worlds we cannot now imagine.

From this premise, Bradbury then proposes that "Science-fiction writers will lean more and more into theology, forced by NASA's blasphemous intrusion on the Lord's-territorial imperatives to question where we  have come from and just where in Heaven or Hell we are going."  The remainder of the essay sees him accounting for his own handling of themes of religion in his science fiction stories, ranging from The Martian Chronicles to the then-unpublished Leviathan '99.

An almost complete run of Omni magazine is now available online via the Internet Archive. This allows us to read Bradbury's compositions as they originally appeared, complete with the lavish illustrations that the magazine was known for. Here are direct links to the Bradbury issues, which can be viewed/downloaded in various file formats:

April 1980
October 1980
May 1981
October 1984
April 1985
Fall 1995

Labels: Beyond Eden, God in Science Fiction, Leviathan '99, Omni, The Martian Chronicles

I noticed that director Rodion Nahapetov has updated his Bradbury page, saying that he hopes the long-planned Dandelion Wine film will go into production in the summer of 2013. For more details on the background to this project, see my original post here.

Labels: Dandelion Wine, Rodion Nahapetov

Ray Bradbury's works have often been adapted to different media, sometimes by the author himself, and sometimes by others. Occasionally his works have inspired artists in other ways, such as the Canadian Ève K. Tremblay. Tremblay has created photographs inspired by aspects of Fahrenheit 451 and once attempted to memorise the whole novel - just like a Fahrenheit 451 book-person.

Tremblay's work is detailed in this article from Canadian Art.

Over at ArtCat, you can read the letter Tremblay sent to Bradbury which explains her intentions (scroll down to "Dear Mr Bradbury").

Labels: Fahrenheit 451, Ève K. Tremblay

In 1955, after completing his work on the screenplay for Moby Dick but before the film was released, a 35-year old Ray Bradbury made an appearance as a contestant on Groucho Marx's long-running game show You Bet Your Life. It seems to have been Ray's habit to go without glasses around this time, and this is how he appears in the show. Groucho must have been a complete blur to him, as Ray was severely short-sighted for all of his adult life (and even escaped conscription because his eyes were so bad).


Let's see how Ray Bradbury copes with these tough questions on movies:

Labels: Groucho, Moby Dick, You Bet Your Life

As Ray Bradbury's literary reputation grew, he moved from the poorly paying pulp magazines to the more financially rewarding "slicks". This was a well trodden path for successful genre authors, and a path that would typically include writing for men's magazines. In Bradbury's case this meant Playboy and Esquire, among others.

He contributed six original short stories to Esquire between 1950 and 1955:

"The Dragon", "The Gift", "The Illustrated Man", "Interval in Sunlight", "The Last Night of the World", and "A Piece of Wood".

"The Last Night of the World" appeared in February 1951 - inside the cover pictured above. Shortly afterward, the story was collected in Bradbury's book The Illustrated Man, which is in fact the only Bradbury book it has appeared in. For some reason it was never selected for either of the two big short story compendiums (Bradbury Stories and The Stories of Ray Bradbury).

Esquire's website has the full text of "The Last Night of the World", and names it as one of twelve contributions Bradbury made to the magazine. Since there were only six original short stories, I am guessing that the remainder were either reprints or non-fiction articles.

Labels: Esquire, Last Night of the World, The Illustrated Man

Everyone must surely know The Day The Earth Stood Still, the 1951 SF film. Directed by Robert Wise - the editor of Citizen Kane and future producer-director of both West Side Story and The Sound Of Music - it was one of the first serious Hollywood science fiction movies, and a significant contibution to that wave of near-paranoid cold war SF on the big screen. Forget the 2008 Keanu Reeves re-make; Michael Rennie remains the definitive Klaatu.

The 1951 film was scripted by Edmund H. North, and based on Harry Bates' short story "Return of the Master", a story which still reads well today.

But did you know that the early 1980s nearly saw the return of Klaatu, in a sequel written by Ray Bradbury?

Bradbury's screen treatment for Twentieth Century-Fox was entitled The Evening Of The Second Day, and was drafted in March 1981, with revisions completed in September 1981. Bradbury was initially opposed to the idea of such a sequel. According to Starlog magazine, he told the studio "Don't do it. The original film is so beautiful. Why don't you blow it up on larger film stock and re-release it, because nobody wants to see a sequel."

The studio bosses replied, "Yes, but we want you to do it."

Bradbury described his plot for the film like this:

The return of Klaatu. He comes back under refrigeration because he has been dead, semi-dead. His body is encased in ice so you wouldn't see him very well and we wouldn't have to change characters.

Klaatu's daughter brings him back and they land on Earth at Cape Canaveral on Christmas Eve. They signify their arrival, proving how powerful they are by lighting all the towers all the way down Cape Canaveral. Oh wow! I thought it would be terrific if we could show you all the towers lit like Christmas trees on Christmas Eve. They're offering a promise, aren't they? A gift to the world. They stay around for a while and at the story's end, on New Year's Eve, they take off for the universe. Of course, that's a celebration also - and along the way, there's the usual Bradbury optimism.

I liked some of the ideas I had. They were very visual. Of course, you have to out-metaphor the other film. And what is there left to do [laughs].

A few days ago I remarked that Bradbury wrote little that was related to Christmas, so this film would have been a notable exception. It's certainly typical of Bradbury that he would be seduced by a strong central image,  and curious that he should have chosen a Christmas setting for the return of Klaatu, especially since some critics have emphasised the Christ-like attributes and behaviour of the original  character.

Would Bradbury's treatment have made a good film? It is is difficult to tell. I have no idea which director (if any) was attached to the project, nor whether this would be a "major motion picture" or just a cheap cash-in sequel. In 1981 Hollywood was still trying to come to terms with the Star Wars phenomenon, with lots of attempts to cash in on George Lucas' unexpected box-office smash. For every Blade Runner or ET, there were a dozen cheap and embarrassing Star Wars knock-offs.

In any case, Bradbury's screen treatment didn't progress to a screenplay, and the project faded away. Just another Bradbury film project that might have been.

Labels: film, Klaatu, Robert Wise, The Day The Earth Stood Still

Whaddya know, Ray Bradbury is now a Famous Author!

Here's an interview from the series Day at Night, which was recorded in 1974. Bradbury refers to Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) as being published "eight or nine years ago", but he was a couple of years off as the actual airdate of the interview was 21 January 1974). It has many of the familiar interview questions and Bradbury anecdotes, but one or two novelties such as the opening question about fantasy in relation to fantasising.

Incidentally, the whole aechive of Day at Night is online at CUNY-TV, and includes an amazing roster of interviewees.

Labels: Day at Night, Famous Authors, interviews

I'm sure I've said this before, but Christmas isn't a season usually associated with Ray Bradbury. He was more of an October guy. One of the few Bradbury compositions set at Christmas was "The Gift", a TV script he wrote for the 1950s series Steve Canyon. You can read my review of this episode here.

As 2012 draws to a close and people start summing up the year, a few more Bradbury tributes have begun to appear, usually grouped with other "people we lost this year". Here are three such short tributes, from Time, the Los Angeles Times and MyDesert.com.
 

Labels: Steve Canyon, The Gift, tributes

AboutSF is an information resource on science fiction from Kansas University. The AboutSF website carries materials aimed largely at teachers of science fiction, but much of it will also be of general interest.

Until recently, AboutSF produced a semi-regular podcast. Some of the episodes were based around readings of short stories or novel excerpts, but a number were derived from archive recordings of interviews with major figures in the history of modern SF, most of them conducted by John C. Tibbetts, conducted in the 1980s and 1990s.

Most of the Tibbetts interviews are relayed unedited. You hear Tibbetts counting down to the start of each segment; you hear the microphone being passed from one speaker to another; you hear the interviewee's telephone going off in mid-interview. A trivial element perhaps, but when the interview is a rarity such as L.Sprague de Camp and his wife Catherine Crook de Camp in conversation, it feels like stepping back in time.

Of interest to Bradburymedia readers will be the following:

• Robert Bloch - the author of Psycho, and a friend of Ray Bradbury for many years, who talks about his early career as a protege of H.P.Lovecraft, and about the ups and downs of being so closely associated with a single work (Psycho) when one's body of work is actually vast and remarkably diverse
• L.Sprague de Camp - author of Lest Darkness Fall and dozens of other novels of SF and fantasy, and also the author of "A Gun For Dinosaur", the other classic SF short story about going back in time and hunting tyrannosaurs. Mr and Mrs de Camp talk about their remarkable collaborative work of many decades.
• Jack Williamson - golden age SF novelist who was also one of the first academics to study SF. Williamson knew Bradbury and was one of Bradbury's mentors in his early career.

Other interviewees include Poul Anderson and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Full details of these fascinating archive recordings can be found on the AboutSF podcast page, here.

Labels: AboutSF, Bloch, Jack Williamson, L.Sprague de Camp, podcast

On 8 November 2012, Bradbury scholar Jon Eller presented the John D. Barlow Lecture at his home institution of Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis. In the lecture, Jon gives an account of Bradbury's development as an author, and shows how the later decades of Bradbury's career were drawn more towards Hollywood and the space programme, and less towards original fiction.

That said, he also points out the remarkable output of Bradbury's final decade, which saw the publication of two novels and many other books of short stories, poetry and essays.

Jon titled his lecture "Cry the Cosmos", after Bradbury's famous space-age essay for Life magazine. The lecture is now available in its entirety on YouTube, and the video includes images from Jon's presentation and a question and answer session.You can view the lecture here.

Labels: Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, Eller + Touponce, lecture, video clips

This photo, from the Los Angeles Times, captures the naming of Ray Bradbury Square in Los Angeles yesterday.

Read the LA Times account of the event here.

Labels: LA Times, named for Bradbury

Today is December 6th, and at 2pm in downtown Los Angeles the intersection of Fifth and Flower will be named as Ray Bradbury Square. I've blogged about it before, but the best explanation of what it's all about comes from the man who has made it all happen, Steven Paul Leiva. Steven wrote about it for the Huffington Post - read his article here.

Once again, here is the flyer for the dedication ceremony (cick to enlarge):

Labels: named for Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Square, Steven Paul Leiva

The dedication of Ray Bradbury Square has been confirmed for Thursday 6th December at 2pm, and a list of speakers has been published.

Ray Bradbury Square is in Los Angeles, located at the intersection of Fifth St and Flower St. This very urban crossroads doesn't look like the sort of place Bradbury would identify with, but to one side of the  intersection is a small park adjacent to the Los Angeles Public Library. It is in this park that the dedicatory sign will be mounted... and now it all begins to make sense, since Bradbury is strongly identified with libraries.

The speakers at the dedication ceremony will include the actor Joe Mantegna, whose credits include the Bradbury-scripted The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit. Others of note include the City's Librarian, John Szabo; the SF writer David Brin; Bradbury's daughter Sue Bradbury Nixon; Bradbury's biographer Sam Weller; and the co-ordinator of Ray Bradbury Week 2010, Steven Paul Leiva.

The event is open to the public. For more information, click on the flyer below.

Flyer - click to embiggen

Labels: Joe Mantegna, Ray Bradbury Square, Ray Bradbury Week, Steven Paul Leiva, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, Weller

Further to my recent post about Rosebud magazine, editor and publisher Rod Clarke has told me a bit more about his background and motivations for starting the magazine, now approaching its twentieth year in print. I was aware of his (and Rosebud's) Wisconsin connection, but I had not worked out how this might connect to Bradbury. This is what Rod tells me:

Having grown up in a small village in the American Midwest, I have always identified with Mr. Bradbury’s work, especially the stories with “October themes,” since I am an October baby, having just turned 65 on October 16th, and I have always been enchanted by the wonderful autumn colors of the Midwest. My wife and I live on 20 acres of rural land in southeast Wisconsin in a 140-year-old farmhouse I heat with wood I cut myself.

I worked for August Derleth’s literary publishing house Stanton & Lee in the eighties, but I never met the man. However his influence, and the inspiration he drew from the Wisconsin land have always stuck with me; in particular the wonderful balance he struck in his work between the natural and the supernatural, fact and fantasy. Derleth, as you know, provided publishing outlets for fantasy, sci-fi and horror writers old and young, including many greats of the Weird Tales crowd, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Bloch, and many more. I would like to think that Rosebud follows Derleth and Bradbury’s independent imaginative literary tradition in the American Midwest . 

Rosebud will celebrate its twentieth year of operation as an independent, self-financed literary magazine in the autumn of 2013.

August Derleth, of course, was behind Arkham House, the first publisher to put out a book by Bradbury: the 1947 short story collection Dark Carnival. Some years later, Bradbury let Dark Carnival slip out of print, and he chose to re-write many of its stories for a revised collection called The October Country - and he dedicated this revised collection to August Derleth.

Labels: August Derleth, Rosebud, Wisconsin

My researches have recently turned back towards Ray Bradbury's work on Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) and - perhaps more importantly - the influence this experience had on his own later creations such as Leviathan '99, Something Wicked This Way Comes and Green Shadows, White Whale.

After watching the Huston movie again, I started casting around for behind-the-scenes information on the film, and stumbled on a fascinating post on a blog called Matte Shot: a Tribute to Golden Era Special Effects. It includes some rare images of the whale and boat miniatures used in the film, and some informed speculation on the craftsmen who brought the film's effects work to the screen. Read all about it here.

My own review of the film is here - although it really needs updating, since Bradbury's version of the screenplay has since been published, and shows that the vast majority of the film sticks to Bradbury's script, although the final act shows some small but significant deviations from it, especially in the behaviour and implied motivations of Starbuck.

Labels: Moby Dick

An art gallery in Ray Bradbury's old home town of Venice, California, is currently staging an exhibition of works related to Bradbury. In fact, L&M Gallery is located on the exact spot where Bradbury lived in the 1940s, and where he wrote some of his early works in including much of The Martian Chronicles. The exhibition runs until January 2013. Here's some more detail from the Gallery's press release:

Curated by Yael Lipschutz in honor of Bradbury and his journey into the red unknown, the exhibition will include the original manuscript of The Martian Chronicles, alongside artists ranging from Yves Klein—whose mysterious blue sponge sculpture from 1958 is as strange and disconcerting as any Mars rock—to Larry Bell, Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe, Matthew Ritchie, and Vija Celmins, whose exquisite renderings of the cosmos serve to propel the viewer forward through space as we travel with Bradbury on his interstellar mission. Some works directly invoke the Red Planet, such as Ed Ruscha’s Hold on For a Minute, I’m No Martian (1980), and Tom Sachs’ Phonkey (2012), a large-scale sculptural tableau, in which a lone radio sits silent, stranded atop a scorching Martian terrain.

Cordella (1988-1992), an ethereal blue resin and fiberglass plank by the late John McCracken, (1934-2011) more abstractly suggests Bradbury and the perceptual doors of the mind he opened with his literature. Mars represented not only a stage upon which the writer projected our dreams and fears as a society, but another dimension of thought. Today, as exploration of the fourth planet from the Sun continues, we revisit this philosophic arena.

“Myth, seen in mirrors, incapable of being touched, stays on,” wrote Bradbury. The exhibition is also honored to include works by the late Michael Asher (1943-2012), Mike Kelley (1954-2012), and Ken Price (1935-2012), as well as Scoli Acosta, Kenneth Anger, Brian Butler, Sarah Cain, Corazon Del Sol, Noah Davis, Liz Deschenes, Fred Eversley, Thomas Houseago, Lipschutz & Lipschutz, Anthony McCall, Cameron Parsons, Judson Powell, Noah Purifoy, Ry Rocklen, Eddie Ruscha, Ben Sakoguchi, Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber.

For more information on the exhibition, visit the L & M Arts website.

Labels: art, exhibition, Venice California

The marvellous bare.bones website has published another of Jack Seabrook's insightful reviews of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. This latest instalment is a detailed breakdown of the episode "The Life Word of Juan Diaz", which was scripted by Bradbury and based on his own short story. You can read Jack's review here. (My own review of the same episode is on my Alfred Hitchcock Hour page, here.)

Jack's other reviews of Bradbury/Hitchcock episodes are all worth reading. There are collected here.

Labels: Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Juan Diaz, Seabrook

Here's an unusual little item, a supposedly "lost" interview with Ray Bradbury. I say "lost" because it seems absurd to suggest that Bradbury - one of the most widely interviewed and media-friendly writers of his generation - could possibly have done an interview that contained anything so unique that its loss would be significant. There are whole BOOKS of interviews with Bradbury out there, and he was profiled for interview-based documentaries at least four times across his career.

Anyway, reservations about the title apart, The Lost Interview of Ray Bradbury does give us a nice glimpse of Ray and his thoughts from about twenty years ago. At this point he was in his early 70s, a time when most people would have long since retired, but not our Ray. Instead, he was writing scripts for his long-running TV series, putting together the short story collection Quicker Than The Eye, and launching his novel Green Shadows, White Whale. I think this is what they call a third act... The film ends with Ray reading his poem "Doing is Being", which alone makes it worth watching.

The Lost Interview of Ray Bradbury - twenty-year-old footage blended with stock footage and (in my view) rather unnecessary visual enhancements - is directed by Harry Hall, and can be viewed in three episodes on Vimeo:

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3

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Meanwhile, the Ventura County Star reports that Michael O'Kelly's documentary about Bradbury - Live Forever: the Ray Bradbury Odyssey - has been screened, and that O'Kelly is now looking for a distribution deal to get the film released to TV and/or DVD. The report recaps much of the story of the making of the film during the last three years or so of Bradbury's life, and also recaps the highlights of Bradbury's life and career. The report is here.

Labels: documentary, interviews, Live Forever documentary, Michael O'Kelly

As the days, weeks, months go flying by I somehow managed to miss blogging anything about Bradbury on Halloween. If there is one month of the year that is Bradbury's, it is undoubtedly October: the month that figures centrally in at least three of his books:

• The October Country - where it is right there in the title; a collection of his weird tales, derived from Bradbury's earlier (out of print) collection Dark Carnival
• Something Wicked This Way Comes - where October is right there in the opening line ("First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.")
• The Halloween Tree - which is all about the history and traditions of Halloween

Fortunately, others kept Bradbury visible this Halloween. For example...

Bradburymedia's friend Brian Sibley reminded us once again how a blog post should be done, with his excellent account not only of the creation of Bradbury's Halloween Tree, but of his friendship with the late author, and of the spreading tradition of the Halloween Tree concept. You can read Brian's post here.

Radio Station KPFK re-broadcast an archive programme which includes a performed reading of The Halloween Tree - including Ray Bradbury himself as one of the readers. This show is currently available in the stations online archive, but I expect it will only be there for a short while, as don't think they archive everything forever. So, listen while you can, but make sure you allow yourself a full three hours. Here's the direct download link.

Labels: Brian Sibley, Halloween, Halloween Tree, KPFK, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The October Country

Bradburymedia has been rather quiet of late. There's no big explanation for this, other than my general state of busy-ness... partly connected to my resolution to complete a cover-to-cover reading of Moby Dick in two weeks or less.

Of course, when John Huston invited Ray Bradbury to write a screenplay for Moby Dick in the 1950s, Bradbury replied "But I've never been able to finish the damned thing." Me neither, until now.

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A new issue of Rosebud magazine is now available, issue 53. This is "the magazine for people who enjoy good writing", and which has in the past included a fair amount of Bradbury-related material:

• Rosebud 25 featured “Last Rites,” a reprint of an earlier Bradbury story (also collected in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales and Quicker than the Eye)
• Rosebud 28 featured “To Ireland,” a poem by Bradbury, and “Rendezvous with Ray Bradbury,” an article by Laura Treacy Bentley
• Rosebud 34 featured “The Trivial Pursuits Transporter,” a short story by Ray Bradbury which has yet to appear in a Bradbury collection
• Rosebud 39 featured an exclusive interview with Ray Bradbury by Gregory Miller
• Rosebud 52 featured Bill Goodwin’s “Citizen Ray,” an essay about his friendship with Bradbury

All issues are still available for purchase from the Rosebud online store - most for $6.95, but issue 34 with its uncollected Bradbury story will set you back a cool $100.

There's no Bradbury in issue 53, but I understand from editor Rod Clarke that there will be something about Bradbury in the next issue. More details to follow.

(My thanks to Eric Carter for pulling the information together on Bradbury appearances in Rosebud back issues.)

Labels: Bill Goodwin, Moby Dick, Rosebud

It's too late to attend the actual event, which was several days ago, but a press release announcing "Waukegan 2.0 - Rebuilding Jack Benny's and Ray Bradbury's Hometown" caught my eye. It's not the first time we have read about plans to revitalise the city, but it is a plan with very definite goals.

 No mention there of the Carnegie Library, I notice...

Labels: Carnegie Library, Waukegan

In September, the Planetary Society held a tribute to Ray Bradbury. Founder Louis Friedman talked about Bradbury's siginificance to real-life planetary exploration. Bradbury's contribution to this field was not scientific or technical - he was no scientist, after all. What Bradbury DID bring was an immense enthusiasm on the key question of why our species is driven to explore.

Whether you agree with Bradbury or not, there is no doubt that he was a prominent poetic voice, particularly when the American space programme went into contraction post-Apollo.

Here is Louis Friedman's talk. It includes a lot of archive photos of Ray at JPL (and elsewhere), some of which I had never seen before.

Labels: JPL, Louis Friedman, Planetary Society, tributes

The third volume of the journal The New Ray Bradbury Review is now available. You can order directly from the publisher, Kent State University Press, or from the usual outlets such as Amazon. (Amazon usually has it for a lower price, and sometimes lists third-party suppliers with even lower prices.)

Although it's an academic journal, all issues of the Review so far have been very accessible, with informative articles that work for the general reader and fan, not just the Eng. Lit. scholar.

This new issue is made up almost entirely of fragments of Bradbury's own writing. As such, it will be a useful resource for the Bradbury scholar, as it gives direct access to so many story openings and undeveloped raw ideas. But this also will appeal to those who just love Bradbury's writing. It's like being allowed to look through Bradbury's personal files and getting a glimpse of work in progress.

Labels: New Ray Bradbury Review

According to his biographer Sam Weller, the last thing Ray Bradbury wrote for publication prior to his death was "The Book and the Butterfly" It's a short essay written as the introduction to The Best Nonrequired Reading 2012. How does Sam know this? Simple: Ray dictated it to him in April and they worked on the revisions in May, shortly before Ray passed away.

"The Book and the Butterfly" has been reproduced online by the Huffington Post, and can be read here.

Labels: Best Nonrequired Reading 2012, Book and the Butterfly, Weller

I'm very late in reporting this, but better late than never!

On 18th September, Los Angeles City Council voted to name an intersection Ray Bradbury Square. The intersection is of Fifth Street and Flower Street - click here to view it on Google Maps. You can read a brief account of the council proceedings here.

Three key figures in this renaming were Steven Paul Leiva (co-ordinator of 2010's Ray Bradbury Week in Los Angeles), Sue Bradbury Nixon (Ray Bradbury's daughter) and Jose Huizar (LA Councilmember). The three are pictured together after the event in this photo from Steven's Facebook page:





Steven has also posted a transcript of Sue's comments to the Council, which I would like to reproduce here:

First of all, I’d like to thank the many councilmembers who worked on, and supported, the motion to name the intersection of 5th and Flower, near the Los Angeles Public Library, Ray Bradbury Square. My father would be so proud to be honored in this way.

Labels: Leiva, named for Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Square, Ray Bradbury Week., Sue Bradbury Nixon

Here's an announcement from Bill Goodwin - illustrator, writer, and friend of Ray Bradbury:




It sounds as if this panel is something of a follow-up to the Mars and theMind of Man symposium; this ties in with the Curiosity rover, just as the 1971 symposium tied in with Mariner 9. It sounds like an excellent panel, and I only wish I could be there. There is more information about the free 'parent' event AltCar Expo 2012 here.

Meanwhile, down in Venice, California - where Bradbury lived for many years - there is an unusual event called a type-in. Apparently, participants will be able to type on one of Ray's old typewriters. More details are here.

Labels: AltCar Expo, Bill Goodwin, symposium, typewriter