Orbiting Ray Bradbury's Mars...in Arizona

Orbiting Ray Bradbury's Mars is a new book edited by Gloria McMillan (University of Arizona and Pima Community College, Tucson). Yesterday, McMillan appeared on Tucson public television to discuss the book. You can view the TV show below - the Bradbury book is the headline of the programme, and then the first full report after the news summary.

The accompanying web page refers to the book as "kaleidoscopic", because of the many facets of Bradbury that it tries to bring out. The book's subtitle claims for it "biographical, anthropological, literary, scientific and other perspectives", which does indeed sound multi-faceted. So far, I have only dipped into the book, more or less at random, but at some point I will post a review of it.

The original call for submissions to the book mentioned the Arizona connection, suggesting that the book would be "keyed to the fact that Ray Bradbury spent a formative teen year in Tucson, Arizona, that impressed his young mind, largely shaping his metaphorical Mars" and it is precisely this aspect that Arizona's AZ Illustrated picks up on here, leading off with the scientific view of Mars.

Tributes Continue

As the headline says: the tributes continue. Comic-Con took place last week, and featured a well attended tribute panel which included Margaret Atwood, Sam Weller, Marc Scott Zicree and others. There are plenty of accounts of this panel on the web, such as this one.

Zicree talks more about Bradbury in this BBC radio interview.

Fans in Pittsburgh staged their own tribute by reading Bradbury stories.

Other tributes inevitably come wrapped up in reviews of the new tribute volume Shadow Show.

Gloria McMillan of Arizona University has put out a call for papers inviting scholars to contribute to a proposed book with the working title The Tucson Bradbury Chronicles: Mars is The West. This essay volume will take as its starting point the fact that the young Ray Bradbury lived for a while in Arizona, but will explore Bradbury's engagement with the western US in broad terms. Such academic volumes are often a long time in development, so it may be some time before anything comes of this, but I will post more information when it becomes available.