Lockdown Choices - Issue #4: The Golden Apples of the Sun

This is the fourth in my series of Lockdown Choices, where I seek to entertain you while in coronavirus-isolation, and remind you of Bradbury's great works in this, his centenary year.

In these posts, I cover each of Ray Bradbury's books, say something about the contents, then pick the best stories and adaptations.

Lockdown Choice #4: The Golden Apples of the Sun

First edition. Doubleday, 1953.

The Book

The Golden Apples of the Sun was Ray Bradbury's fourth book, a collection of science-fictional, fantasy, and "realistic" tales. With Bradbury, of course, "realism" can be very far from our everyday reality, but what I mean here is the type of story which does not hinge upon a science-fictional or fantastical premise.

The book collected twenty-two stories, most of which had previously been published in various magazines between 1944 and 1953. Like Bradbury's first book, Dark Carnival, the stories are presented as is, without any attempt to connect them through a linking narrative. It is therefore the first of Bradbury's Doubleday books to be allowed the luxury of being an undisguised short story collection. (Remember that editor Walter Bradbury (no relation) had asked of Ray, "We've disguised The Martian Chronicles as a novel, do you think we can somehow do the same thing with The Illustrated Man?")

As well as being "just" a collection of short stories, Golden Apples has the distinction of collecting a number of stories which had won awards or had been published in venues of some prestige. "Power House", for example, had won an O. Henry Prize; "The Big Black and White Game" had been selected for Best American Short Stories 1946; and "I See You Never" for Best American Short Stories 1948. And by now, Bradbury's short stories were being collected not just from pulp magazines, but from major-market publications such as American Mercury, Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker. Appearing in these majors brought more than just prestige: they brought better income.

Another distinctive feature of Golden Apples is the art direction. For the first time, Bradbury's work was surrounded by the work of artist Joe Mugnaini. Mugnaini provided both the cover art (see above) and a uniform series of line drawings, one for each story. Mugnaini and Bradbury became good friends, and collaborated repeatedly over the year, to the extent that many readers find the two inextricably linked. Where else might you recognise that Mugnaini style from? For a start, there's that iconic newspaper-fireman from the cover of Fahrenheit 451.

For some reason, the first UK edition of Golden Apples deleted one story, "The Big Black and White Game" - perhaps on the grounds that the baseball theme might be meaningless to British readers. Subsequent UK editions restored the full table of contents, however.


Unfortunately, Golden Apples has become somewhat confusing in more recent times. Somewhere along the line, it became part of a set of editorial mash-ups which resulted in The Golden Apples of the Sun disappearing, and being effectively supplanted by The Golden Apples of the Sun AND OTHER STORIES. This latter title (which usually has "and other stories" written as a whispering footnote) scrambles the order of the stories and mixes in others from elsewhere. And - blasphemy! - removes the Mugnaini illustrations.

For some readers, there's no problem here. It's just a collection of short stories. But to others (i.e. me), the art direction and the running order is all part of "the book". If you're a person who puts their MP3s on shuffle, you probably don't care about this. But if you like to hear, say, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with all the tracks in the right order, then this is a very big deal indeed.

In fact, according to Eller and Touponce, the visual theme of the original book was Bradbury's concept, and was his alternative way of having a consistent authorial thread running throughout the book (Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction, p. 367). So taking away the Mugnaini artwork would be the equivalent of removing the linking material from The Martian Chronicles.

Check the small print to see whether you have an actual Golden Apples, or an ...and other stories edition. Current paperback, HarperCollins.

Find out how The Golden Apples of the Sun finally allowed Bradbury to break out of the fantasy/science fiction "ghetto" and gain respect in the mainstream in myBradbury 101 video below. And scroll further down the page for my pick of the best stories from the book.

 

The Stories

Because of its eclectic nature, pulling in science fiction, fantasy and realistic stories, Golden Apples feels less coherent than any of Bradbury's previous books. But that does set a pattern which would continue through most of his subsequent short-story collections. Here are my personal story picks, perhaps heavily influenced by the fact that this is the first Bradbury book I ever read.


"The Pedestrian" - a really simple concept, and strangely appropriate for the COVID-19 lockdown: in some unspecified future, it is illegal to walk anywhere. Instead, everyone is supposed to stay home and watch TV. Mr Leonard Mead, however, breaks the rules. He goes out (gasp!) for a solitary stroll. Of course, it being the future and everything, he is stopped by what turns out to be... Well, read it for yourself.

According to Bradbury, one day he took his pedestrian out for another stroll - and found himself writing a new story, "The Fireman", which he would later expand into Fahrenheit 451.

Mugnaini illustration for "The Pedestrian".

"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" - I think this is truly the first piece of fiction I ever read which amazed me, and convinced me that words on a page could be magical and insightful. This when I was, I suppose, twelve years old. It's a simple story of a murder, except that the murderer becomes obsessed with the fingerprints he has left behind. Or probably left behind. Or must have, or possibly left behind. His gradual descent into obsession is masterfully written, and is another fine example of Bradbury constructing a character, even though that's something he is alleged not to be able to do. It's also full of beautifully poetic writing which is also narratively purposeful.

He has forgotten to wash the fourth wall of the room! And while he was gone the little spiders had popped from the fourth unwashed wall and swarmed over the already clean walls, dirtying them again! On the ceilings, from the chandelier, in the corners, on the floor, a million little whorled webs hung billowing at his scream! Tiny, tiny little webs, no bigger than, ironically, your - finger!

As he watched, the webs were woven over the picture frame, the fruit bowl, the body, the floor. Prints wielded the paper knife, pulled out drawers, touched the table top, touched, touched, touched everything everywhere.

 "The Fruit..." was originally published with Bradbury's punning title "Touch and Go!", but he wisely switched to the title the story is now better known by. The significance of the fruit? Our murderous protagonist becomes so obsessed with fingerprints that he cleans even things he knows he didn't ever touch...

"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" first appeared as "Touch and Go" in Detective Book Magazine, November 1948.

" A Sound of Thunder" - how could I not pick this story? It's one of the most anthologised short stories of all time, and one of the best known science fiction shorts. In case you don't recall this one, it's the one where people go back in time to hunt dinosaurs. Bradbury didn't originate that concept of course, and there are numerous other variations on the theme from other authors. But what Bradbury does so much better than, say, L. Sprague de Camp's "A Gun for Dinosaur", is create a clear connection and contrast between small, selfish actions, and large-scale consequences. And this is why I could also have said, "in case you don't recall this one, it's the one with the butterfly".

"Thunder" was rejected by The Magazine of Fantasy of Science Fiction, whose editor declared it was unbelievable because of the way it handles the time-travel paradox. But Bradbury stuck with his story, believing that the powerful imagery far outweighed any appeal to logic. The story was published instead by the mainstream magazine Collier's. 

"A Sound of Thunder" first appearance. Collier's, 1952.

"The Great Wide World Over There" -  proof if it were needed that Bradbury can write stories without a science-fictional or fantastical premise. This tale is of Cora, who longs to be like her neighbour and receive letters from far and wide - except that Cora can't read or write. She gets Benjy to send off for things for her. All sorts of things: a free muscle chart, a free health map, information from a detective school, anything that she can eagerly anticipate arriving.

There's a neat little plot within the story, and again a demonstration that Bradbury can craft characters who are tightly bound to his narrative and theme.

Mugnaini illustration for "The Great Wide World Over There".

"Hail and Farewell" - an often overlooked story of a boy who cannot grow up, this is an exquisite example of Bradbury taking a simple fantasy concept (Peter Pan anyone?) and finding the tragedy within it, just as he had done with the earlier story "The Martian" in The Martian Chronicles. The tragedy here comes from the fact that every time the boy (outwardly stuck at the age of twelve, but actually born forty-three years ago) finds himself a family to adopt, he must eventually walk away from them. The reason: they will eventually discover his secret, and will no longer be able to love him: "after three years, or five years, they guessed, or a travelling man came through, or a carnival man saw me, and it was over. It always had to end."

Mugnaini illustration for "Hail and Farewell".

 

The Adaptations

"The Pedestrian" was adapted for the stage, and later for TV, by Bradbury himself. In both of these adaptations, he was faced with a slight problem: Mr Leonard Mead does most of his walking alone among empty streets, and therefore doesn't have much to say or anyone to interact with; not exactly the most riveting of stories to perform with actors on a stage or on screen. His solution? He gives Mead a walking companion. It's not a bad piece of theatre - see for yourself in the Ray Bradbury Theatre adaptation, here - but it really turns it into a very different story, and I think I prefer the original tale.

"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" was adapted by Ilona Ference for a British  series, Television Playhouse, in 1963 with Leonard Rossiter in the role of the nervous killer, and adapted by Bradbury himself for an early episode of Ray Bradbury Theater, with Michael Ironside and Robert Vaughn.

"The Meadow" is something of a reverse adaptation: Bradbury wrote the short story first, then adapted it for radio for World Security Workshop. But the radio adaptation appeared in 1947, and the short story in 1953, giving the impression that the story is an adaptation of the play.

"Hail and Farewell" was also adapted for Ray Bradbury Theatre, albeit as a rather non-memorable instalment.

But Golden Apples' biggest stories are the two creature features. Both "The Fog Horn" and "A Sound of Thunder" feature prehistoric creatures, and both have had a long afterlife in media adaptation. "The Fog Horn" was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post under the title "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms", and served as the inspiration for Ray Harryhausen's first solo animation feature under that name, and arguably inspired the similarly themed original Godzilla. "Thunder" was not quite so lucky.

"A Sound of Thunder" has been adapted for radio quite successfully, as in the NPR series Bradbury Thirteen, and even the Ray Bradbury Theater version scripted by Ray was OK (apart from the pre-Jurassic Park rubber monster). But it was also the basis of a dodgy feature film directed by Peter Hyams in 2005; Hyams got the job after Bradbury allegedly had an earlier director fired from the project for trying to remove the butterfly from the story. The story also inspired a segment of The Simpsons!

Find Out More...

See my page for Golden Apples, here.

Read about a little-known educational short film adaptation of "The Flying Machine" by Bernard Selling, here.

Listen and Watch...

I took part in a lively discussion of "A Sound of Thunder" and its movie adaptation on the Take Me To Your Reader podcast. Listen to it here.

Watch Tyne Daly bring Cora to life in Ray's dramatisation of "The Great Wide World Over There" for Ray Bradbury Theatre, here.

Next Up...

The next of my Lockdown Choices will be Bradbury's fifth book: Fahrenheit 451.

The Two Rays

Ray Bradbury and animator Ray Harryhausen had remarkably parallel lives and careers. Both were born in 1920 (and so both are due a big centenary celebration in a few years). Both were members of the same science fiction group in Los Angeles. Both credited on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Both with a love of King Kong and other classics of fantasy film and literature. They met in 1938 at the house of collector and editor Forrest J Ackerman, and remained friends for life. According to Bradbury, they "made a pact promising to grow old, but never to grow up".

In 1947 Harryhausen was best man at Bradbury's wedding, and Bradbury once described the wedding party crowding into Harryhausen's car afterwards for a trip across town. A few years later, Bradbury dropped in on Harryhausen at work on a new dinosaur movie, and was invited by producer Hal Chester to take a look at the script. Bradbury quite liked what he read, but pointed out that the scene where a creature from the deep destroys a lighthouse is remarkably similar to a scene in a short story he had recently written for the Saturday Evening Post. Chester's face flushed as he realised what had happened: the script had been inspired by Bradbury's story (or more likely the artwork which accompanied it), but the inspiration had been forgotten. Until now. Bradbury was paid for the use of the story, so when it came out, the film's poster proudly boasted that Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was "suggested by the sensational Saturday Evening Post story by RAY BRADBURY".

By the early 1960s Bradbury, now well and truly established as a short story writer, novelist and screenwriter, found himself separated from friend Harryhausen by the Atlantic, as Harryhausen found European locations and studios more suitable for the style of films he was developing. But they maintained their friendship through air-mail correspondence. Some of these letters have survived in the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies in Indianapolis. "Dear Brother Ray," Harryhausen would write from exotic locations in Spain; and he would sign off as "the Other Ray" or "the tormented one."

Occasionally Bradbury would send film ideas to Harryhausen - as he would send off ideas to anyone he thought was compatible with the idea: Federico Fellini, David Lean, Akira Kurosawa. In 1976, Bradbury shared his idea/outline "The Nefertiti-Tut Express" with Harryhausen, who in turn shared it with longtime producer Charles H. Schneer. Harryhausen reluctantly admitted that the idea wasn't suitable for the type of film he wanted to make, but wrote that one day the right subject would come along to allow the two Rays to collaborate. Alas, this would never come to pass, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms remains the only film where Ray B and Ray H have their names together on the screen.

Over the years, Bradbury built versions of Harryhausen into his stories. In 1962, he fictionalised a real-life encounter Harryhausen had had with a nasty producer. The result was the humorous short story published as "The Prehistoric Producer", but better known today as "Tyrannosaurus Rex". Here is how that story describes the painstaking stop-motion animator's art:

Step by step, frame by frame of film, stop motion by stop motion, he, Terwilliger, had run his beasts through their postures, moved each a fraction of an inch, photographed them, moved them another hair, photographed them for hours and days and months.

"Tyrannosaurus Rex" was later filmed for the TV series The Ray Bradbury Theater,with a script by Bradbury himself. In all honesty I have to say that it's not a very good episode - it was made on far too low a budget. However, for the all-too-brief animated sequences the producers enlisted French animator Jean Manuel Costa, winner of multiple Cesar Awards (French Oscars) for works such as Le voyage d'Orphée (1983) and La tendresse du maudit (1980), and therefore something of a French Harryhausen.

In 1992, Bradbury was one voice among many of Hollywood's great and good lobbying for Harryhausen to receive a special Oscar. The campaign was a success, and resulted in Tom Hanks and Bradbury introducing Harryhausen as he was given the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for his lifetime of achievements in animation and film-making. The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies holds copies of many of the campaign letters, and a list of the senders reads like a Who's Who of film-makers and special effects artists: Bradbury, George Lucas, Dennis Muren, Ken Ralston, Gordon Hessler, Miklos Rozsa, John Dykstra, Joe Dante, John Landis, Burgess Meredith, Charles H. Schneer, Jim Danforth, Rick Baker, Stan Winston, Gale Anne Hurd, Nathan Juran, Albert Whitlock... every one of whom wrote a loving tribute to Harryhausen, their colleague, friend or inspiration.

In 1993, Bradbury paid perhaps the highest tribute of all, by incorporating a fictionalised Harryhausen as a major character in his Hollywood novel A Graveyard for Lunatics. Special effects wizard "Roy Holdstrom" is a very thinly disguised Harryhausen, and accompanies the narrator in attempting to solve a murder mystery in 1950s Hollywood. Here is how the narrator first sees Holdstrom's workshop, which we can imagine is similar to what Bradbury saw back in 1938 when first invited into Harryhausen's garage:

Stage 13 was, then, a toy shop, a magic chest, a sorceror's trunk, a trick manufactory, and an aerial hangar of dreams at the centre of which Roy stood each day, waving his long piano fingers at mythic beasts to stir them, whispering, in their ten-billion year slumbers.

Bradbury wrote other tributes as introductions for Harryhausen's wonderful books, Film Fantasy Scrapbook and An Animated Life, and in 2010 also provided a video greeting for Harryhausen's 90th birthday BAFTA tribute.

Ray Bradbury passed away in 2012, and less than a year later Ray Harryhausen also left us. Alas, the two never did work together on a movie, but they both had long and successful careers and remained friends to the end. They also both lived long enough to see significant recognition for their work: Harryhausen with the Oscar and BAFTA tributes, and Bradbury with his French Order of Arts & Letters and his Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.

As 2020 approaches - the centenary of both Rays - it will be great to celebrate these twin talents, united at age eighteen with their shared passion for King Kong, and never divided.

Trailers from Hell

The always entertaining site Trailers from Hell hosts commentaries on movies by movie makers and critics, and is always a good place to head when you have a spare five minutes or so.

Among the delights are director and cinematographer Ernest Dickerson reviewing the 1956 Bradbury-Melville-Huston collaboration Moby Dick

... and director and screenwriter Darren Bousman discussing the Bradbury-Harryhausen Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Monsters!

The blog Den of Geek, by way of introducing a DVD release of the movie Monsters, joins a long line of commentators who credit Ray Bradbury with inventing the "primeval creature causes destruction in the modern world" subgenre. The justification for this claim is Bradbury's short story "The Fog Horn", once and famously filmed as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

The claim is perhaps slightly exaggerated, in that many of the key elements of this subgenre originated with the movie amd are nowhere to be found in Bradbury's original story. However, any grace and pathos typically found in such movies are most definitely to be found in "The Fog Horn". And it's but a short step from the central image in Bradbury's story to the imagery of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which was achieved chiefly through the efforts of Bradbury's lifelong friend, Ray Harryhausen.

Read more about Bradbury's contribution to The Beast... on my page for the movie, here - and other posts relating to the Rhedosaurus here.

Many Happy Returns

Ninety years ago today, Ray Douglas Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois.

Happy Birthday, Ray.

And: Live Forever!

Here's a birthday card I made:




Many thanks to Brian Sibley for permission to use his photo of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.

Launch parties with Ray and Ray

Last week saw the launch of Sam Weller's book of Bradbury interviews, Listen to the Echoes. The event at the Mystery and Imagination bookstore in California attracted quite a bit of media attention. The LA Times reports on it here. Weller blogs about it here.

And if that's not enough, watch a video clip of the introductions on YouTube, here.



Further to my earlier post about Ray Harryhausen's 90th birthday, Harryhausen has opened an exhibition of his work in London at the London Film Museum. Fellow blogger Brian Sibley was there at the launch and has posted his account of the event, complete with photos of Mr H's mythic creations - such as this familiar Bradburyan Beast:



If you are wondering where you have seen this chap before, visit my page on The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms!

Titans, Wounds

Ray Bradbury gets a mention in this Daily Telegraph interview with Ray Harryhausen. Bradbury and Harryhausen, of course, met in their teens. They shared a love of King Kong, dinosaurs and SF. In the 1950s they (sort of) collaborated on The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. In the 1990s, Bradbury fictionalised Harryhausen into a lead character in his novel A Graveyard for Lunatics.



Another friend of Bradbury and fellow dinosaur enthusiast is the artist William Stout. I don't know how I missed this at the time, but back in February Stout blogged about his visit to Pasadena to see one of Bradbury's plays. Stout was one of the illustrators for Bradbury's book Dinosaur Tales.



The writer Jonathan Walker has created an interesting looking book, which he is calling an "illuminated novel". He claims that the text, design and illustrations of Five Wounds have been concived together, and the website for the book makes it sound very intriguing. Walker's blog talks about many of the inspirations and ideas behind the novel, among which is Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

We'll Always Have Paris Review...

The Paris Review's latest issue carries one of Sam Weller's interviews with Ray Bradbury. Weller, of course, if Bradbury's official biographer, author of The Bradbury Chronicles. In the course of developing the biography, Weller undertook many hours of interviews with Bradbury. In June of this year, another book containing nothing but interviews will be released. Entitled Listen to the Echoes and consisting of over three hundred pages of chat, the book is available for pre-ordering now.

I confess to being a little (I emphasise little) tired of Bradbury's interviews, in the sense that he often reels out the same anecdotes again and again. But I attribute this to interviewers asking the same questions again and again. Steven Aggelis's Conversations with Ray Bradbury is fascinating precisely because Aggelis carefully selected interviews that allowed us to see how Bradbury's thought evolved over his career. I am hoping that Weller's Listen to the Echoes will work because his in-depth knowledge of Bradbury's life enables him to come up with new questions and new angles.

The Paris Review website has a short extract from the Weller/Bradbury interview, in which Bradbury amusingly recounts what happened when he was invited to adapt War and Peace for King Vidor.




The B-Movie Film Vault Blog has an amusing top ten of the best Ray Harryhausen creatures. At number nine is the rhedosaurus. This, of course, is the dinosaur that was The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, based on the Bradbury story also known as "The Fog Horn". My own review of the film can be found here.




Subterranean Press are highlighting reviews of their edition of Pleasure to Burn, a collection of the stories that were directly ancestral to Fahrenheit 451. I haven't yet seen the book in the flesh, but I believe it has essentially the same fiction content as Gauntlet's Match to Flame. As far as I can tell, however, only Match to Flame has the contextual essays from Jon Eller and Bill Touponce. There are some other small differences as well, but I can't quite figure them all out.




Urban Archipelago Films has announced the DVD release of their film Ray Bradbury's Chrysalis. I haven't seen the film yet, but I know it has been doing well on the festival circuit. The DVD will be out on 27 July 2010 - full details are here. I'm pretty sure this date was announced a while ago, but I may not have mentioned it on this site.




Ever wondered what "a Ray Bradbury" is? Maybe one of these Gene Roddenberrys will know the answer:

Le Monstre...

I was amused to discover that The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was dubbed Le Monstre des Temps Perdus for French-speaking markets - this translates back into English as "the monster of lost times", unless I am very much mistaken. Presumably the fact that the critter was from the deepest depths wasn't enough for the French, so they empasised the depth of time instead. I discovered this thanks to this blog post from Hal Astell, which gives a neat review of the Bradbury-inspired, Harryhausen-animated movie which started the monster flick trend of the 1950s. My own page on the film, giving Bradbury's account of his involvement, is here.

Another Bradbury media review, this time of "The Screaming Woman" - one of the earliest Ray Bradbury Theatre episodes - can be found on Examiner.com. My own review of that episode can be found here.

Finally, for filing under the heading of "the mind boggles" comes this production, shortly to open in New York:

Opera on Tap will present Operamission's production of the one-act opera Margot Alone in the Light, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's short story All Summer in a Day by composer Clint Borzoni and librettist Emily Conbere. Margot Alone in the Light was originally conceived during Borzoni and Conbere's participation as Resident Artists in American Lyric Theater's Composer Librettist Development Program. Ray Bradbury's story is set in a classroom of schoolchildren on the planet Venus, where it rains constantly with the exception of one hour every seven years. None of the schoolchildren remember the sun, except for 'Margot,' who moved to Venus four years ago from Ohio. The role of 'Margot' will be portrayed by soprano Martha Guth and the role of 'Mrs. Clott,' the schoolteacher, will be sung by mezzo-soprano Alteouise de Vaughn. It will be staged by Scott C. Embler (founding member and former producing director of Vital Theatre Company). Jennifer Peterson, founder and director of operamission, will conduct the opera.

More details can be found at Broadway World.

More decline and decay...

Further to my previous blog mentioning the remains of the Fahrenheit 451 monorail, some more ruins to ponder. This time, the remains of Venice, California, which have had a considerable impact on Ray Bradbury.

As far I am aware, the first declared influence was on Bradbury's short story "The Fog Horn", the 1951 tale of a lighthouse destroyed by a lonely dinosaur. The story was the basis of the 1950s monster movie The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. So where is the Venice influence? The dinosaur itself! In a frequently recounted anecdote, Bradbury tells how he saw the remains of the Venice Pier rollecrcoaster, and imagined it to be the skeletal remains of a dinosaur. Freewheeling from there, he asked what would lure such a creature to such a place. A lighthouse, of course!

But Venice has had more than one story's worth of influence on Bradbury. Much of the carnival imagery of his early stories is likely to have been influenced by the carnival-like Venice, California, which Bradbury probably first visited in the late 1930s when he was in his teens.

Later in life, Bradbury makes explicit use of Venice, its pier and derelict canals in his 1985 novel Death is a Lonely Business. Indeed, his depiction of the town influenced the cover art of several editions of the novel - there are some examples here.

There are more images of Venice in its prime and in decline in the online photo collection of the Los Angeles Public library. Click here to see a selection.

Old Friends...and more

Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen, friends since their teens, yesterday signed books together at the Mystery & Imagination bookstore in Los Angeles.

Both Rays were born in 1920, and both were members of the same LA science-fiction group in the 1930s...where they mingled with the likes of Robert A. Heinlein, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton and many others.

In 1953, Ray H. made a film based on a Ray B. story - The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. In 1990, Ray B. made a fictionalised version of Ray H. into a character in his novel A Graveyard for Lunatics.

Nowadays, Ray Harryhausen makes his home in England, but the two Rays still meet up from time to time. The photo above (click to enlarge) was sent to me by John King Tarpinian, a regular insider at Mr B's book signings. Many thanks, John.



The Planetary Society recently sponsored a performance of Green Town by Ray Bradbury's theatre company. You can read about this - and listen about it - on this page on the Society's website.