Friends of Bradbury

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.

AboutSF

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.

The Leavetaking

Yesterday Ray Bradbury was laid to rest in a small-scale, private ceremony in Los Angeles. He is beside his wife Maggie in Westwood Village Memorial Park. As you can see from the list of others who have been buried there, Ray is also in company with many people he knew: writer Robert Bloch, screenwriter Harry Essex. cinematographer James Wong Howe, and the writer who gave him a huge break by rescuing one of his short stories from the reject pile, Truman Capote.

Discussions are underway for ways of remembering Ray: there is talk of a celebration of his life to be held either on his birthday (August) or at Halloween; there is talk of naming something after him in Los Angeles - something which was already under discussion in his lifetime, but which didn't come to fruition in time for Ray to see it; and calls for the Waukegan Public library to be renamed in his honour. Whether any or all of these tentative ideas come to pass remains to be seen, but I will post updates here if anything tangible emerges.



Tributes to Bradbury continue to appear, too many to link to. As before, I want to link just to the best of these:

• The Los Angeles Times has a report on the tributes from "ordinary" people.
• The Guardian carried an article by Margaret Atwood, in which she tries to uncover why Bradbury became such a widely treasured American writer. Atwood, the author of The Handmaid's Tale has had a career which in many ways reflects Bradbury's. Like him, she is novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter. Like him, she has had some tussles over whether her work is science fiction or something else. Curiously, her working definition of science fiction is almost opposite to Bradbury's. Bradbury's distinction between SF and fantasy was that SF (such as, for him, Fahrenheit 451) could happen, but fantasy (The Martian Chronicles) was about things that were impossible. Atwood, on the other hand, once dismissed SF by implying that it was about the impossible, famously using the phrase "talking squids in outer space".
• The organiser of Los Angeles' Ray Bradbury Week tributes in 2010, Steven Paul Leiva, has blogged some photos of himself and Ray, and a link to an interview he gave about Ray on an NPR station in LA.
• The Los Angeles Review of Books has completed its three day series of reflections on Bradbury's work with articles by (among others) Bradbury scholars Jon Eller, Robin Anne Reid and Bill Touponce, and SF/fantasy critics John Clute, Gary K. Wolfe and Rob Latham. Read all three parts with these links: part one, part two, part three. This last section contains essays which are probably the first since Bradbury's death to refer to shortcomings or disappointments with aspects of Bradbury's writing, and perhaps are a sign of how the scholarly community will now seek to grapple with what Bradbury's work really meant. I have no problem with this at all, but I do wonder whether some of the critics have read much of Bradbury's post-1962 writing.

Ellison and Bradbury - take two

Further to my post back in January, it has now been confirmed that the book Live Forever will be co-edited by Sam Weller, Ray Bradbury's biographer. The tribute volume will have an introduction by Bradbury and, as I reported here, will include a new story and afterword by Harlan Ellison. The book will also include all-new tales by Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Audrey Niffenegger, Alice Hoffmann, Dan Chaon, David Morrell, Dean Koontz, Sam Weller and co-editor, seven-time Bram Stoker nominee, Mort Castle. The tentative publication date will be July 2012.

Speaking of Bradbury, Ellison and other greats, courtesy of Richard on the Bradbury message board, here is a signed photo from a 1973 Los Angeles Science Fiction Fantasy Society meeting. What a gathering: Robert Bloch, Sherwood Springer, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, A.E. Van Vogt, Wendayne Ackerman (Forry's wife), and Forrest J. Ackerman.

Photo courtesy Richard Kaminsky. Click to enlarge.