It's been a while, but I'm back with a new series of Bradbury 100 podcast episodes.
I get things started with a look at Ray Bradbury as a playwright, tracing his career as a theatre writer from the 1950s to the 2010s. I cover both successes and failures, and discuss both "faithful" and "playful" adaptations of his own work.
I have touched on some of this before - see episode 12, where I talked about Colonial Radio Theatre's audio performances of Dandelion Wineand Something Wicked This Way Comes, which both used Ray's plays (rather than his books).
And elsewhere on Bradburymedia you will find a review of a performance of Fahrenheit 451.
Coming up in future episodes of the podcast, I'll have more in the Chronological Bradbury strand, a look at some lesser-known Bradbury films, and some Bradbury fiction.
Here's the new episode - and, of course, you can also listen via any decent podcast app (see the bottom of the page for some of the options).
This week on my podcast Bradbury 100 we take another look at Bradbury on radio - but American radio this time.
Bradbury's radio credits date back to 1946, when Mollé Mystery Theatre dramatised his story "Killer, Come Back To Me". During the 1940s and 1950s Bradbury submitted many stories to radio networks, just as he submitted stories to magazines. Occasionally, a story would sell.
But as Bradbury became better known, with appearances in "slick" magazines and in books, so his stories became sought-after by radio producers. His short stories in particular became regular fare on shows like Suspense and X Minus One.
In the podcast, I talk about various production companies which continued both the tradition of American radio drama and the tradition of adapting Bradbury. My guest is the multi-talented and prolific Jerry Robbins of Colonial Radio Theatre.
I also mentioned Bradbury Thirteen, the 1980s series produced by Mike McDonough. The series no longer has an official web presence, but you can find episodes just by Googling. (But don't for one minute believe anyone who tells you the series is "public domain" or "out of copyright". It isn't.)
This is the second in a new series of posts, my 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 #2: The Martian Chronicles
First edition, Doubleday 1950
The Book
The Martian Chronicles was Ray Bradbury's first book from a mainstream publisher, a collection of linked science fiction and fantasy tales published by Doubleday in 1950. Many of the stories had previously been published in magazines ranging from Thrilling Wonder Stories to Mademoiselle. But there was also a lot of new material, mostly in linking stories and passages crafted to join the disjointed tales together. The result is sometimes called a novel, and sometimes called a short story collection. The label "fix-up" is also sometimes applied: this term from the science fiction field refers to a work originally published in sections in pulp magazines, but then stitched together as a novel for book publication. The best description, although it's a bit of a mouthful, is the term Eller and Touponce use: "novelised story-cycle".
Bradbury often told the tale of how this novel/collection/fix-up/novelised story-cycle came to be. He met with editor Walter Bradbury (no relation), who suggested to Ray that he could take some of his disparate Mars stories and weave them into a novel. In fact, Ray already had the idea of collecting his Mars stories as far back as 1948, when he wrote some notes under the title "The Martian Chronicles, a book of short stories".But perhaps it was Walter Bradbury's suggestion which gave him "permission" to link the stories together.
In this first major publication, Bradbury shows his influences quite clearly. Here you will find some remarkably spare and clear writing, reflecting the influence of Hemingway. In the "chronicling" approach with its explanatory and linking chapters you will find the influence of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. (Remember how Steinbeck alternates between his fictional narrative and his more journalistic interstitial chapters?) And in the stories themselves, with their quirky character portrayals, you will see the influence of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. All of these literary influences, of course, sit alongside the tropes of science fiction, since Bradbury's Mars is an extension of the common-coin concepts of Mars which Ray knew from his childhood reading of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Ah yes, science fiction.
That's a problem with Bradbury. And it was a problem for Bradbury.
The first problem is that Bradbury uses the backdrop of Mars, but it's not at all a scientific backdrop. It's based on Burroughs, who based it on the work of astronomer Percival Lowell... whose work was discredited the moment it was first published. By 1950, when real rockets had been developed, Bradbury's presentation of Mars was decidedly quaint. He caught a lot of flak over the years for writing something so unscientific under the guise of science fiction.
Which leads me to the second problem. Bradbury knew this wasn't science fiction. He said it was fantasy. Bradbury's personal definition of science fiction was that it had to be possible. And since The Martian Chronicles is set on a Mars that doesn't really exist, every word of the book was, in his mind, pure fantasy. And yet...
Doubleday launches a new line of science fiction books, much to the annoyance of
the science fiction author who argued that this book was not SF.
...right there, on the cover of the book, was this nifty new logo that Doubleday had devised. They were marketing this book, Bradbury's breakthrough into mainstream hardcover publication, as something it wasn't.
Bradbury fought it, but couldn't win. Doubleday knew that science fiction was going to become a big genre in the 1950s, and they were determined to grab a piece of that particular pie, and hadn't they just signed this Bradbury guy who was being celebrated as one of the most creative of those science fiction pulp writers?
Shortly after the Doubleday edition appeared, there was a British edition, which had a more poetic (but also more obscure) title: The Silver Locusts. This variant title continued to be used for all British editions right up until 1980, when The Martian Chronicles was made into a TV miniseries. The opportunity for a bit of cross-marketing got the better of publisher Granada, and The Silver Locusts quietly became The Martian Chronicles on British shores. And we've never looked back.
Spot the difference... The UK had always had a repackaged version of the book, titled The Silver Locusts.Until the TV miniseries, when lucrative tie-in opportunities arose. Granada/Panther paperback editions, 1979/1980.
The Silver Locusts also had some variation in the content, and this is where Bradbury's book reveals itself as really being a short story collection, rather than a novel. The British first edition from Hart-Davis removes "Usher II" and replaces it with "The Fire Balloons". This was reportedly at Bradbury's request, and reflected a change he would have made to the Doubleday edition if he had had the opportunity before it went to press.
Over the years, The Martian Chronicles has become something of an unstable text, since there have been many additions and removals, most of them originating with Bradbury himself. "The Wilderness" slips its way in, giving a much needed role to some female characters (which Chronicles is otherwise short of). And slipping its way out: "Way in the Middle of the Air", a remarkable story in which American black people decide, en masse, to abandon Earth once and for all, and to start over on Mars. There are elements of this story which foreshadow the civil rights movement which would come in the 1960s; it was really ahead of its time, but also rapidly came to look outdated, prompting Bradbury to remove it from the book.
And speaking of time, you will find that The Martian Chronicles takes place in different time periods depending on which edition you have. All the chapters have dates attached to them - running from February 1999 to October 2026 in the first edition, but shifted to January 2030 to October 2057 in late twentieth-century editions! As the book is fantasy, Bradbury felt no need to update any of the technology, but he did feel the need to keep the story forever in the future, just out of reach.
The Stories
If The Martian Chronicles truly were a novel, it would be next to impossible to choose "stories" from it. But it isn't. (As Ray said, it's a "half-cousin to a novel".)
My personal picks from The Martian Chronicles are these:
"Rocket Summer" - strictly speaking not a story, but one of the bits of linking material Ray crafted for the book, "Rocket Summer" is one of Bradbury's best pieces of prose poetry. From the opening single-sentence paragraph, you know you're in for a poetic ride in this book. It's "Ohio winter", until the rocket fires up in paragraph 2:
And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer's ancient green lawns.
"- And The Moon Be Still As Bright" - a story which depicts a major turning point in the colonisation of Mars. In the stories leading up to this one, there has been a series of attempts by Earthmen (for they are all men; a sign of the times in which this was written) to conquer the red planet - but each attempt has been thwarted by the Martians. Now the fourth expedition settles in, and is shocked to find all of Mars now dead. It turns out the humans have inadvertently brought disease to Mars, and the martians are wiped out by something as simple as chicken pox.
For most of the rocketship's crew, this is a fine state of affairs, giving them free rein over a whole planet. But for one, Spender, it's a tragedy. Spender alone is able to see the great loss of martian civilisation. His empathy for the martians leads to him presenting himself as one of them. For the rest of the book we will encounter a number of other martians, all of them ethereal or ghostly. Humankind may take over the planet, but they will be forever haunted by the former civilisation they have destroyed.
"The Martian" - unlike "And the Moon..." and "The Third Expedition" (aka "Mars is Heaven!"), "The Martian" is rarely reprinted outside of this book. Take a look on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, and you will see that "Mars is Heaven" - one of the best known short stories in the science fiction field - is endlessly anthologised, whereas "The Martian" doesn't get a look-in.
So what's so great about it? Well, it captures a true sense of loneliness. Mr and Mrs Lafarge live on Mars, and are in perpetual mourning the loss of their son, Tom. Until, one day:
"A small boy's standing in the yard and won't answer me," said the old man, trembling. "He looks like Tom!"
"Come to bed, you're dreaming,"
"But he's there; see for yourself."
The old woman looks, but has to wave the figure away. Shortly after, in bed, she says "It's a terrible night. I feel so old."
It turns out that it is their beloved Tom. Or, actually, a martian who is able to take on the form of Tom. The martian, too, is lonely. If only the Lafarges can accept him as their son, they can all be happy.
If you've not read the story before, I won't spoil it by revealing anything further. But I do recommend you read it. You don't have to know anything else about what's going on in The Martian Chronicles; "The Martian" works perfectly well as a standalone short story.
"There Will Come Soft Rains" - another story with a title taken from a poem (the other one being "And the Moon..."). This is perfection. A science fiction story written as a prose poem. There is barely any human presence in the story, which is the whole point: back on Earth, a global nuclear war wipes everything out. In "There Will Come Soft Rains" we see the poignant decline of a fully-automated house after its owners have been killed in an atomic flash. Only Bradbury can make you feel sorry for a house ("The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by the heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.") Ever dutiful, the robotic house chooses a poem to read, since "Mrs McClellan" doesn't answer when asked for her selection. The chosen poem is by Sara Teasdale, and provides the title for the story. The final line of the poem sums up the short story: "And Spring herself, when she awoke at dawn / Would scarcely know that we were gone."
"The Million-Year Picnic" - (SPOILER ALERT!) - a perfect ending for an astonishing book, and yet another turning point in humankind's relationship with Mars. Following the destruction of Earth, all that remains of the human race is the smattering of colonists who were unable to get back home prior to the nuclear war. In the aftermath of that destruction, one family goes off on the martian canals for a picnic, with a promise from "Dad" that they will see martians. They travel amid the ruins of the martian cities, a reminder of the destroyed cities on Earth, but there is no life there. The kids really want to see a martian. "Where are they, Dad? You promised." Dad eventually shows them:
"There they are," said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down. [...]
The Martians were there - in the canal - reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad.
The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long, silent time from the rippling water...
The Adaptations
The Martian Chronicles and its constituent stories were grabbed for adaptation almost immediately: the NBC radio series Dimension X had four episodes based on parts of the book in 1950, and the appeal of the book/stories continued for decades. The most popular story for adaptation is "Mars is Heaven!" ("The Third Expedition"), probably because it is as much a horror/suspense story as it is an SF tale. Horror writer Stephen King describes how, as a child listening-in to the Dimension X adaptation, he was scared so much that he couldn't sleep (see Danse Macabre, chapter V).
Bradbury himself was very keen to get The Martian Chronicles made into a film. From the late 1950s onwards he would return again and again to drafting different screenplay versions, but they unfortunately never sold. Even as late as 2005, when Bradbury was 85 years old, he was putting together new proposals for film or TV.
But wait, I hear you cry. There was a Martian Chronicles TV series. I saw it with my own two eyes!
Well, we don't like to talk about that...
It's true, in the late '70s, in the wake of Star Wars and Close Encounters, every studio in Hollywood was falling over itself to try to have the next hot SF property. The Martian Chronicles had a remarkably success run as a stage play around that same time in Los Angeles. And so was born the idea of adapting The Martian Chronicles for TV. Which Ray had been banging on about for years, but would anyone listen?
Flyer for the 1977 Colony Theater stage production in Los Angeles, 1977.
In theory, it should have been great. It had a respectful script from Richard Matheson, one of the most successful genre screenwriters (The Twilight Zone, The Night Stalker, Duel). And it had Michael Anderson directing (1984, Logan's Run). But alas, Anderson phoned it in, and the special effects were made out of plastic bottles and cornflake packets. Bradbury wasn't the only one to notice that the whole miniseries was boring. Unfortunately, he said it during a press conference, and got chastised by the studio's legal department.
About a decade later Bradbury tried to "do it right". He got the rights back to all the stories, and began adapting them for his TV series The Ray Bradbury Theatre. The budget wasn't good, but the production team did the best they could, turning out some respectable episodes in "The Earthmen" and "The Long Years".
Every now and again, we hear that The Martian Chronicles is going into production again, but I think ultimately it will never be done well. The book is too fragmented to make into a coherent movie, and although a TV series would probably work best, I fear that viewers today expect season-long arcs, not episodes with different casts every week (Black Mirror notwithstanding).
So forget TV and film, and consider radio: Colonial Radio Theatre did an excellent job with the whole of the Chronicles nearly ten years ago.
Find Out More...
Find out more about The Martian Chronicles on my page about the book, here.
Learn more about the Colonial Radio Theatre dramatisation of The Martian Chronicles in my review of the production, here.
Learn more about Bradbury's definition of "science fiction" and "fantasy" in my blog post, here.
Watch...
In November 2020, I gave a public lecture over Zoom all about The Martian Chronicles, as part of the University of Wolverhampton's ArtsFest Online series. You can watch it here:
Listen...
One of the earliest adaptations from The Martian Chronicles was the one that scared the bejeezus out of Stephen King: this Ernest Kinoy-scripted version of "Mars is Heaven!" (aka "The Third Expedition"): click here.
Next Up...
The next of my Lockdown Choices will be Bradbury's third book: The Illustrated Man.
I've taken part in a number of podcasts over the years, discussing various Ray Bradbury works in film, television, theatre and radio. I thought it was time to put links for them all in one handy place.
So, without further ado, I give you Phil's podcasts!
A Sound of Thunder - short story, film and other adaptations - Take Me To Your Reader
Fahrenheit 451 - novel and 1966 film - Take Me To Your Reader
Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is the latest release from Colonial Radio Theatre, the audio drama company whose previous hits include Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Halloween Tree.
As with Colonial's Bradbury productions, 20,000 Leagues stays true to the source material - although if you are only familiar with the 1954 film (or any of the many TV remakes), there may be some surprises for you here. The first surprise might be the cover art, seeming to imply that Captain Nemo is perhaps some kind of Indian nobleman, but even this is true to Jules Verne, although it is in Verne's sequel The Mysterious Island that this aspect of Nemo's past is revealed.
Verne's extraordinary voyage is really a tour of the world under the sea, in itself a rather undramatic premise. It succeeds by the vividness of the wonders he describes, and by the verisimilitude of the fantastic events that befall the cast of characters: the French scientist Arronax, his assistant Conseil, and Canadian whaler Ned Land, all of whom become unwitting captives of the myterious Captain Nemo. The other element which draws the reader (or listener) forward is the mystery of Nemo himself. What motivates his vengeful attacks on ships of all nations? Who are the other occupants of Nemo's wondrous submarine the Nautilus? How can they possibly survive life beneath the oceans?
Colonial's Nemo is J.T.Turner, who plays him as appropriately larger than life. Although we never fully discover all of Nemo's secrets, we do learn of his intense sadness when there is loss of life among his own crew, and we do learn of an emotional trauma related to his wife and children. It is to Colonial's credit that these humanising elements of the story are retained alongside the rollicking adventure of fighting giant squid and escaping from cannibals.
Something else I admire about this production is its period setting. It might have been tempting to either update the story, or eliminate the specifically outdated elements. But I'm pleased to see that this version clearly keeps the story before the completion of the Suez Canal, and even allows Verne's mistaken assumption that the South Pole is on a floating ice cap (as the North Pole is), rather than on the terra firma of the continent of Antarctica.
Ordering details for Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea can be found on Colonial's website: http://www.colonialradio.com/
Halloween. Bradbury season. A good time of year to (re-)read Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Halloween Tree and The October Country...
And a good time to receive the news from award-winning radio dramatist Brian Sibley: that he has been commissioned to write a radio dramatisation of Bradbury's The Illustrated Man. It is to be part of a short season for BBC Radio which will also include an adaptation of The Martian Chronicles (written by someone other than Sibley). Brian has considerable experience of working with Bradbury material, having adapted a number of short stories for the series Ray Bradbury's Tales of the Bizarre. A few years ago he was trying hard to get a production of Something Wicked This Way Comes onto the air, but the BBC wouldn't bite. (Shortly afterwards, they did stage a production, but not the Sibley version.)
For Halloween, Brian has also posted something seasonal on his own blog: Death and the Magician is about the life (and afterlife?) of Harry Houdini. Brian, of course, is a connoisseur of magic, and Chairman of the Magic Circle.
And a good time to reconsider the classic Orson Welles radio dramatisation of The War of the Worlds, now seventy-five years old.
It so happens that Colonial have recently produced their own audio version of H.G.Wells' novel, and in traditional Colonial style they have "done the book". No updating of the story, no attempt to relocate the events of the story to a different country, no attempt to reflect current world or political situations - just The War of the Worlds as H.G. wrote it.
This is something I have always wanted the visual media to do. Although we occasionally see an updating of Shakespeare, for the most part film and TV adaptations of classic literature will attempt to recreate the period in which a work was created, the world in which the story is set. Dickens and Austen are always set in the nineteenth century, so why not adaptations of Wells? George Pal's The Time Machine starts and ends in Victorian London, I suppose, although most of the action is in the far future. There was also a 1980s BBC TV dramatisation of The Invisible Man which was staged as a period piece. But every time The War of the Worlds is done, the aim seems to be be to recreate the effect of Wells' work - to scare the audience by showing a realistic threat - rather than to recreate Wells' actual plotting and staging. This latter is exactly what the Colonial Players have done, in audio.
Jerry Robbins' production, starring British actor David Ault, takes us back to Wells' text, but not without some creative interpolations. Wells advances his story mainly through a first-person narrator, but the Colonial Players turn much of this into dialogue, especially in the early scenes. This has led to some smart decisions, such as the presentation of Pearson, the central character, as a man who is slowly acquiring knowledge about the Martian invasion. Whereas Wells' narrator tends to sound authoritative - think Richard Burton's classic reading in Jeff Wayne's musical version of War of the Worlds - this Pearson seems to be talking off the cuff at the start, as he recalls the events he has just witnessed. By the end, with the Martians defeated, he reads confidently as he attempts to shake listeners from complacency.
Because M.J. Elliott's script follows the book, the geographical wanderings of Pearson are preserved, giving it a distinct air of authenticity, at least for a Brit like me who has some familiarity with the places named, but the casual dropping of place names with logical consistency should also make it seem authentic to anyone who is not aware of the real places. If you want to get a sense of the very real geography that Wells uses, take a look at this website, which provides maps and photos of some of the key locations.
Somehow, Robbins has managed to collapse the reading time of the novel right down. I have some audiobook versions of The War of the Worlds which give a straight undramatised reading, and they run to about seven hours. This Colonial dramatisation lasts just under two hours, and yet doesn't seem to have cut very much from the story. I put it down to some efficient dramatisation, and removal of some of the more formal sections of Wells' narration. What remains tends to be dramatic material that keeps the story moving forward.
As is so often the case with Colonial productions, the cinematic soundscapes make a strong impression. I was particularly taken with the thumping, piston-like stride of the Martian tripods, and their bellowing, almost subsonic communication. Although it's science fiction, Wells' novel works by being realistic: his Martian war machines are extrapolations of the massive mechanical contraptions which were beginning to appear in real warfare at the turn of the twentieth century, and which within twenty years would bring about the devastation of the First World War. Colonial's sound effects build upon that same kind of technology. When the first cylinders descend, they sound like missiles, weapons of war, rather than Hollywood flying saucers. There is only a modest use of cliche science-fictional sounds, and reliance more on hisses, grindings, thumps and explosions. The best soundscape comes in the scene where Pearson, in the river, goes underwater to hide or escape from the Martians. But the "call to feed", with blood-curdling screams accompanying the bellow of the Martians is quite effective - and quite appropriate for Halloween listening...
I can't finish this brief review without addressing the question of voices and accents. Brits don't sound Americans, and Americans don't sound British, so some very embarrassing results can arise in productions like this (Colonial Radio Theatre records in Boston, MA). Fortunately, with David Ault at the centre, it is very convincingly British. The secondary characters blend in well, with Joseph Zamparelli's Ogilvy and J.T.Turner's Reverend holding up well.
There's a lot to be said for the Orson Welles eve-of-Second World War version of The War of the Worlds, and even Spielberg's post 9/11 film version from 2005. It's great that Wells' story, anticipating world war and the end of empire, can find modern resonance in updated, relocated renderings of his story. But the genius of Wells was the building of the real and the mundane into an only slightly extrapolated fantasy, and it is this War of the Worlds which Colonial delivers.
If you want to treat yourself to The War of the Worlds this Halloween, you can get it as a download from Amazonor Amazon UK. And you can even get the script for Kindle!
The War of the Worlds, adapted by M.J.Elliott, directed by Jerry Robbins. 104 minutes.
Cast: RICHARD PEARSON: David Ault, CATHERINE PEARSON: Shana Dirik, PROFESSOR OGILVY: Joseph Zamparelli, WARRICK PEARSON: Robin Gabrielli, MRS WAYNE: Jackie Coco, PORTER: Seth Adam Sher, ESSEX: Fred Robbins, LIEUTENANT: Mark Thurner, REVEREND: J.T. Turner, MRS ELPHINSTONE (MRS E): Shana Dirik, CAPTAIN: Dan Powell, ONLOOKER 1 (MALE): Fred Robbins, ONLOOKER 2 (FEMALE): Shana Dirik, LONDONER 1: Mark Thurner, LONDONER 2: Jackie Coco.
The Los Angeles Review of Books is running a series of tributes to Ray Bradbury, starting with a 2004 essay "The Bradbury Era" by F.X.Feeney. I understand that a new tribute will be added each day.
Colonial Radio Theatre, which has produced some fine audio adaptations of Bradbury works including The Martian Chronicles, The Halloween Tree, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, also has a podcast. The most recent instalment (episode 21) is a special tribute to Ray Bradbury in which writer-producer-director-actor Jerry Robbins talks about how his magnificent collaborations with Ray came about. You can listen to the podcast here.
I've been listening to another Colonial Radio production: Logan's Run - Last Day.
It's a full-cast dramatisation of various story elements from the Logan books, although I gather it is more directly adapted from the comic book series from Bluewater Productions.
I haven't read the comics, so I can't comment on this aspect of the adaptation, except to say that the radio dramatisation has a breathless pace which is rather like a comic book.
Logan's Run began life in 1967 as a novel, written by two friends and colleagues of Ray Bradbury: William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. (Nolan had previously been known for his Ray Bradbury Review, and Johnson had been known forhis Bradbury collaboration Icarus Montgolfier Wright... and an association with The Twilight Zone, Star Trek and Ocean's Eleven.)
I don't think it's a coincidence that Logan's experience has some parallels with Montag from Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: both are responsible men in neo-military organisations in a dystopian future, who come to a realisation that there is more to the world than they had imagined... and who both find like-minded others when they go off searching for a kind of sanctuary. It's actually a good template for a science-fictional story, and Bradbury, Nolan and Johnson were neither the first nor the last to exploit it.
Colonial's production is fun and not too taxing. The pseudo-historical back story for Logan's world is, I believe, modified and updated from what appeared in the novel (as, presumably, is the case in the comic-book). I didn't find it quite as profound as some of their work with Bradbury stories, but it doesn't really need to be.
I was hoping for was something that was better than both the old Logan's Run TV series and feature film. I was not disappointed.
Ordering information for the audio version of Logan's Run - Last Day is here. And for the comic book, click here!
On June 7th, Colonial Radio Theatre releases its latest Ray Bradbury production: a full cast dramatisation of The Martian Chronicles. Colonial has a great track record of adapting Bradbury, with their award-winning productions of Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Halloween Tree. This one, though, is probably the most complex of them all: Bradbury's book is neither novel nor short-story collection, but something in between the two. This makes for some difficulty for the would-be adaptor, and it's a difficulty that has proven insuperable for Hollywood.
Colonial has one great advantage: radio is the theatre of the mind, and can create visions that Hollywood can only dream of.
Things are busying up here at Bradburymedia, as I have been given the privilege of a sneak preview of some new Bradbury-related items. I can't post about these in any detail yet, but reviews will be forthcoming at some point: Becoming Ray Bradburyis the latest work from Bradbury scholar Jon Eller of Indiana University. Jon is currently checking the page proofs and readying this volume for publication through the University of Illinois Press. This literary biography is currently planned for publication in September 2011, and traces the development of Bradbury the writer from childhood through to the career turning point represented by the Moby Dick film experience of the 1950s. Based on the couple of chapters I've read so far, the book looks like a perfect complement to both Sam Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles and Jon's other project (with Bill Touponce), the critical edition of The Collected Short Stories of Ray Bradbury.
The Martian Chroniclesis the latest audio production from Colonial Radio Theatre. This is due for release on CD later in 2011, and is the first full adaptation of the Chronicles in any medium. (The 1980 TV mini-series, and the several abortive attempts to turn the Chronicles into a feature film, skipped some of the stories and generally ignored much of the linking material that gives the book its unique character.) The adaptation is by Jerry Robbins, who successfully transformed The Halloween Tree into audio a short while ago. I'm still listening to this mammoth production, which looks like running to half-a-dozen CDs, for a running time of around 333 minutes.
I am grateful to Jon and Jerry for being given the opportunity to look at these creations at such an early stage. Once I've finished reading and listening, I hope to be able to give a more detailed review of each.
