Listening to those echoes

I've spent a few days reading Sam Weller's Listen to the Echoes, his collection of Bradbury interviews, and companion to his earlier biography The Bradbury Chronicles.

I quite like the book, although I don't think I have really learned anything new from it. That's not to criticise the book, as I'm sure many Bradbury readers will find something new here. It's just that when you've read Steven Aggelis' Conversations with Ray Bradbury and Bradbury's own Bradbury Speaks, it all becomes a little familiar.

I quite like one of Bradbury's phrases which crops up now and again throughout the book, which is something like "get your work done". It seems to be his response to all sorts of questions to do with coping with what life throws at you, and yet Bradbury claims not to be a workaholic. Indeed, his description of a typical day's work would support his non-workaholic claim. However, he just must be under-emphasising how much effort he would put into re-working his stories, as all the manuscripts I've seen show a lot of careful and considered deletions and edits.

What I didn't like about Listen to the Echoes is the endless catalogue of famous people Ray has known. If the famous people are worth discussing, I would have liked to see them discussed at length, not just used as a trivial throwaway.

But what I did like about the book is the breadth of its coverage. Bradbury isn't just asked about celebrity friends, or his own work, or his daily life; he is also asked about literature, poetry, painting, music, pop culture and high art.

Echoes is a useful sourcebook for anyone looking for quotable quotes from Bradbury, and has a good index. You just have to bear in mind that these are the views of an 89-year-old looking backwards. Anyone interested in a rounded view of how Bradbury sees the world would be well advised to also read Aggelis' Conversations with Ray Bradbury, which compiles interviews conducted over many decades of Bradbury's life and career.

Sam Weller is maintaining a blog to tie in with the book, which has recently included this essay by Bradbury on the death of a feline friend.

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: