David G. Hartwell

In a strange echo of what happened with George Clayton Johnson, there have been announcements - followed by rapid retractions - of the death of Hugo Award-winning editor and critic David G. Hartwell. He evidently suffered a massive stroke.

I once sat on a conference panel with David, although my interaction with him was minimal. But I am very familiar with his work. The "Timescape" imprint he started at Pocket Books in the 1980s gave me plenty of quality reading back in the day, and that accounts for only a tiny proportion of his career's work. You can read about this influential SF figure here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_G._Hartwell

This photo shows the panel at the 2008 Eaton Conference at University of California Riverside where I met David. Left to right: Paul Alkon, David G. Hartwell, Eric Palfreyman​ and me. The theme of the panel was the Mars and Ray Bradbury, and the whole conference was entitled "Chronicling Mars".

RIP: George Slusser (1939-2014)

Some sad new to report: George Slusser has died.

George wrote one of the earliest studies of Ray Bradbury's work, The Bradbury Chronicles (Borgo Press, 1977). This short study, written in an accessible style, concentrated mainly on Bradbury's early short stories, and drew out the key themes that seemed to be Bradbury's preoccupation in those classic weird tales.

George Slusser was an academic at the University of California Riverside, where he built the J.Lloyd Eaton Collection into the world's largest research collection for science fiction, fantasy and horror. He also organised or helped organise many of the Eaton Conferences, and edited and co-edited many of the books that collected the proceedings of those conferences.

As well as writing about Bradbury, George wrote books on Ursula Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein and many others. He collaborated frequently with Eric Rabkin, and helped shape the academic study of SF.

In 2008, I submitted a conference paper proposal about Bradbury to the Eaton Conference, and was surprised to get a personal response from George. I was even more surprised when he told me my paper had been accepted - and that Ray Bradbury was to be a guest of honour at the conference. That conference would be my first meeting with both George and Ray.

Both the Eaton collection and the Eaton conference look set to continue in the future. Both are a fitting legacy for George Edgar Slusser.

Frederik Pohl (1919-2013)

I just heard that Fred Pohl has passed away. He was a major figure in twentieth-century American SF, as editor, agent, novelist and short-story writer. He edited pulp-magazines before the Second World War, rubbing shoulders with other founding figures of the genre as we know it today. He wrote satirical novels and short stories in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth in the 1950s. He edited Galaxy magazine in the 1960s. In the 1970s he had what for many people would be a late-career flourish with a string of award-winning novels such as Gateway, Man Plus (probably my favourite of his works) and Jem.

But that late-career flourish in his 50s turned out to be mid-career, as he continued working right through to his 90s. His authobiography, The Way The Future Was, consequently turns out to be a rather incomplete work as it was published in 1978 when Fred was a mere 58 years old! In recent years, he effectively extended the book by becoming a prolific blogger with his The Way The Future Blogs.

I met Fred in 2008 at the Eaton Conference in Riverside, California. He appeared on a panel with guest of honour Ray Bradbury. I had a chance to talk to him briefly about his work, telling him that I had re-read Man Plus on the flight from the UK, and found that it held up well for a thirty-year-old book. I have a few photos from the event, including one of me talking to Fred, but my favourite is this shot of him looking pensive. In the background, Larry Niven (standing) is sharing a joke with Ray Bradbury; and further back is SF scholar Eric Rabkin (seated), talking to Fred's wife Elizabeth Anne Hull.

James Gunn

One of the delights of this year's Eaton Conference in Riverside, California, was the opportunity to meet the incredible James Gunn.

(Pictured at the James Gunn panel are (from left to right) Nathaniel Williams, Michael Page, James Gunn, Chris McKitterick.)

What's so incredible about James Gunn? For starters, he's ninety years old this year, but could easily pass for twenty years younger. More importantly, though, he is what one conference speaker called "a triple threat": not only a successful author of science fiction, but a successful teacher of SF and creative writing, and a successful critic and historian of SF.

While other significant genre figures were associated with the Eaton Conference because they were to receive awards - Ray Harryhausen, Stan Lee and Ursula Le Guin all received Eaton Awards this year - Gunn was present because there was going to be a panel discussing the three strands of his career. The panel was part academic study, part reminiscence from those who have worked with Jim , and all celebration of his life and work. (The panel organisers told me they were inspired to do this by the Ray Bradbury tribute events I organised for last year's SFRA conference in Detroit.)

Apart from my ongoing interest in Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, who in any case I see as master fantasists rather than science fiction writers, I have been quite distant from the science fiction field for a number of years. But there was a time when I was fascinated by the genre, and particularly by its history as a literary genre that seemed to emerge alongside the industrial revolution. Around 1980, when I was a student (for the first time; I still am a student!) I discovered Gunn's book The Road to Science Fiction: From Gilgamesh to Wells. This was a remarkable book, which suddenly gave me that historical insight, where previously I just had a fractional and fractured knowledge of what SF was. Gunn wrote a clear history, in plain English and short chapters, and then gave the reader substantial excerpts from key texts to illustrate the points he was making about the emergence of the genre. It was, and remained, and excellent way of learning about how and why the genre came into existence. I would later learn that there are other interpretations of the emergence of the genre, but that doesn't matter.

Shortly after, I discovered there was a second volume to The Road to Science Fiction, subtitled From Wells to Heinlein; and a third, From Heinlein to Here. (And a fourth, and some time later there were yet more.) For anyone looking for a history of the genre, I still recommend this series, and they have remained in print.

One additional stroke of genius in the first volumes of the series was Gunn's inclusion of lists of recommended SF works and SF writers for further reading. I worked through these lists systematically over the next couple of years, a far more difficult task in those pre-internet days than it would be today.

I don't recall whether Gunn included any of his own works in the suggested reading category, but for some reason I was prompted to also sample his fiction. The Listeners appealed to me from its plot description as an account of scientists engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and when I read it I was blown away by both the ease and artistry of the book, particularly its first chapter. Later I would track down as many other Gunn books as I could, and have fond memories of The Joy Makers, The Immortal, Crisis, and This Fortess World (which I was fortunate to find in a hardcover first edition from 1955).

At the Eaton Conference, Gunn explained that his career wasn't planned, but he just took opportunities as they arose. His response to each offer that came his way was, "Why not?" Thus it was that he came to be working at Kansas University by the mid-1960s, and later set up the first academic courses in SF, and the first research centre for SF (take a look at About SF for the present incarnation of what he developed at KU).

I took the opportunity of asking Jim Gunn how he came to collaborate with the legendary Jack Williamson, on the 1954 novel Starbridge. Jim explained that he attended a convention and, somewhat starstruck, recognised Williamson from a photograph on the back of a book. He pointed at Williamson and blurted, "You're Jack Williamson!" Later, he learned that Williamson was suffering a bout of writer's block, and Williamson turned over a partially complete version of Starbridge, which Gunn then completed. It was published by Gnome Press, and became Gunn's first published novel.

I couldn't resist mentioning to Jim that I had recognised him in the lift (elevator!) the day before - and that part of me had wanted to blurt, "You're James Gunn!", but I was too starstruck to say anything.

As it turns out, Jim Gunn is a charming, modest fellow, and it was exciting to meet him. It prompted me to take a look again at his books - and I still find The Listeners to be a remarkable work. Although it is fantastical, it has one of the best portrayals of scientists and scientific discovery I've ever seen in a work of fiction. Speakers on the Gunn panel also commended this as one of his best works - and both they and the audience members echoed my experience regarding The Road to Science Fiction. It seems James Gunn has been the gateway to SF not just to me, but to a couple of generations of SF fans and scholars. Jim talks about his own involvement with the genre in this recent interview in the Kansas City Star.

And now, in his 90th year, James Gunn has produced a new novel, Transcendental, and he's a Guest of Honour at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio, Texas. Is this what they call a third act?

Bradbury, Ellison: Writing for the Screen

Last week I attended the Eaton Science Fiction Conference (which this year was combined with the Science Fiction Research Association conference) in Riverside, California, to present a paper on the screenwriting styles of Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison.

The overall conference programme was ridiculously full, with seven simultaneous panels for most of the conference's three days. This is an amazing expansion since my first Eaton in 2008, which just had a single strand of panels.

My paper was part of a panel I had proposed on screenwriting. The paper title was "Screenwriting: Spectacle, Specificity and Speculative Fiction", and my intention was to illuminate the challenge of writing a screenplay for an imagined world, using examples from the scripts of Bradbury and Ellison to show two distinct strategies.

Bradbury tended to write non-technical scripts, resulting in a style of script which looks for all the world like a modern-day "spec script" - although he developed this style as early as the mid-1950s. Ellison, on the other hand, developed his craft in television in the early 1960s, in a time when it was common practice for the scriptwriter to write more or less in a shooting-script format, a style which is generally more prescriptive and more technical in terms of camera directions.

Over time, Bradbury's style became more and more simplified, and his scripts tend to read like very clear short stories. The heavy use of metaphor we often find in his short stories is largely absent, however, as he recognised how important it was to be unambiguous in describing a fantastical world in a screenplay. Ellison, on the other hand, developed a remarkable specificity in his scripts, which makes for some stunning visual concepts which challenge the director and production team to match his vision.

Time permitting, I intend to develop the paper for journal publication.

The other contributors to the panel were Julian Hoxter of San Francisco State University, author of Write What You Don't Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters (New York: Continuum, 2011) and Michael Klein of James Madison University. Julian spoke on the emergence of the "spec script" format and its impact on action in blockbuster movies. Michael spoke on the mythos of Frankenstein as it developed in both Shelley's original novel and its first film adaptation. I learned a lot from both presentations, and appreciated both speakers' contribution to the panel.

Update on VISIONS OF MARS

The book Visions of Mars is approaching publication. Its a collection of essays and articles which are mostly derived from the 2008 Eaton Conference, which was subtitled "Chronicling Mars". The book looks at the way Mars has been depicted in literature, film and popular culture.

The table of contents is now online. I see my chapter "Re-Presenting Mars: Bradbury’s Martian Stories in Media Adaptation" is smack in the middle of the volume. There is one other paper specifically about Bradbury, from Eric Rabkin, and also a transcript of a roundtable discussion between Bradbury, Fred Pohl and George Slusser. I'm sure there will many other passing references to Bradbury, as my recollection of the conference is that his name came up again and again.

The volume is quite expensive (40USD for a softcover version), but this is an academic volume and they tend to be pricey. Release date according to the publisher is now May 2011. (I notice that Amazon still shows the original release date, and also has a higher price than McFarland publishers!)



I see that Harlan Ellison has been nominated for a Nebula Award from SFWA (the SF and Fantasy Writers of America) for his short story "How Interesting: a Tiny Man". The story was first published in February last year in Realms of Fantasy magazine, copies of which can be ordered from the magazine's own website.

Ellison is no stranger to the Nebulas. He was the first ever recipient in the Short Story category, for "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said The Ticktockman" in 1965. His last Nebula win was 1977's "Jeffty is Five". His most recent nomination (before "Tiny Man") was in 2003 for "Good-Bye To All That".

"How Interesting: a Tiny Man" is a beautifully clear piece of writing, but is deceptively more complex than it appears on first reading.

A Wanderer Returns

I'm just back (a couple of days ago) from the Eaton Conference in Riverside, California, where I presented a paper on a different writer for a change: Harlan Ellison. My paper was titled "Living in a Limited World: Omniscience and Point of View in the Works of Harlan Ellison", and in it I discussed some of the ways Ellison has used point of view to get across the emotional and/or intellectual impact of his stories and screenplays. Among the works I discussed were Ellison's screenplay Phoenix Without Ashes (recently adapted for a comic book series) and his classic short stories "The Deathbird" and "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore" (soon to be re-published in a new, revised edition of Deathbird Stories from Subterranean Press).

Harlan was originally expecting to be attending some of the conference events, but ill health unfortunately forced him to cancel. He was due to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Eaton Conference/Eaton Collection, so he asked his friend Steve Barber to accept it on his behalf. I was able to spend some time with Steve, and Steve kindly offered to give Harlan a copy of my paper.

A couple of days later, Harlan posted the following on his website:

"[...] Steve Barber and Cris got the Eaton proclamation to me, it is as big as Austria, and we have it propped up in the dining room. Steve also delivered Phil Nichols's paper on me (the original, with all the defamatory parts pencilled out) and I must say that while I am completely oblivious to the two academic papers cited (Royle and Rimmon-Kenan), had Phil answered the phone when I called him at Riverside, I would've had some effulgent praise for his notice of, and appreciation for, the use of cinematic expansion&contraction sans voiceover or dialogue that apparently I was autodidactically smart enough to use at the end of PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES. In short, Phil, I was much put a-smile by your observations on my efforts. I would've liked to have heard it live, then debated it with you. [...]"

That latter part - about debating it with me - would have probably turned me to jelly. The same goes for the phone call, which I apparently missed.

Here's the Eaton proclamation, in the hands of Barber the Ellison stand-in. It's not literally as big as Austria, it's just that Harlan is what we call a creative writer.

Click on photo to enlarge.
Left to right: Melissa Conway, Rob Latham (conference organisers, University of California Riverside); Steve Barber, Ellison substitute; Ruth Jackson (head librarian, UCR).

Off to a Conference

The Eaton Conference is about to begin in Riverside, California. I will be there to present a paper, although for once I will not be talking about Bradbury.

On this occasion, I will be speaking about Harlan Ellison's work. It is one of two papers on Ellison, who is also due to receive the 2011 Eaton Award for lifetime achievement in fantastic literature. The other paper will be from Rob Latham of University of California Riverside.

Harlan has announced that he intends to be present for the award presentation on Saturday, and that he will also attend the Friday night screening of Erik Nelson's excellent documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth.

If you happen to be in Riverside for the conference or related events, please say hello. I'll be the Brit with the fixed grin, if the photo of me on the conference webpage is anything to go by...

Bradbury and Ellison

On Monday, Harlan Ellison mentioned on his website that he has completed a story called "Weariness", and sold it to an upcoming Ray Bradbury tribute book called Live Forever! along with an 1100-word afterword. I don't think I have heard of this book before (if I have, I've forgotten all about it). Shortly thereafter Robert Morales, evidently the editor of said volume, wrote that "the afterword about you and Bradbury [...] is so staggeringly SWEET and funny and poignantly saturated with history".

The image on the left, from 1973, is one of the few online photos to show Bradbury and Ellison together, and is taken from the Los Angeles Science Fiction Fantasy Society website. Bradbury is in the back row, second from left, partially obscured by Ellison.

Random thought: one of the (many) things that connect Ellison and Bradbury is Los Angeles' famous Bradbury Building. Though not named after Ray, the Bradbury Building is featured prominently in the opening credits to The Ray Bradbury Theatre, as Ray (actually a body double!) is shown arriving at his office...which was actually in a totally different building elsewhere in LA:





The Bradbury Building also stars in "Demon with a Glass Hand", an episode of The Outer Limits written by Harlan Ellison. When writing the script, Ellison personally researched a key scene in which his protagonist races an elevator. He hurt his leg in the process, as the final leap to hit the ground before the elevator was rather a long jump. Robert Culp (or perhaps a stunt double) replicates the jump in the finished episode.

There are some good photos of the Bradbury Building today on the Bladezone website, as part of a Blade Runner-themed tour of LA.

Another connection between Bradbury and Ellison is that they are both recipients of the J.Lloyd Eaton Award: Bradbury was the first, in 2008; Ellison is the fourth, and will receive his award at next month's Eaton Conference in Riverside, California.

New Bottles, Vintage Wine...

The long-running audio drama version of The Twilight Zone will shortly feature a dramatisation of "I Sing the Body Electric!", the only episode of the original TV series to be scripted by Ray Bradbury. According to the TZ Radio Drama blog, Dennis Etchison has written the new version to take into account not just the original episode, but some of Bradbury's ideas which didn't make it to screen.

"I Sing..." is actually one of the strangest items in Bradbury's back catalogue. The short story is quite well known - from the eponymous short story collection first published in 1969 - but not many people know that the story first saw light of day as the Twilight Zone episode, which Bradbury scripted c.1960. This puts "I Sing..." in the same category as The Halloween Tree and Something Wicked This Way Comes: a Bradbury media creation which only later became a literary text.


Here's an item to file under "wish I'd been there" heading: on 17 March in Fresno, California, there was a two-day symposium on Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The event tied in with the Big Read campaign. The event was moderated by writer and academic Howard V. Hendrix, who I met in 2008 at the Eaton Conference where we both presenting papers on Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Fresno seems quite keen on F451...


It looks as if the ghastly cover of The Stories of Ray Bradbury, in print in hardcover from Knopf since 1980, is soon to vanish, replaced by this new cover with the Everyman label. As far as I know, this is all that's changed about the book, apart from (possibly) a new introduction. The publisher's page for this new edition is here.

To tie in with the new edition, the Wall Street Journal has a new interview with Ray.

Spring Miscellanea

I've been away from the blog for a while, as I have been bogged down with writing. In February I turned in a paper for a book, a substantially re-written version of a paper I originally presented at the 2008 Eaton Conference at University of California, Riverside. It's about the Martian Chronicles story "And The Moon Be Still As Bright" in its various media incarnations. As part of my research, I thought I should go back to the original story, so I bought the 1948 issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories in which it appears. The book is likely to be called Chronicling Mars, and is being edited by George Slusser, Eric Rabkin and Howard V. Hendrix. I have no publication details just yet, but I expect that it will be released some time in 2010.

Immediately after finishing that paper, I started on another. This one is looking at images in selected Bradbury short stories. I feel the need to stop, and emphasise that I said IMAGES rather than IMAGERY. By which I mean that the paper looks at Bradbury's use of PICTURES such as photos, paintings and tattoos.

While I've been busy with that, a few Bradbury-related items have come to my attention which I haven't yet flagged up. So, by way of catching up with the backlog...

From Macmillan books comes a PDF teacher's guide to accompany the new graphic novel version of Fahrenheit 451. Just because Bradbury's novel has turned into a comic, it doesn't mean it can't still be used in the classroom!

I don't know what the provenance is of this next item, but it seems to be a transcript of a speech or presentation that Bradbury gave in 1969. It is held on the website of Caltech, but whether that means Bradbury delivered the presentation there I simply don't know. It has some nice photos of Ray in his ice-cream suit doing his inspirational speaker bit. I don't think it really contains anything I haven't read elsewhere, but it is clearly from the time of the first moon landing, so it has certain historical charm. See for yourself, here.

I noticed in the knew Knopf catalogue that there is a new edition of The Stories of Ray Bradbury. No new content (although this one has an introduction that I don't recall seeing in the original edition), but a new cover - not the best I have ever seen, but a bit more modern than the original design that seems to have remained in print since the 1980s. The Knopf catalogue is here, Bradbury is on page 135.

Finally, from Halloween 2007 comes LAWP Newsflash - a publication of the Los Angeles Writing Project. On page 3 is the story of one person's encounter with Ray Bradbury.

Writers' Encounters

Vincent Eaton has written of an early-career encounter with Ray Bradbury. The encounter itself doesn't sound too inspiring, but what Bradbury said seems to have stuck with him. Read all about it on Vincent's blog.

Screenwriting guru Lew Hunter mentions an encounter with Bradbury at a screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It's in this PDF document from Hunter's website.