Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

Nominations have been announced for the Nebula Awards, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which includes the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation. (Strictly speaking, the Bradbury Award isn't a Nebula - the winner receives a different type of trophy - but it is balloted for, and given, along with the Nebulas. Shown here is Neil Gaiman's Bradbury Award for a 2011 Dr Who episode.)

Here are the nominees:

Doctor Who: ‘‘The Day of the Doctor’’ (Nick Hurran, director; Steven Moffat, writer) (BBC Wales)
Europa Report (Sebastián Cordero, director; Philip Gelatt, writer) (Start Motion Pictures)
Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, director; Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón, writers) (Warner Bros.)
Her (Spike Jonze, director; Spike Jonze, writer) (Warner Bros.)
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence, director; Simon Beaufoy & Michael deBruyn, writers) (Lionsgate)
Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, director; Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro, writers) (Warner Bros.)

It will be interesting to see what the SFWA membership makes of this. Gravity would seem to be the natural winner, but my impression is that it has had quite a critical reception among SF types. While the general filmgoing audience might have found it novel, seasoned SF old-timers see Gravity as 1930s or 1940s SF, the kind of story that Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke (or Bradbury) could have bashed out in an afternoon.


Winners will be announced later in the year. Details of all the Nebula nominees can be found on the SFWA website. Previous winners are listed on Wikipedia, here.

It was sixty years ago today...

On this day in 1953,  Ray Bradbury's book Fahrenheit 451 was published. Strictly speaking, that first edition was a collection of short stories rather than a novel, since it contained not only the title work but two other pieces of short fiction: "The Playground" and "And The Rock Cried Out". Later editions would drop the shorter pieces, allowing 451 to stand on its own.

To celebrate the sixtieth anniversary, as I have reported previously, Simon and Schuster have put out a special edition of the book with new cover art - and with lots of new critical back matter compiled by Jon Eller. Here you will find Jon's account of the origins of Fahrenheit 451, contemporary reviews, and comments on the work from various notables from the book's sixty-year existence. The book also has a new introduction by Neil Gaiman.

Watch out for the remarkably short-sighted lack of promotion from S&S, though. Even their website makes no mention of the substantial content added to this edition, and they didn't even bother giving it a new ISBN number!

Memorable Bradbury

On the anniversary of Ray Bradbury's death, Nancy Lambert wrote about five memorable Bradbury stories. The five - "There Will Come Soft Rains", "The Night", "The Fog Horn", "I Sing the Body Electric!" and "The Lake" - are all excellent choices, although it would be very easy to come up with twenty-five equally good ones. Read what Lambert has to say at Tor.com.

Speaking of memorable stories, there is a special 60th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, out now from Simon & Schuster. I know it's out there, because there have been sightings in the field (see the photo below from jkt). However, if you visit online bookstores such as Amazon you may struggle to find this exact edition - and even the publisher's web page gives you little reason to think there is anything special about the book, apart from the new cover art.

So what's so special about it? How about the new introduction by Neil Gaiman? How about nearly 20,000 words of historical essay from Jon Eller of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies? And how about the collection of articles and reviews from Kingsley Amis, Margaret Atwood, Gilbert Highet and Bertrand Russell?.

The cover art, incidentally, was chosen from a competition. The other contenders can still be viewed on the competition's Tumblr page.

This is a major new edition, but because the text of Fahrenheit 451 is identical to the previous printing, Simon & Schuster have omitted to flag up the significant additions to this volume. Fortunately, they do seem to be shipping them out to major bookstores (those few that remain...) such as Barnes & Noble. 

And the Bradbury Award goes to...

At the recent Nebula Awards ceremony, the Ray Bradbury Award was given to Neil Gaiman for an episode of Dr Who. Neil has posted a photo of the award on his blog, showing the trophy sitting next to his Jim Henson Creativity Award - which he describes as "the only other award goofy enough to make me laugh". Here's the photo:

This isn't the only award named after Bradbury. There's also the Ray Bradbury Creativity Award. This was recently given to Kirk Douglas, with the actor Bo Derek standing in for Ray - this was a few weeks before his death, and he was too ill to attend.

Ray and Bo go back a long way. If you Google both names, you will probably find stories about how they met. Ray and Kirk also go back a long way: in the 1950s, Kirk Douglas worked with  Bradbury to prepare a TV series called Report From Space, which was to adapt stories from The Martian Chronicles and other Bradbury books. Unfortunately, the project fell through. Twenty-some years later, Kirk's son Peter Douglas would produce the Disney adaptation of Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

The Creativity Award ceremony was filmed by Blair Bones Media. Jeremy Blair kindly sent me a link, so please enjoy the event:




Ray Bradbury Creativity Award 2012: Kirk Douglas from Jeremy Blair on Vimeo.

Inspirations

Found on the web: artist Nelson Hernandez of San Jose, California, has created some striking character designs inspired by Bradbury's short story "The Man Upstairs". View them on Nelson's blog.



Also found on the web - probably across the entire blogosphere by the time you read this - is Neil Gaiman's fulsome tribute to Ray Bradbury, published by The Times.