New podcast episode: Ray Bradbury's "Ghost Writer" Friends...

My latest Bradbury 100 podcast episode is a follow-up to the last episode, where I presented Ray's 1947 short story "Rocket Summer" from Planet Stories magazine. In that same issue, Ray contributed a humorous writer bio of himself, in which he claims that all his stories are written for him by a posse of talented professionals including Robert Heinlein!

That magazine slipped into the public domain in 1975, because the copyright wasn't renewed (following the 28-year-renewal rules in operation at that time). So, I'm bringing you the full article today!

After you hear Ray's parody bio, I'll tell you about the various writer-friends he mentions. Have you read any of these writers? Let me know in the comments below! 

Bradbury 100 · Bradbury 100 - episode 41 - Ray Bradbury and his "Ghost Writer" Friends...

 

 

 

 

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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.

Libraries, Kuttner

I keep seeing Ray Bradbury referred to in campaigns to stop library closures. The image to the left is from a library in Charlotte, North Carolina. There is information about the local campaign here.


Henry Kuttner was an important formative influence on Ray Bradbury's early writing career, but Kuttner's work is little known today. Most recently, the so-so movie The Last Mimzy drew upon Kuttner's best known work, the short story "Mimsy Were The Borogoves" (written as Lewis Padgett). The bizarrely named blog Two-Fisted Tales of True-Life Weird Romance gives a neat biography of Kuttner, referencing Bradbury. The blog post also includes a complete Kuttner story, "Bells of Horror", taken from the pulp magazine Strange Stories. An earlier post in the same blog included some Thrilling Wonder Stories pages that contain biographies of 1940s pulp writers, including Kuttner.


In another blog, at Coilhouse, David Forbes contributes an excellent essay about how science fiction literature shifted from a position of technological optimism to a more bleak view. Forbes uses some excellent examples, taking us from early Heinlein and Astounding Stories magazine, through Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and Thomas Disch. It's a very thought-provoking essay, and a reminder that although Bradbury has only occasionally been an SF writer, his position in the genre is solid, thanks largely to the apparently anti-technology stance of his short story collection The Illustrated Man. We can argue all day about whether Bradbury is really anti-technology, and whether any of his work is really science fiction, but his influence on the field and genre of SF is unquestionable.