The Bradbury Centenary

Well, we're finally here. 2020. Cue all those jokes about 2020 vision, and people drawing parallels with (19)20s flappers. For Bradbury fans, 2020 is a nice big round number: one hundred years since the birth of Ray Bradbury.

When I first became aware of Ray Bradbury's fiction, he must have been in his fifties. The first time I saw his photo, probably on a book cover, he would have been about 58 - which was quite old to me at the time; much older than my parents, for example. I saw Ray a lot in magazine interviews and on TV when he was in his sixties. And I finally met him when he was 87, and again when he was 90. Old, quite old. And yet...

His fiction was always so young and lively. What I didn't know when I first read Bradbury was that his amazing stories of dinosaurs, time machines, rockets, youth and death were mostly written when he was young and lively. His peak years, measured in terms of "best stories" were in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was aged between 20 and 40. And yet...

His amazing peak of productivity which produced The Martian Chronicles in 1950 (age 30), The Illustrated Man in 1951 (age 31), and Fahrenheit 451 in 1953 (age 33) was followed by a long tail of work which would never quite gain the same recognition. Bradbury continued writing right up to his final days, which means that there is nearly sixty years' worth of material out there (or hidden away) which most people are unfamiliar with.

A lot of books and essays about Bradbury talk of his career somehow petering out after those classic works of the 1950s. He stopped writing fiction, they say. He turned to poetry and plays, they say. He went to Hollywood, but didn't have much success.

Well, all of that has some grain of truth. His early success in Hollywood - It Came From Outer Space (he created it, but someone else did the final screenplay), Moby Dick (he adapted it, but John Huston nabbed half the screenplay credit), scripts for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents - must have given him a taste of an alternative career, not to mention a significant alternative income stream. It can be argued that the alternative income enabled him to indulge in poetry, and to produce his own plays. Bradbury himself said that his income from Hollywood options is what put his children through college.

Ironically, Bradbury was a far better poet when writing short stories than he ever was when writing poetry. And yet he still managed to get books of poetry put out by major publishers. These things sold. They may not have been bestsellers, but they did the business.

As for his plays, they tended to fall into two camps. There were the original plays, mostly "Irish" stories which had been inspired by his time in Ireland writing Moby Dick, and most of which eventually also came out as short stories. And then there were the adaptations, of numerous short stories and his major novels. Some of these worked, and some didn't. If you ever get the chance to see his stage version of "The Veldt", see it. It's great, and in its reliance on the imagination of the audience, it works far better than any of the screen adaptations of it created so far. Similarly, if you get the chance to see Bradbury's stage version of Fahrenheit 451, grab it - but beware that Bradbury couldn't resist rewriting the story somewhat, so that it has some twists and turns which differ from the original novel.

As Jon Eller's biographies of Ray have pointed out, Bradbury's career was split into two halves. In the first half, he was an extraordinary short story writer and novelist. And in the second half, he might have run dry of original ideas, or he may have been distracted by those other media (poetry, plays, films). And also in that second half he must surely have been distracted by being a figure in the public eye, especially as the space age evolved and he became something of a spokesman for science fiction and an advocate of space exploration. I have always been amazed that he was able to get any real work done at all during this period.

By the 1980s, with Ray now into his sixties, he finally had his own TV series, the excruciatingly low-budget Ray Bradbury Theater. This show was a pioneer of original programming on cable TV, being one of HBO's first original productions, but with none of the investment that HBO today puts into original programming. At times the show was an embarrassment of poor production quality, but at other times it was able to produce some gems. Sixty-odd episodes were made, shot all over the world, with every one scripted by Bradbury himself. In the seven or so years that the show was in production, it is again hard to imagine how he found time for any other work. And yet...

The 1980s and 1990s saw a new burst of activity from Bradbury. Now in his 60s and 70s, he turned out a series of remarkable new novels and short story collections. The best of these were among his best (and the worst were among his worst). And in his final years, in his 80s and 90s, Bradbury put the finishing touches to a number of works-in-progress. A sequel to Dandelion Wine. A new patchwork novel tying a set of short stories together in From The Dust Return. Long-delayed novellas "Leviathan '99" and "Somewhere a Band is Playing".

One hell of a life of writing!

And now, so soon, we reach 2020. The Bradbury Centenary. There will be celebrations, that's for sure. Bradbury's home town of Waukegan, Illinois, has some plans. So does the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, based in Indianapolis.

And if anyone out there wants me to talk about Bradbury, just ask. I'm available for conferences, lectures, podcasts, possibly even barmitzvahs!

Watch this space for news and further developments...

ADDENDUM:  I thought I should use this post to keep a record of planned centenary events. I will add to the list as more events come to light. Here goes:

Feb 9, Pasadena: http://cabookfair.com/features.php#bradbury

Feb 21-23, 28-9, March 1, Pasadena: https://www.facebook.com/events/208921433571387/


March 5-8, San Diego: https://www.sdcomicfest.org/

March 11, Gurnee, Illinois: https://www.facebook.com/events/1421663071366314/

May 17, Bath, UK: https://bathfestivals.org.uk/the-bath-festival/event/neil-gaiman-ray-bradbury-at-100/

May 20, New York: https://www.symphonyspace.org/events/selected-shorts-ray-bradbury-centennial-celebration

July 24-25, Bicknell, Utah: https://www.facebook.com/BicknellInternationalFilmFestival/

For more events, please also keep an eye on this web page: https://raybradbury.com/centennial/

Omni

In the 1980s and 1990s, Ray Bradbury's stories and essays would pop up from time to time in Omni, a glossy magazine which always claimed to be devoted to science fact and science fiction. (In fact, I seem to recall the magazine carrying articles on UFOs and other non-science topics, and the Bradbury fiction they published was almost entirely fantasy rather than SF.)

All four of Bradbury's fiction pieces in Omni were first appearances:

• "Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Home-Made Truly Egyptian Mummy" (May 1981)
• "I Suppose You Are Wondering Why We Are Here?" (October 1984)
• "Trapdoor" (April 1985)
• "Once More, Legato" (Fall 1995)

 The first three of these were later collected in Bradbury's book The Toynbee Convector (1988). The fourth was collected in Quicker Than The Eye (1996). Although these stories were what appeared to be a late flourishing of Bradbury's short story output, appearances can be deceptive. "Colonel Stonesteel..." was originally written in the late 1940s, and I think "Trapdoor" might also have originated in the '40s.

As for non-fiction, Bradbury supplied Omni with two essays:

• "Beyond Eden" (April 1980)
• "The God in ScienceFiction" (October 1980)

"Beyond Eden" was another of Bradbury's celebrations of the manned space programme, in this case extolling the potential of the Space Shuttle to inspire us. Writing at least a year before the first flight of Columbia, Bradbury wrote:

The Space Shuttle.

How will it profit the men of New Bedford? How many kegs of oil can it bring to your Nantucket Market? Is there a seed farmer in the American fields, a churchwarden on his knees, an idler on Manhattan's docks who, looking up and seeing the Shuttle fly high, will be a penny richer, a  half-ounce of philosophy better, less given to ill tempers, more filled with salvation? 

So might Starbuck have queried Ahab re the White Whale 50,000 nights ago. My answer must  imitate Ahab's, who said, touching his chest, "It will reward me here, Starbuck, here!" 

For if the Space Shuttle is not as much heart and blood as it is mind and fact, then we shouldn't fly in Space at all.

 Of course, at this time many proponents of the Shuttle were advocating the idea of the space truck, a rather mundane delivery vehicle that would get the job done routinely, quickly and cheaply. From this quotation we can see that Bradbury took a much loftier view. As so often with his pronouncements on space, Bradbury couldn't resist ending his essay with one of his poems, this one being "They Have Not Seen The Stars".

In "The God in Science Fiction", Bradbury observes that humankind's understanding of deities has evolved over time:

Somewhere back in time, the Sun God Apollo became the Sun God Christ, born in the week of the winter solstice to prove that the world had not died but would rise again in the New Year that was truly that week and not January 1.

Somewhere further along in Time. Christ moves in Space, cargoed on missions that, for Now anyway, take the name of Apollo. So old myth and new circumnavigate the stars, rebuild old dreams, promise again better destinies on faraway worlds we cannot now imagine.

From this premise, Bradbury then proposes that "Science-fiction writers will lean more and more into theology, forced by NASA's blasphemous intrusion on the Lord's-territorial imperatives to question where we  have come from and just where in Heaven or Hell we are going."  The remainder of the essay sees him accounting for his own handling of themes of religion in his science fiction stories, ranging from The Martian Chronicles to the then-unpublished Leviathan '99.

An almost complete run of Omni magazine is now available online via the Internet Archive. This allows us to read Bradbury's compositions as they originally appeared, complete with the lavish illustrations that the magazine was known for. Here are direct links to the Bradbury issues, which can be viewed/downloaded in various file formats:

April 1980
October 1980
May 1981
October 1984
April 1985
Fall 1995

RIP: Norman Corwin

I just heard that Norman Corwin, radio dramatist and producer-director, has passed away at the grand age of 101. Norman's career is remarkable enough in itself (I recommend the obituary in the Los Angeles Times for an overview of his life and achievements. But he also had a significant impact on the life and career of a certain Ray Bradbury.

I wish I had time to go into greater detail, but at the moment the best I can do is mention a couple of things off the top of my head:

Corwin was the one who urged Bradbury to get to New York and try to sell a book. The result of that urging was Ray's meeting with Walter Bradbury, who published Ray's first major-publisher book: The Martian Chronicles.

Corwin was originally intended to direct Bradbury's radio play Leviathan '99, which became Bradbury's first work for the BBC. As it turned out, Corwin didn't get to do the job, but decades later he was able to participate in a new radio version of the story, when Bradbury's novella version of Leviathan '99 was dramatised for radio in LA.

SF Encyclopedia Live - in beta

One of the best source books for the study of science fiction - for both the scholar and the casual fan - is The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Two print editions of the book appeared in the 1980s and 1990s, followed by a CD-ROM version. Now the SF Encyclopedia has gone online, and is freely accessible to everyone: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com

The text is a beta version: this means that the text from previous versions has been ported across, but not all entries have been updated. It also means that there may still be some formatting and factual errors, as well as glaring omissions for some modern topics.

Perhaps because his name is near the front of the alphabet, Ray Bradbury seems to have benefitted from a revised entry, although I suspect the text is little changed since the CD-ROM edition. If the editors were of a mind to be exhaustive, they might perhaps include information on some of Ray's most recent books, although many of these fall outside the SF genre. I would personally argue for some passing mention of the recent graphic novels, since they seem to have been significantly successful in market terms, and maybe a mention of "Leviathan '99", although since this novella is hidden within Now and Forever it might not be particularly visible.

There is one glaring factual inaccuracy (which I have reported): they give Ray's full name as Raymond Douglas Bradbury. Oops. Even Wikipedia knows that he has always been Ray, never Raymond!

Read the full entry here.

Bradbury news

Author Alice Hoffman - writer of Practical Magic and The Story Sisters, among others - has written a short piece for NPR about Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. "I owe Ray Bradbury a huge debt, one that can never be repaid," she says. Read the article here (I originally linked here, but this link seems to have died.)



California Artists Radio Theatre has updated its website with some photos of the recent performance of Leviathan '99. The production was recorded for future release by CART. See photos of the cast - including William Shatner, Sean Astin, Norman Lloyd, Samantha Eggar, Walter Koenig - with Bradbury and the legendary radio producer Norman Corwin here.

Bradbury's Dublin

I recently took a brief trip to Dublin. While I was there I dashed about with a camera trying to grab some pictures of places with a Ray Bradbury connection.

Click on any of these pictures to view larger versions.

It is an oft-told tale that Bradbury stayed in Dublin in 1953-54, when he was writing the screenplay for Moby Dick for director John Huston. This relatively short visit - a mere few months out of Bradbury's nearly 88 years on the planet to date - provided an incredible amount of inspiration. Not only did he complete the screenplay, he left Ireland with material for a number of short plays, short stories, the play (and later novella) Leviathan '99 and eventually the partly autobiographical novel Green Shadows, White Whale.

My first priority in Dublin was to get to O'Connell Bridge. Not only is this the only major bridge in Europe to be wider than it is long, it was the location for Bradbury's finest Irish story, "The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge". First published as "The Beggar on the Dublin Bridge" in the Saturday Evening Post in June 1961, the story is an account of Bradbury's experiences of being accosted by beggars whenever he left his hotel. The story can be found in Bradbury's short story collections The Machineries of Joy and Bradbury Stories. It can also be found, slightly modified, as a chapter in Green Shadows, White Whale - where John Huston strangely takes the place of Bradbury's wife.

O'Connell Bridge isn't difficult to find. Nor is it difficult to find a beggar on O'Connell Bridge. There always seems to be one right in the middle, exactly where Bradbury says. Unfortunately, however, none of the real modern day beggars are as colourful or as entertaining as Bradbury's concertina playing, possibly blind (or possibly not), sweet voiced beggar:

For a moment, while we had been talking in the cold rain, the beggar had been silent. Now, as if the weather had freshened him to life, he gave his concertina a great mash. From the folding, unfolding snake box he squeezed a series of asthmatic notes which were no preparation for what followed.

He opened his mouth. He sang.

The sweet clear baritone voice which rang over O'Connell Bridge, steady and sure, was beautifully shaped and controlled, not a quiver, not a flaw, anywhere. The man just opened his mouth, which meant that all kinds of secret doors in his body gave way. He did not sing so much as let his soul free.

When he arrived in Dublin in October 1953, Bradbury stayed in the Royal Hibernian Hotel, which can be seen in this old postcard of Dawson Street. Here is how Sam Weller describes it in The Bradbury Chronicles:

In Dublin, the Bradburys checked into the old yet opulent Royal Hibernian Hotel on Dawson Street and were given two rooms. Ray and Maggie's room - number 77 - had a fireplace, and in this room Ray would do much of his work on the screenplay. Regina [the Bradburys' nanny]and the girls were placed in a separate room, with a coin-operated heater into which Regina continually fed money to keep the room warm.

Alas, the Royal Hibernian is no more, torn down for redevelopment in the 1970s. In its place today stands a small shopping mall, the Royal Hibernian Way.

Not far from the Royal Hibernian site is St Stephen's Green, a park where Bradbury would occasionally take his children for a walk. This gets several mentions in Green Shadows, White Whale as the narrator desperately tries to solve the mystery of the beggar-woman:

God, how that woman could race.
She put a block between her backside and me while I gathered breath to yell: "Stop, thief!"
It seemed an appropriate yell. The baby was a mystery I wished to solve. And there she vaulted off with it, a wild thief.
So I dashed after, crying. "Stop! Help! You there!"
She kept a hundred yards between us for the first half mile, up over bridges across the Liffey and finally up Grafton Street, where I jogged into St. Stephen's Green, to find it ... empty.
She had absolutely vanished.
Unless, of course, I thought, turning in all directions, letting my gaze idle, it's into The Four Provinces pub she's gone . . .

The entrance to the park closest to Grafton Street is Fusilier's Arch, a memorial erected after the Boer War. In this photo, the arch is flanked by the St Stephen's Green Shopping Centre. Although constructed in the 1980s, this Centre looks rather Victorian with its conservatory-style domed glass roof, which was suposedly design to complement the architecture of the Gaiety Theatre opposite. (After Ray's family left for Italy in 1954, he attended the ballet season at the Gaeity.)

Speaking of theatres, legend has it that on Bradbury's first day in Dublin he saw a newspaper ad which said "Laurel & Hardy - Live - For One Night Only". He promptly dashed down to the Olympia Theatre and bought the last remaining ticket. The Olympia still stands in the Temple Bar area of Dublin, and remains a popular venue for drama, comedy and music.

If the legend is accurate, Ray must have arrived in Dublin on Sunday 11 October 1953, as it was on that night that Stan and Ollie had decided to give a single charity performance of a show they had been preparing for touring in Belfast and London. The picture here shows them outside the Royal Marine Hotel where they stayed throughout their time in the city. A detailed account of Laurel and Hardy in Dublin can be found in this programme for a recent Sons of the Desert convention.

It's impossible to be in Dublin without noticing the references to the great literary figures all around, in statues, museums, public art. You can find out more than you would ever want to know at the fascinating (but small) Writer's Museum where you will find this fellow, hero of Ray Bradbury and immortalised in the story "GBS - Mark V" (1976).

Oh, and the wee fellow in the background? That's Oscar Wilde!

Apart from Shaw, Bradbury was also greatly influenced by another Dublin writer, W.B.Yeats. It is Yeats, of course, who provided Bradbury with the title for his short story "The Golden Apples of the Sun." Joe Mugnaini's line art for this story is shown here.

When Genres Collide

Publishing is quite a slow business. It's over a year since I presented a paper about Bradbury's Leviathan '99 at the Science Fiction Research Association conference in New York... but the book of the conference has only just come out.

When Genres Collide: Selected essays from the 37th annual meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association, edited by Tom Morrissey and Oscar De Los Santos, includes a diverse array of papers on various aspects of science fiction. My paper appears in a section alongside papers on Philip K. Dick and Norman Spinrad. Other delights include Lincoln Geraghty on 1980s Hollywood science fiction, and Adam Frisch on the Byronic hero in science fiction.

The book is now available from Amazon (direct link here) and other fine bookstores.

New Books

It always seems to be the height of summer when a clutch of Bradbury books appears over the horizon. I recently received my copy of Match to Flame, the latest in a series of books from Gauntlet press that reveal the complex history of Bradbury's fictions.

This one, edited by Bradbury's bibliographer Donn Albright, shows how Fahrenheit 451 didn't spring from nowhere, but was the culmination of a line of thought which Bradbury had been following through a number of short fictions in the years prior to F451's publication. Match to Flame includes a contextual essay from Bill Touponce, an essay on the texts themselves from Jon Eller, and an amazing set of stories, some of which appear here for the first time. This volume is also the first opportunity to view what remains of the fragments of Bradbury's first attempt at novel-writing, the never- completed When Ignorant Armies Clash By Night.


Coming soon from Gauntlet is another piece of textual detective work from Donn Albright, Somewhere a Band is Playing. This includes Bradbury's novella, which he developed from a screen treatment he originally wrote for Katharine Hepburn. The Gauntlet book includes pages from the screenplay and various fragments of Bradbury's developing story idea.

You can watch Bradbury tell his Katharine Hepburn anecdote on this YouTube page.

The Gauntlet titles are quite expensive, because they are limited editions. However, if you are lucky enough to live in a country where the dollar is relatively weak (the UK, for instance!), now is the time to get online and pick up these bargains. Match to Flame is already shipping - I received copy number 158 out of 750. Somewhere a Band is Playing is currently advertised for release in "Fall 2007".


If you have no interest in seeing how Bradbury got to his completed story, and just want to read it, you need Bradbury's latest book from his mass-market publisher, Wm Morrow. Now and Forever is an unusual book, being neither a novel nor a short story collection: it contains two novellas, "Somewhere a Band is Playing" and "Leviathan '99".

Both of these stories have been worked and re-worked by Bradbury many times over the years. Leviathan, in particular, has periodically made public appearances as a radio play, stage play and opera. Now, at last, the prose version is being made available. I assume that Bradbury was never able to expand the story to a sustainable novel length, and has settled on the novella as being the most appropriate form for the finished text.

Now and Forever is due for release on 4 September 2007. Here are direct links for pre-ordering:

Now and Forever at Amazon.com

Now and Forever at Amazon.co.uk

Farewell Summer

I haven't got my copy yet - I have to wait for it to cross the Atlantic, so I'm holding out for strong westerly winds - but Farewell Summer, Bradbury's new novel is out now.

The LA Times published a favourable review yesterday - click here to view it. There are links to other reviews in my earlier post.

It has become clear that Bradbury's two other forthcoming titles, Leviathan '99 and Somewhere a Band is Playing will be published together in a single volume. Although Bradbury and others have described them as novels, it looks as if they are really novellas, and too short to justify mass-market publication as separate volumes.

New Bradbury books

We're in for a spree of new Bradbury material in the next few months.

First to be released will probably be Farewell Summer. This is a sequel of sorts to Bradbury's classic Dandelion Wine. In fact, the two books were originally conceived as one, but Bradbury was persuaded to split it into two...and then took around fifty years to polish the second part. Farewell Summer is out in hardcover in October 2006.

Around the same time, Match to Flame: the Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451 should appear. This is the latest in a series of volumes from Gauntlet Press. It's rather a costly volume, but for the Bradbury completist it will be a must-have. Edited by Bradbury's bibliographer Donn Albright, the book includes essays by Jon Eller which show that Fahrenheit 451 didn't spring fully formed from Bradbury's creative genius, but rather had a long gestation through various precursor short stories. This volume should be a perfect conpanion piece to (and extension of) Eller & Touponce's Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction. The book contains "The Fireman", the short story that developed into Fahrenheit 451, plus a long list of other precursors.

After that should come Somewhere a Band is Playing. I believe that this is another "Green Town" novel, but don't know much else about it. The last information I heard about this wasthat Guantlet Press would be publishing it in 2007.

And finally... according to Bradbury himself in a number of recent interviews, the long-in-development novel version of Leviathan '99 is now with his publishers, and is likely to see publication in 2007. Leviathan '99 is Bradbury's space age version of Moby Dick. Having spent a year adapting MD for the screen, Bradbury was unable to let go of the mythic white whale. In the early 1960s he began the novel, but soon turned it instead into a radio play...and then a stage play... and now it's come full circle and is to appear as a novel.

Talking about Ray

In June (told you it was a busy month!) I also presented a paper on Ray Bradbury to the Science Fiction Research Association Conference in New York State. I've been to academic conferences before, but this was my first presenting stint. Thankfully, the audience wasn't so huge as turn me to jelly.

The paper was the one mentioned earlier, on Leviathan '99. I have submitted the paper for possible publication in the conference book.

Funding for my trip was provided by my employer, the University of Wolverhampton, to whom I am immensely grateful.

Apart from the presenting, the highlight of the conference was listening to Norman Spinrad, the science fiction writer and critic. Although I think I may have upset him a bit by asking what had happened to the proposed film version of his novel Bug Jack Barron.

"Didn't Harlan Ellison write a screenplay for it?" I ask.
"Ellison wrote a screenplay," Spinrad replies.
"Was there more than one?"
"Ellison wrote a screenplay, I wrote a screenplay, Peter Weir wrote half a screenplay. Universal Studios now owns the whole damned thing, forever."

I also met Andy Sawyer of the Science Fiction Foundation and the University of Liverpool's SF Hub. Many years ago I used to write book reviews and type copy for Paperback Inferno, which Andy edited - and yet we never met, until SFRA 2006 in New York.

Researching Ray

A little over a year ago I visited the BBC Written Archive Centre in Caversham, near Reading. I went in search of information on Ray Bradbury's connections to the BBC, and came back with pages of notes relating mainly to BBC radio dramatisations of his work. Among the papers were several dealing with Leviathan '99, Ray's 1968 radio play. From this visit I was able to write a paper giving a detailed account of Bradbury's treatment by BBC radio up until 1970 (the Achives' cut-off date).

In June I paid a second visit to the Archives, this time hoping to fill in some of the gaps in the 'Bradbury at the BBC' story. I wanted to find out more about Leviathan '99, particularly about the production team. I searched through papers relating to H.B.Fortuin, the play's Dutch producer, and Tristram Carey, the play's composer. From this second visit I was able to write a second paper giving an account of the production of Leviathan '99, relating it to Bradbury's novel of the same name which is due for publication sometime in the next year.