Ray Bradbury - "Minor Poet"

On 10th July 1972, Ray Bradbury​ was the first speaker in a twelve-week series of free lectures entitled Cosmic Evolution: Man's Descent from the Stars at San Francisco's Exploratorium. "I will be participating as a minor poet and sub-minor philosopher," Ray said, "seeking to explain our age and the great three-billion-year age ahead."

By this time, Bradbury had been closely associated with space - partly through his fiction, but more importantly through his non-fiction writings and public speaking.

Other contributors to the lecture series were all scientists, including: Freeman Dyson, who lectured on intelligent life in the universe; Nobel Prize-winning chemist Melvin Calvin, on the origin of life; and Philip Morrison, who concluded the series with "The Context of Mankind: a Summation."

Five years later, Bradbury and Morrison would sit together on a NASA panel with novelist James Michener and explorer Jacques Cousteau, discussing "Why Man Explores". The answer to such a question clearly required not just a scientific answer, but a poetic one.

Mars and the Mind of Man

For a long time, it's been on my very lengthy to-do list: write a review of the 1971 book Mars and the Mind of Man. It's a record of a seminar held at the time of the Mariner 9 probe to Mars, in which key figures in space science and science fiction give their views of the impact of our new knowledge of the red planet.

I acquired an ex-library copy of this book a year or two ago, in the hope that it would reveal something more of Bradbury's attitudes to the "space age". (It does, so it was a worthwhile purchase!) Now I have an excuse to skip the review, because Maria Popova has done the task so well on BrainPickings.com.

Popova's article includes a number of images from the book, and a considered digest of the points of view expressed by the principal contributors Arthur C.Clarke, Carl Sagan and Ray Bradbury.


On Bradbury's birthday, 22 August, two artists presented new portraits of of Ray to the Waukegan public library. Pictured below are David Motley and Patrick Tufo with the paintings. The full story is here.

Bradbury Landing!

As expected, yesterday - what would have been Ray Bradbury's 92nd birthday - saw some more tributes paid to Ray:


Practical Magic author Alice Hoffman recalled her first direct contact with Ray, and his response to the story she submitted for the tribute volume Shadow Show in "A Birthday Wish For Ray".


Bradbury's friend, the British writer and broadcaster Brian Sibley uploaded a radio documentary he made in 1989 for the BBC World Service.


The Curiosity rover on Mars dedicated its landing site to Ray, announced in a tweet which reads "In tribute, I dedicate my landing spot on Mars to you, Ray Bradbury. Greetings from Bradbury Landing!" Here's the photo of Bradbury Landing:

Space.com was the first website to attempt to place "Bradbury Landing" in the context of other named landing spots on Mars. Read more here.


In their 11.30am (PST) press conference, the NASA/JPL team started with Ray Bradbury - playing a clip of him from the 1971 "Mars and the Mind of Man" symposium - and concluded with a short video showing Ray's last visit to JPL in 2009, when he was shown models of Mars rovers and was allowed to drive one of them in simulation. NBC have the best coverage of the contents of the press conference, and have included the two video clips, here.

Nightshade Writers and Creepy Babies

British SF novelist Richard Morgan has blogged about how he sees himself as a "Jim Nightshade" writer - comparing his sensibilities to the Bradbury character from Something Wicked This Way Comes. I haven't read any of Morgan's work, but this makes me want to.



Another list featuring Bradbury: this time it's twenty-one creepy babies from film and TV. Bradbury appears thanks to "The Small Assassin", specifically the Ray Bradbury Theater adaptation of the short story. View the twenty-one here - and view my review of that episode here. I also have a review of the 2006 short film based on the same story, here.



This last item isn't new, but I stumbled on it just recently and thought I would link to it here. On NASA's website they have the full text of a small book called Why Man Explores, first published in 1976. It includes a brief essay and poem by Ray Bradbury, as well as writings from James Michener and Jacques Cousteau. The full text is here.