New Bradbury 100 podcast episode: "The Exiles"

Here's another new episode of my Bradbury 100 podcast. It's a short episode, focusing on a single short story - although, as you will discover, it's really two or three different stories...

"The Exiles" started life as "The Mad Wizards of Mars", and you can easily find two or three different versions of the story. All of them are basically the same, but the characters - most of them based on real-life authors - are different between one version and the next.

To find out what the heck I'm talking about, listen to the pod!

 

Bradbury 100 · Bradbury 100 - episode 33 - The Exiles

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Ray Bradbury wins another Retro Hugo

Ray Bradbury's classic short story "King of the Gray Spaces" has won a Retro Hugo Award from the World Science Fiction Convention 2019, which began yesterday in Dublin.

Retro Hugos are special awards given for years where the standard Hugo Award was not awarded for some reason, mostly due to the Second World War interrupting the usual continuity of the Worldcon.

Bradbury has been awarded Retro Hugos in the past - the 1939 award for Best Fanzine, and the 1954 award for best novel (Fahrenheit 451).

"King of the Gray Spaces" is an early Bradbury science fiction tale, and is typically considered as the first to show the emotive style he is associated with. First published in Famous Fantastic Mysteries magazine in December 1943, the story has frequently been reprinted under the more familiar title "R is for Rocket".

In the story, fourteen year old Christopher and his friends long to be chosen for the space corps. They know that they can't "apply" for this; they have to be chosen. The key emotion of the story comes when Chris is indeed chosen, but as part of the selection process he has to keep it a secret even from his best friend Ralph. Chris's elation is contrasted with his sadness at having to leave Ralph behind, and with Ralph's muted understanding of what is happening to Chris.

Some elements of the story are quite dated now, and in fact Bradbury was aware of this when he made it the title story of his 1962 collection R is for Rocket: he made some changes to the story to bring it more up to date.

When the story first appeared in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, it was accompanied by a magnificent illustration by Lawrence Sterne Stevens (shown above).

When the Retro Hugo win was announced, my friend Jason Aukerman of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies took the stage to receive it on behalf of the Bradbury family and the Bradbury estate. Jason took the opportunity to remind the Worldcon audience that in exactly one year and one week it will be Bradbury's one hundredth birthday. The awarding of the Retro Hugo makes a fine lead-in to the Bradbury Centenary.

Here's the award announcement and Jason's speech.

Rain!

This is England, and so rain is hardly unexpected. Especially in April, the month traditionally associated with showers.

However, we haven't had very much rain - statistically and historically speaking - in the last two years, and so the Authorities (with a capital A) have declared an official drought. This must be laughable to those who live in, say, Ethiopia. All it means is that the UK water table is at a low level for the time of year, and if the dry spell keeps on we will faced with water shortages very soon. Several areas of the UK are under a hosepipe ban right now, meaning it is against the law to use a hosepipe or sprinkler to water that front lawn.

And, right on cue, it started raining about a week ago and has barely stopped. Today especially there has been an almost endless torrent where I am. It reminds me, of course, of the Bradbury story "The Long Rain".

"The Long Rain" first appeared in Planet Stories magazine in1950. Today you can find it in Bradbury's collections R is for Rocket and The Illustrated Man. It's set on the planet Venus, and is built on the science fiction conception of Venus as some kind of lush rain forest. The story deals with an astronaut who has to travel through the endless rains of Venus to reach the safe haven of a Sun Dome.

If you are stuck indoors, staring out at the rain and wondering what to do, you could always try a bit of homework. Here's a lesson-plan found online which should prompt you to start writing your own story in the style of Bradbury!

To Fairyland By Rocket

Eric Rabkin once wrote an essay on Bradbury called "To Fairyland By Rocket". In that title alone, Rabkin encapsulates something fundamental about Bradbury's writing: the collision or co-existence of fantasy and science fiction.

Bradbury is quite clear on what he considers to be science fiction. Fahrenheit 451, he tells us, is SF precisely because it is possible. It is a warning about the future, extrapolating from the technologies and the culture prevalent at the time of writing the novel.

The Martian Chronicles, on the other hand, is in Bradbury's view pure fantasy. The reason? It is impossible. No way it could ever happen. Yes, it has allegorical properties, and in its re-casting of the American experience of the frontier it unveils some profound truths. But it isn't an extrapolation of a possible future, merely a fanciful presentation of a world that never was.

It is The Martian Chronicles above all which gives Rabkin the fuel for his discussion of how Bradbury uses off-the-shelf imagery from SF and places it in a world - all crystal pillars, masks and flame birds - which is straight out of a fairy story.

Another story which I have always considered to be part of this approach is "Here There Be Tygers", about an expedition to a planet which turns out to be a paradise that seems to grant any wish. Bradbury doesn't refer to wishes, instead presenting the story in terms of a planet that can somehow read thought, but a wish-fulfilment fantasy is what is at the heart of the story.

The "fairyland by rocket" aspect of the story is captured neatly in the artwork accompanying the story when it was reprinted in Amazing Stories in April-May 1953. The illustration by Tom O'Sullivan (below - click on image to enlarge) captures a facnciful moment of flight - probably the most memorable sequence of the story - while in the background is the standard 1950s SF rocket.

(The amusing blurb in the magazine more or less apologises for re-printing a story, which was due to the expected new Bradbury story not arriving in time.)

"Here There Be Tygers" was first published in an anthology called New Tales of Space and Time in 1951. It was later collected in two Bradbury volumes: R is for Rocket and the UK Day it Rained Forever.