New Podcast Episode: Chronological Bradbury 1943 (continued)

Here's another new podcast episode, picking up the "Chronological Bradbury" thread once more, with the remaining Ray Bradbury stories which were first published in the latter part of 1943.

I cover five stories in this episode, completing the total of eleven stories Ray published in that year.

All of the stories are available online within archived copies of the original pulp magazines. Here are the stories and links:

• Doodad (Astounding, September 1943)
• And Watch the Fountains (Astounding, September 1943)
• Promotion to Satellite (Thrilling Wonder Stories, fall 1943)
• The Ducker (Weird Tales, November 1943)
• King of the Gray Spaces (aka R is for Rocket) (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1943)

In the following year (1944), Ray will publish a total of nineteen stories. That's a lot of stories, but he still won't have reached his peak of busy-ness!

Here's the new pod - or you can find it in your podcast app of choice. As always, there's a list of direct links to the pod on various platforms down below.

 

Bradbury 100 · Bradbury 100 - episode 68 - Chronological Bradbury 1943

 

 

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Another Award for Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury has won yet another Retro Hugo Award - for his 1944 short story "I, Rocket".

Like the normal Hugo Awards, winners are decided by a popular vote among the membership of the World Science Fiction Convention, which this year is held in New Zealand. (Well, it's become an online event this year due to Covid, but it's still being run from New Zealand.) The idea behind the Retro Hugos is simple: there were some years in the past where normal Hugos weren't awarded - mostly because of pesky little things like World War 2 getting in the way. The Retro Hugos are designed to plug the gap in the historical record by awarding for those years retroactively.

Of course, the award winners will be distorted by the peculiar selective memories we all have. The only authors who are ever going to win Retro Hugos are famous ones. Any author whose name is lost to the mists of time is just never going to be in with the chance of winning a popular vote.

However, in some cases with the Retro Hugos you will find more than one famous name competing for an award. For the 1944 Retro Hugo voted for this year, famous author Ray Bradbury was up against famous author Isaac Asimov, and three authors whose popularity has probably diminshed over the decades: Clifford D. Simak, Fredric Brown and A.E. Van Vogt.

Surprisingly, Bradbury's "I, Rocket" isn't contained in any of his main short story collections. But you can find a scan of the magazine it originally appeared in way back in May 1944. Click here to read Amazing Stories magazine.

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.

Re-Unite Bradbury's Hugo Award with his Manuscripts!

It took fifty years for Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic novel of book-burning firemen, to be formally honoured by the science fiction community. The first Hugo Awards - voted for by members of the World Science Fiction Convention - were given in 1953 (covering the year 1952), too early for Fahrenheit to be in consideration. They weren't given again until 1955, by which time it was too late for Fahrenheit. But in 2004 the "missing year" of 1954 was finally covered with the "Retro Hugos", an opportunity for Convention-goers to select the best works of 1953 for special awards.

Ray's Retro-Hugo is currently up for auction, along with more than 400 other artefacts offered by the Bradbury estate. The starting bid was $5000. Unfortunately, this is beyond what the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, which holds (in original or digitised form) many manuscripts related to Fahrenheit 451, could afford to spend. So I would like to make a simple proposition to put the Hugo back with the manuscripts:

Bid-to-donate.

Is there someone out there who could bid for the Retro-Hugo, and donate it to the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University?

If this idea appeals to you, please visit the web site of Nate D. Sanders Auctions of Los Angeles (link below); or email auction@natedsanders.com; or phone 310 440-2982. The auction instructions and registration pages of the website explain the online, phone, and mail bidding process.

The bidding period runs until 5:00 p.m. PDT on Thursday, September 25th, 2014. The Bradbury Hugo Award is lot number 293 in the Bradbury online auction catalog. Here's a direct link:

http://natedsanders.com/Ray_Bradbury_s_Hugo_Award_for___Fahrenheit_451____-LOT31626.aspx

Bradbury Wins Retro Hugo

The problem with awards is that they don't always go to the right people. The Hugo Awards - decided on a ballot of the year's World Science Fiction Convention membership - have a way of correcting for this: the Retro Hugos, typically given for overlooked works... but many years after the event.

At this year's Loncon3 convention, the Retro Hugos have been given for the year 1939. This, of course, is long before most of the convention's members were born. But it has given Ray Bradbury a second opportunity to have his works considered for recognition.

Bradbury was on the ballot in two categories:

"Best Short Story" - his amateur story "Hollerbochen's Dilemma" lost out to Arthur C. Clarke's "How We Went To Mars". Perhaps the UK location of this year's Worldcon helped Clarke to win this category...

"Best Fan Writer" - Ray won in this category, where the award is not given for a specific named work, but for a general body of work. Of course, in the late 1930s Bradbury was contributing to a number of fan publications, and was producing his own fanzine, Futuria Fantasia.

I find it quite amusing that Ray Bradbury should win as "best fan writer", particularly since back in 1939 he attended the very first World Science Fiction Convention in New York.

Full details of the Retro Hugo ballot can be found at Tor.com.

Bradbury Gets Two Retro-Hugo Nominations

Between 1938 and 1941, Ray Bradbury emerged as a significant voice in the developing world of science fiction fandom. Now, seventy-five years after the first World Science Fiction Convention, his early contributions to the field are recognised in not one, but two nominations in the Retro Hugo Awards, which this year are being given for works first published in the year 1938. The Award winners will be announced at the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention in London.

Bradbury's 1938 fanzine short story "Hollerbochen's Dilemma" - which appears in the appendix of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition, Vol. I - is among the nominees for Best Short Story of 1938, where Bradbury is in competition with writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, L. Sprague de Camp and Lester Del Rey.

His second nomination is in the category of Best Fan Writer, which recognises his contributions to various fanzines, although his own fanzine Futuria Fantasia wouldn't see publication until mid-1939, outside the nomination window for this round of Retro Hugos. Details of all the Hugo Award nominations, including the Retro Hugos, can be found here.