Here's another new episode of my Bradbury 100 podcast. This time I review three new Bradbury-related products which I've recently received. Here are ordering links for the three:
Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, 1980 TV miniseries on Blu-ray: order from ViaVision Entertainment
Phoenix 451, a collection of Ray's own dramatisations of Fahrenheit 451: order from Gauntlet Press
It Came From Outer Space, 1953 film written by Ray, on 4K HDR Blu-ray: order from Amazon US - or order from Amazon UK
Australian bluray publisher Imprint Films has announced a new release of Ray Bradbury's THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, the 1980 miniseres. The CHRONICLES has been out on this format before, but with very little in the way of extras.
This new release has audio commentary by veteran science fiction film journalist Gary Gerani, and interviews with several industry professionals. They're also throwing in the documentary Ray Bradbury: American Icon, which was first released in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
Ray famously said that this miniseries was "boring", and he was heavily chastised by NBC for saying it. He wasn't entirely wrong. But the announced extras should make this a very collectable release.
It's a limited edition set, and I understand that it will be region free. I've placed an order, and found that they do ship to the UK (with added shipping of about 30 Australian dollars - which is about £15 in UK money). It's released at the end of September.
I recently joined the team of the Continuum Drag podcast to discuss the 1980 TV miniseries of The Martian Chronicles. It was a lot of fun, especially since the regulars were watching the series with fresh eyes (whereas I was bringing baggage from having watched the series when it first went out).
Ray Bradbury himself said that this miniseries, starring Rock Hudson, was "boring". He got in trouble with NBC and Charles Fries Productions for this, but he wasn't wrong. Fries' lawyers, however, pointed out that Bradbury's contract forbade him from badmouthing the production...
Here's the podcast, where we're discussing episode 2 of the miniseries:
Here's a little curiosity that I've mentioned before, but now with added evidence:
In the 1980 TV miniseries of The Martian Chronicles, there is a brief scene of people coming out of (what I assume to be) a cinema. Either side of the door is a rather amateurish poster with the title The Silver Locusts. The artwork on the poster is taken from... the UK paperback of The Silver Locusts, which was the original UK title for... The Martian Chronicles.
How meta is that? People in MC going to watch a film about themselves!
I noticed this in 1980, when the show was first aired on British TV. But this was before VCRs, and the appearance of the artwork was so fleeting as to be unprovable. The commercial DVD release allowed the image to be paused, but it was rather muddy.
But thanks to Bluray, we can now get a closer look. So here is the proof:
Silver Locusts posters as the crowd emerges from the cinema.
UK paperback, 1970s. Artwork by Peter Goodfellow.
When the miniseries was released, UK publisher Granada decided to cash in by re-issuing The Silver Locusts as The Martian Chronicles.
In the same sequence, there are some other posters on display, but I haven't been able to figure out what they are. They're probably completely fictional, but who knows? What are we looking at here? mtext? Invasion?
In the latest Bradbury 100 podcast episode, I discuss Ray Bradbury's other martian stories - stories set on Mars which are not part of The Martian Chronicles.
These stories have only once been all collected together, and that was in the limited-edition book The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition (2009). I've mentioned this book before, and have also mentioned my love-hate relationship with it. On the one hand, the book was a great idea, but on the other hand, it turned out to be far from "complete".
One section of that book is titled "the other martian tales of Ray Bradbury", and is based on a selection of stories originally collated by Marc Scott Zicree, writer of the famous Twilight Zone Companion. Zicree figured out which other Mars-related stories Bradbury wrote, and also dug around in Ray's archives to find any that remained unpublished. Zicree's proposed book didn't happen, but the selection of stories was absorbed into the Complete Edition. Actually, not everything Zicree collated ended up in the book; the editors of the Complete Edition decided to only include stories set on Mars, and to eliminate any that were set elsewhere. A reasonable choice... except not all of The Martian Chronicles is set on Mars... so they hadn't thought it through...
Here's the list of "other Mars stories" used in the so-called Complete Edition, which I work through in the podcast episode (UPDATE: I somehow missed "The Martian Ghosts" of this list - but I've added it now):
The Lonely Ones
The Exiles
The One Who Waits
The Disease
Dead of Summer
The Martian Ghosts
Jemima True
They All Had Grandfathers
The Strawberry Window
Way in the Middle of the Air (included in the "other" section, because the Complete Edition contains a version of The Martian Chronicles which deliberately omits this story)
The Other Foot
The Wheel
The Love Affair
The Marriage
The Visitor
The Lost City of Mars
Holiday
Payment in Full
The Messiah
Night Call, Collect (aka I, Mars)
The Blue Bottle
Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed (aka The Naming of Names)
Anyone who is expecting any major revelations in this list will be disappointed. It is mostly a list of (a) stories which are easily available in Bradbury's other books; (b) unfinished stories; and (c) tiny fragments and bridging material, pages or paragraphs left on the cutting-room floor. The only truly interesting find here is "They All Had Grandfathers".
Please listen to the episode, where I go through the intricacies of these stories, and explain how a couple of the fragments such as "The Wheel" and "The Disease" reveal something of Bradbury's process of assembling The Martian Chronicles.
It's time for a new episode of my Bradbury 100 podcast. This time I explore some of the best movies nevermade, by looking at Ray Bradbury's multiple unfilmed screenplays for The Martian Chronicles.
The book came out in 1950, and The Martian Chronicles immediately became a mini sensation that same year, thanks to the radio drama series Dimension X, which dramatised several stories from the book. Ray knew that there was dramatic potential in his Martian tales, and the late 1950s saw him - by now an established screenwriter, thanks to Moby Dick and It Came From Outer Space - drawing up plans for a TV series to be called Report From Space.
Alas, the series didn't make it to air, and his attempts to develop The Martian Chronicles further for the big screen also came to nothing. But the scripts are pretty good, and allow us to play a game of what if:
What if Ray Bradbury's TV series came on air the same year as The Twilight Zone or Men Into Space?
What if the producer-director/actor team from 1962's To Kill A Mockingbird had succeeded in making The Martian Chronicles before 2001: A Space Odyssey (or Star Trek) had come along?
You may have seen this post on LitHub. It reproduces a 1962 letter that Ray Bradbury wrote to Arthur M. Schlesinger, the historian who was a special advisor to President Kennedy. Bradbury offers his services - whichever services the president might feel appropriate - in promoting the new space age.
This is another illustration of how Ray's book publication history fails to reflect his "real" interests.
By
1962 - when he wrote this letter - in the public eye he had move far
beyond science fiction. He had published The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man and Fahrenheit 451 -
and that was it for SF. Then he was on to Dandelion Wine, The October
Country, The Golden Apples of the Sun, A Medicine for Melancholy - all quite far removed
from SF. Plus he had been busily writing the screenplay for Moby Dick, episodes of Alfred
Hitchcock Presents, and a bunch of one-act Irish plays.
But
what wasn't visible to the public was that he was deeply involved in
trying to get The Martian Chronicles filmed. He had worked on various
script drafts since 1957, and in 1962 he seemed closest to getting the
film made. What perfect timing this would have been for him, for The Martian Chronicles: The
Movie to have been made just as Kennedy was launching the real space
programme.
Despite
all the claims that he didn't like being called a science fiction
writer, you can see from this letter that he really did want to be known
for his SF. The "space age" meant a lot to him. It was vindication of
his "silly" childish fantasies about rocketships.
JFK replied to Bradbury, thanking him for the books he had gifted. But he didn't go so far as to invite Ray to become a space advisor. However, around
that same time, Bradbury wrote a number of articles about space for Life and
other publications. He was determined to be associated, in the public
mind, with space. And, indeed, he eventually succeeded. See Jon Eller's Bradbury Beyond Apollofor a full account of Ray's space activities!
Alas, Kennedy's assassination the following year brought a big interruption to everything. In various interviews Ray talked about where he was the day Kennedy died: he was on his way into Hollywood for a script meeting about The Martian Chronicles. He knew that nobody would be able to concentrate on anything, so the meeting was cancelled and he returned home instead.
By 1965, The Martian Chronicles movie was cancelled. Ray had written at least two distinctly different scripts, and was working with the makers of the successful To Kill A Mockingbird. But they couldn't get the movie into a shape they were all happy with, and so the project died. (The 1980 Martian Chronicles TV miniseries was an unrelated attempt to adapt the book; Ray played no part in the scripting of that version.)
Arguably, the death of Kennedy brought a renewed determination to achieve the goal, by the end of the decade, of "putting a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth". And when it happened, Bradbury was prominent in media coverage - as was his science fiction friend and colleague Arthur C. Clarke. On the night of the Moon landing, Bradbury walked out of a British David Frost entertainment show (it was more concerned with showbiz than with celebrating humanity's setting foot on another world), but was also interviewed on national TV in the US.
It's time for another new episode of the Bradbury 100 podcast. This week, I'm joined by writer and Bradbury scholar Steve Gronert Ellerhoff.
We talk about Ray Bradbury - and also Kurt Vonnegut! Did you know that Bradbury and Vonnegut knew each other? Or that they both had a TV series at the same time, from the same production company?
Following on from the success of Ray Bradbury Theatre (1985-1992), production company Atlantis signed up with Vonnegut to do a similar series, adapting Vonnegut's short stories in a similar way to Bradbury's stories. Kurt Vonnegut's Monkey House ran for two very short seasons - a total of seven episodes altogether. This pales in comparison to Ray's sixty-five episodes.
Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, in a publicity still for Atlantis by leading photographer Karsh.
We also tackle the difficult issue of how race is portrayed in some Bradbury stories from the 1950s. Bradbury took a strong stand against racism in a number of stories, including two of his Mars tales. Ironically, because they use dated language, they are today sometimes accused of being raciststories. I generally defend these stories as bold and brave anti-racist works, but I admit to being uncomfortable with the language used.
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a public lecture as part of the University of Wolverhampton's ArtsFest 2020. My topic was Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles at Seventy, marking the seventieth anniversary of the first publication of that book.
Bradbury himself recognised that The Martian Chronicles was a "half-cousin to a novel", being neither a short story collection nor a full novel. In the lecture, I discussed how this came about, and how it influences the way the book has survived these last seventy years.
I released the audio from the lecture as part of a recent Bradbury 100 podcast, but you can now also see the video of the lecture. Given that it was an illustrated talk, this has to be the best way to enjoy it...
This week's Bradbury 100 is a bit different: instead of a featured guest interview, I present highlights from two Bradbury Centenary events from recent times, as well as summing up some of the key centary events of the year so far.
The first of the highlights is a selection from the discussion in the first (and so far, only) Bradbury 100 LIVE episode. This was an event I ran on Facebook Live back in September. In this recording, I talk to John King Tarpinian - a friend of Ray Bradbury's who often accompanied him to public events - and educator George Jack.
The second is the audio from a public lecture I gave earlier this week, celebrating seventy years of Bradbury's book The Martian Chronicles.
Read more of my assessment of The Martian Chronicles here.
JKT - John King Tarpinian- is a frequent contributor to Mike Glyer's File 770, where he often provides news stories relating to Ray Bradbury. View his posts here.
Today - Tuesday 10th November - I am giving a talk on Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles at Seventy. It's online, entirely free, and open to all. But you do need to register to receive the link. (The talk will be delivered via a Zoom webinar.)
It will also be recorded, and made available for future viewing, but this could take a few weeks.
The talk is part of the University of Wolverhampton's annual ArtsFest. Here's the official blurb for the event:
This year saw the widely celebrated one-hundredth anniversary of the
birth of Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), the American author whose best-known
work Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Brave New World and Nineteen
Eighty-Four as a classic of twentieth-century dystopian fiction, and
still holds relevance today.
But this year also saw the seventieth anniversary of Bradbury’s
earlier The Martian Chronicles, a book which better captures the breadth
and fragmentary nature of Bradbury’s many styles and interests, and one
which more clearly reveals the irony of Bradbury’s association with the
science fiction genre. For all its reliance on science-fictional
tropes, The Martian Chronicles is a work which builds dream-like fantasy
on top of Bradbury’s own fantastical influences. And, while projecting
and warning about our future, it relies heavily on a rear-view mirror to
reflect on colonialism, invasion and occupation.
In this illustrated lecture, Phil Nichols recounts the history of
The Martian Chronicles, and shows how this short-story collection
masquerading as a novel has constantly evolved with our changing times.
He considers the long shadow the book has cast over television, radio
and film science fiction, and shows how Bradbury’s unscientific book has
nevertheless inspired several generations of real-life scientists and
astronauts.
The online lecture will be followed by a question-and-answer session.
Dr Phil Nichols, Course Leader for Film & Television
Production at the University of Wolverhampton, has been called “the
leading scholar on Bradbury's media adaptation history" by Bradbury
biographer Professor Jonathan R. Eller (Bradbury Beyond Apollo,
University of Illinois Press, 2020). Phil has spoken about Bradbury on
the BBC World Service and National Public Radio, and has published and
presented widely on Bradbury’s work in all media. He currently produces
and presents a podcast, Bradbury 100, which explores Bradbury’s
centenary.
This is the second in a new series of posts, my Lockdown Choices, where I seek to entertain you while in coronavirus-isolation, and remind you of Bradbury's great works in this, his centenary year.
In these posts, I cover each of Ray Bradbury's books, say something about the contents, then pick the best stories and adaptations.
Lockdown Choice #2: The Martian Chronicles
First edition, Doubleday 1950
The Book
The Martian Chronicles was Ray Bradbury's first book from a mainstream publisher, a collection of linked science fiction and fantasy tales published by Doubleday in 1950. Many of the stories had previously been published in magazines ranging from Thrilling Wonder Stories to Mademoiselle. But there was also a lot of new material, mostly in linking stories and passages crafted to join the disjointed tales together. The result is sometimes called a novel, and sometimes called a short story collection. The label "fix-up" is also sometimes applied: this term from the science fiction field refers to a work originally published in sections in pulp magazines, but then stitched together as a novel for book publication. The best description, although it's a bit of a mouthful, is the term Eller and Touponce use: "novelised story-cycle".
Bradbury often told the tale of how this novel/collection/fix-up/novelised story-cycle came to be. He met with editor Walter Bradbury (no relation), who suggested to Ray that he could take some of his disparate Mars stories and weave them into a novel. In fact, Ray already had the idea of collecting his Mars stories as far back as 1948, when he wrote some notes under the title "The Martian Chronicles, a book of short stories".But perhaps it was Walter Bradbury's suggestion which gave him "permission" to link the stories together.
In this first major publication, Bradbury shows his influences quite clearly. Here you will find some remarkably spare and clear writing, reflecting the influence of Hemingway. In the "chronicling" approach with its explanatory and linking chapters you will find the influence of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. (Remember how Steinbeck alternates between his fictional narrative and his more journalistic interstitial chapters?) And in the stories themselves, with their quirky character portrayals, you will see the influence of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. All of these literary influences, of course, sit alongside the tropes of science fiction, since Bradbury's Mars is an extension of the common-coin concepts of Mars which Ray knew from his childhood reading of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Ah yes, science fiction.
That's a problem with Bradbury. And it was a problem for Bradbury.
The first problem is that Bradbury uses the backdrop of Mars, but it's not at all a scientific backdrop. It's based on Burroughs, who based it on the work of astronomer Percival Lowell... whose work was discredited the moment it was first published. By 1950, when real rockets had been developed, Bradbury's presentation of Mars was decidedly quaint. He caught a lot of flak over the years for writing something so unscientific under the guise of science fiction.
Which leads me to the second problem. Bradbury knew this wasn't science fiction. He said it was fantasy. Bradbury's personal definition of science fiction was that it had to be possible. And since The Martian Chronicles is set on a Mars that doesn't really exist, every word of the book was, in his mind, pure fantasy. And yet...
Doubleday launches a new line of science fiction books, much to the annoyance of
the science fiction author who argued that this book was not SF.
...right there, on the cover of the book, was this nifty new logo that Doubleday had devised. They were marketing this book, Bradbury's breakthrough into mainstream hardcover publication, as something it wasn't.
Bradbury fought it, but couldn't win. Doubleday knew that science fiction was going to become a big genre in the 1950s, and they were determined to grab a piece of that particular pie, and hadn't they just signed this Bradbury guy who was being celebrated as one of the most creative of those science fiction pulp writers?
Shortly after the Doubleday edition appeared, there was a British edition, which had a more poetic (but also more obscure) title: The Silver Locusts. This variant title continued to be used for all British editions right up until 1980, when The Martian Chronicles was made into a TV miniseries. The opportunity for a bit of cross-marketing got the better of publisher Granada, and The Silver Locusts quietly became The Martian Chronicles on British shores. And we've never looked back.
Spot the difference... The UK had always had a repackaged version of the book, titled The Silver Locusts.Until the TV miniseries, when lucrative tie-in opportunities arose. Granada/Panther paperback editions, 1979/1980.
The Silver Locusts also had some variation in the content, and this is where Bradbury's book reveals itself as really being a short story collection, rather than a novel. The British first edition from Hart-Davis removes "Usher II" and replaces it with "The Fire Balloons". This was reportedly at Bradbury's request, and reflected a change he would have made to the Doubleday edition if he had had the opportunity before it went to press.
Over the years, The Martian Chronicles has become something of an unstable text, since there have been many additions and removals, most of them originating with Bradbury himself. "The Wilderness" slips its way in, giving a much needed role to some female characters (which Chronicles is otherwise short of). And slipping its way out: "Way in the Middle of the Air", a remarkable story in which American black people decide, en masse, to abandon Earth once and for all, and to start over on Mars. There are elements of this story which foreshadow the civil rights movement which would come in the 1960s; it was really ahead of its time, but also rapidly came to look outdated, prompting Bradbury to remove it from the book.
And speaking of time, you will find that The Martian Chronicles takes place in different time periods depending on which edition you have. All the chapters have dates attached to them - running from February 1999 to October 2026 in the first edition, but shifted to January 2030 to October 2057 in late twentieth-century editions! As the book is fantasy, Bradbury felt no need to update any of the technology, but he did feel the need to keep the story forever in the future, just out of reach.
The Stories
If The Martian Chronicles truly were a novel, it would be next to impossible to choose "stories" from it. But it isn't. (As Ray said, it's a "half-cousin to a novel".)
My personal picks from The Martian Chronicles are these:
"Rocket Summer" - strictly speaking not a story, but one of the bits of linking material Ray crafted for the book, "Rocket Summer" is one of Bradbury's best pieces of prose poetry. From the opening single-sentence paragraph, you know you're in for a poetic ride in this book. It's "Ohio winter", until the rocket fires up in paragraph 2:
And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer's ancient green lawns.
"- And The Moon Be Still As Bright" - a story which depicts a major turning point in the colonisation of Mars. In the stories leading up to this one, there has been a series of attempts by Earthmen (for they are all men; a sign of the times in which this was written) to conquer the red planet - but each attempt has been thwarted by the Martians. Now the fourth expedition settles in, and is shocked to find all of Mars now dead. It turns out the humans have inadvertently brought disease to Mars, and the martians are wiped out by something as simple as chicken pox.
For most of the rocketship's crew, this is a fine state of affairs, giving them free rein over a whole planet. But for one, Spender, it's a tragedy. Spender alone is able to see the great loss of martian civilisation. His empathy for the martians leads to him presenting himself as one of them. For the rest of the book we will encounter a number of other martians, all of them ethereal or ghostly. Humankind may take over the planet, but they will be forever haunted by the former civilisation they have destroyed.
"The Martian" - unlike "And the Moon..." and "The Third Expedition" (aka "Mars is Heaven!"), "The Martian" is rarely reprinted outside of this book. Take a look on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, and you will see that "Mars is Heaven" - one of the best known short stories in the science fiction field - is endlessly anthologised, whereas "The Martian" doesn't get a look-in.
So what's so great about it? Well, it captures a true sense of loneliness. Mr and Mrs Lafarge live on Mars, and are in perpetual mourning the loss of their son, Tom. Until, one day:
"A small boy's standing in the yard and won't answer me," said the old man, trembling. "He looks like Tom!"
"Come to bed, you're dreaming,"
"But he's there; see for yourself."
The old woman looks, but has to wave the figure away. Shortly after, in bed, she says "It's a terrible night. I feel so old."
It turns out that it is their beloved Tom. Or, actually, a martian who is able to take on the form of Tom. The martian, too, is lonely. If only the Lafarges can accept him as their son, they can all be happy.
If you've not read the story before, I won't spoil it by revealing anything further. But I do recommend you read it. You don't have to know anything else about what's going on in The Martian Chronicles; "The Martian" works perfectly well as a standalone short story.
"There Will Come Soft Rains" - another story with a title taken from a poem (the other one being "And the Moon..."). This is perfection. A science fiction story written as a prose poem. There is barely any human presence in the story, which is the whole point: back on Earth, a global nuclear war wipes everything out. In "There Will Come Soft Rains" we see the poignant decline of a fully-automated house after its owners have been killed in an atomic flash. Only Bradbury can make you feel sorry for a house ("The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by the heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.") Ever dutiful, the robotic house chooses a poem to read, since "Mrs McClellan" doesn't answer when asked for her selection. The chosen poem is by Sara Teasdale, and provides the title for the story. The final line of the poem sums up the short story: "And Spring herself, when she awoke at dawn / Would scarcely know that we were gone."
"The Million-Year Picnic" - (SPOILER ALERT!) - a perfect ending for an astonishing book, and yet another turning point in humankind's relationship with Mars. Following the destruction of Earth, all that remains of the human race is the smattering of colonists who were unable to get back home prior to the nuclear war. In the aftermath of that destruction, one family goes off on the martian canals for a picnic, with a promise from "Dad" that they will see martians. They travel amid the ruins of the martian cities, a reminder of the destroyed cities on Earth, but there is no life there. The kids really want to see a martian. "Where are they, Dad? You promised." Dad eventually shows them:
"There they are," said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down. [...]
The Martians were there - in the canal - reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad.
The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long, silent time from the rippling water...
The Adaptations
The Martian Chronicles and its constituent stories were grabbed for adaptation almost immediately: the NBC radio series Dimension X had four episodes based on parts of the book in 1950, and the appeal of the book/stories continued for decades. The most popular story for adaptation is "Mars is Heaven!" ("The Third Expedition"), probably because it is as much a horror/suspense story as it is an SF tale. Horror writer Stephen King describes how, as a child listening-in to the Dimension X adaptation, he was scared so much that he couldn't sleep (see Danse Macabre, chapter V).
Bradbury himself was very keen to get The Martian Chronicles made into a film. From the late 1950s onwards he would return again and again to drafting different screenplay versions, but they unfortunately never sold. Even as late as 2005, when Bradbury was 85 years old, he was putting together new proposals for film or TV.
But wait, I hear you cry. There was a Martian Chronicles TV series. I saw it with my own two eyes!
Well, we don't like to talk about that...
It's true, in the late '70s, in the wake of Star Wars and Close Encounters, every studio in Hollywood was falling over itself to try to have the next hot SF property. The Martian Chronicles had a remarkably success run as a stage play around that same time in Los Angeles. And so was born the idea of adapting The Martian Chronicles for TV. Which Ray had been banging on about for years, but would anyone listen?
Flyer for the 1977 Colony Theater stage production in Los Angeles, 1977.
In theory, it should have been great. It had a respectful script from Richard Matheson, one of the most successful genre screenwriters (The Twilight Zone, The Night Stalker, Duel). And it had Michael Anderson directing (1984, Logan's Run). But alas, Anderson phoned it in, and the special effects were made out of plastic bottles and cornflake packets. Bradbury wasn't the only one to notice that the whole miniseries was boring. Unfortunately, he said it during a press conference, and got chastised by the studio's legal department.
About a decade later Bradbury tried to "do it right". He got the rights back to all the stories, and began adapting them for his TV series The Ray Bradbury Theatre. The budget wasn't good, but the production team did the best they could, turning out some respectable episodes in "The Earthmen" and "The Long Years".
Every now and again, we hear that The Martian Chronicles is going into production again, but I think ultimately it will never be done well. The book is too fragmented to make into a coherent movie, and although a TV series would probably work best, I fear that viewers today expect season-long arcs, not episodes with different casts every week (Black Mirror notwithstanding).
So forget TV and film, and consider radio: Colonial Radio Theatre did an excellent job with the whole of the Chronicles nearly ten years ago.
Find Out More...
Find out more about The Martian Chronicles on my page about the book, here.
Learn more about the Colonial Radio Theatre dramatisation of The Martian Chronicles in my review of the production, here.
Learn more about Bradbury's definition of "science fiction" and "fantasy" in my blog post, here.
Watch...
In November 2020, I gave a public lecture over Zoom all about The Martian Chronicles, as part of the University of Wolverhampton's ArtsFest Online series. You can watch it here:
Listen...
One of the earliest adaptations from The Martian Chronicles was the one that scared the bejeezus out of Stephen King: this Ernest Kinoy-scripted version of "Mars is Heaven!" (aka "The Third Expedition"): click here.
Next Up...
The next of my Lockdown Choices will be Bradbury's third book: The Illustrated Man.
According to The Illuminerdi, a new screen adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is in development. As usual with such announcements, I caution against getting too excited: "in development" just means someone is signed up to write a script or treatment. Whether said script ever goes into production is another matter entirely.
The new, big name atached to the project is James Gunn, filmmaker of considerable talent - and not a little controversy. In 2018 he was fired by Disney when some decade-old tweets came to light which showed poor judgment and poor taste. (He was later re-hired when Gunn apologised and recanted; and when the unearthing of the old tweets was found to be the work of alt-right activists.)
The bigger picture is that The Martian Chronicles spent most of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s "in development". Back in the 1950s, Ray Bradbury and Kirk Douglas tried to get the Chronicles onto TV and then into film, with scripts and treatments by Ray. Then in the 1960s, he worked with Alan J. Pakula and Robert Mulligan on a film version. None of these came to anything. The Martian Chronicles did eventually get onto the screen in the late 1970s/early 1980s, in the wake of (a) the unexpected global success of Star Wars and (b) the unexpected stage success in Los Angeles of Ray's theatrical production of the Chronicles.
After the critical flop of the 1980 TV miniseries version of The Martian Chronicles, Ray adapted various of the constituent stories of his book as episodes of his TV series The Ray Bradbury Theater. And then attempted, yet again, to get The Martian Chronicles on the big screen, with his own screenplay adaptation. Various attempts were made through the 1990s and early 2000s.
So the latest news is actually nothing new. Once again, a big Hollywood name is attached, but we've seen this all before. Whatever happened to the remakes of The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes? It is Hollywood's way to spend a lot of time (and sometimes money, too) on development, but somehow never quite get to an end product.
I hope things will turn out differently this time. It would be a nice way to celebrate the Bradbury Centenary, and the seventieth anniversary of The Martian Chronicles book. But don't hold your breath!
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:
There's something of a Bradburyan influence on the latest episode of The Simpsons, due to air today in the US. According to the Simpsons Wiki:
"Not feeling unique, Lisa signs up for the Mars One Space Colony – to Marge's dismay. Then, Marge hires Bart to go through the tryout process with Lisa to make her want to quit."
It's called (wait for it!) ... "The Marge-ian Chronicles."
OK, the Bradbury reference is tenuous, but it's far from the first. Other references are documented here.
You can't fail to have noticed the widespread tributes to Leonard Nimoy, who died recently at the age of 83. Of course, Star Trek, and of course, Spock. But Nimoy also had an incredibly long career that spanned stage, television, film - and was recognised for his acting, teaching, writing, directing and photography.
It would be impossible for science fiction giants like Nimoy and Bradbury to have never crossed paths, and indeed their paths did cross on several occasions - but curiously the only times when Nimoy acted for Bradbury were all voice work.
Nimoy recorded a couple of spoken-word albums of Bradbury material, which included short stories chosen from The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles. Today, we would call these "audiobooks", but back in the day they were released as LPs.
Later, Nimoy put in an energetic performance as Bradbury's character Moundshroud, in the Emmy-winning animated TV film of The Halloween Tree. On this occasion, Nimoy was performing directly from a screenplay written by Bradbury himself.
It's been interesting to see the tributes to Nimoy, which have come not just from Hollywood, but from NASA, astronauts, and President Obama. He inspired people to dream of space, and of the future; much as Bradbury did. I haven't been able to locate any photos of Bradbury and Nimoy together, but I've sure they met at some point, and no doubt they would have much in common to talk about.
Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Disney is planning its second attempt to film Something Wicked This Way Comeswith Seth Grahame-Smith as writer-director. And in just over a week, BBC Radio 4 will be topping and tailing its season of SF dramas with two new productions based on The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles.
In the last year we have seen academic texts about Bradbury's works:
Finally, we have seen Bradbury's office contents shipped to the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies for preservation future study, and the sale of the Bradbury house on Los Angeles' Cheviot Drive.
A time of change, to be sure.
Next month, BBC Radio 4 launches a new week of science fiction drama, starting and ending with dramatisations of two of Ray Bradbury's most celebrated works.
On Saturday 14th June at 2.30pm, The Illustrated Man opens the series. This all-new production is written by award-winning radio dramatist Brian Sibley, whose previous works include the 1990s series Ray Bradbury's Tales of the Bizarre as well as the classic BBC Radio adaptations of Lord of the Rings, Gormenghast and The History of Titus Groan. Brian knew Ray personally, and tells me he is particularly pleased that the new production airs forty years to the week since he received Ray's first letter. (Brian is also a doodler, as you can see from this "Sibleytoon" of Ray.)
Of course, The Illustrated Man is not a novel, but a collection of short stories linked loosely together with the framing device of a tattooed man whose tattoos have a life of their own. As with previous adaptations, due to limitations of time it has been necessary to select which stories to adapt. Brian has chosen (in this order): 'Marionettes Inc', 'Zero Hour'
and 'Kaleidoscope' - and has managed to also include passing references to other stories in
the collection, as well as the separately published short story 'The
Illustrated Man'.
Studio recordings were completed last week, with Ian
Glenn playing The Illustrated Man and Jamie Parker the Youth who meets
him and hears his story. The drama is currently in post-production.
The
broadcast launches a short season of dramas entitled 'Dangerous Visions'
that runs for the week with a two-part classic serial (beginning on
Sunday 15th June) of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and five thematically-linked afternoon plays from Monday to Friday (details yet to be announced)
And to end the season: The Martian Chronicles will be aired on Saturday 21st June at 2.30pm.Unlike the in-house BBC production of The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles
is an independent production created by B7,
the team behind the radio adaptation of Blake's Seven. The dramatisation is by Richard Kurti and Bev Doyle, produced by Patrick Chapman and directed by Andrew Mark Sewell.
While I don't have full details on this production yet, early notes on the dramatisation suggest that the stories selected from Bradbury's book will include: '...And the Moon be Still as
Bright', 'The Off Season', 'The Long Years' and 'The Million Year
Picnic'.
These new productions, acting as bookends to such a major new series, promise to add to the already impressive BBC Radio track record for Bradbury productions (as you can see from my Bradbury radio list). Radio 4 streams live on the web, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world - and their shows usually remain online for catch-up listening for seven days after broadcast. The Radio 4 web page is here.
Bradbury's first book from a major publisher, The Martian Chronicles from Doubleday in 1950. That little logo saying "science fiction" was something that Bradbury fought against - not because he was opposed to science fiction, but because he considered The Martian Chronicles to be fantasy rather than SF.
But it was a battle he did not win, and the label continued to stick despite the fact that most of his work was not SF. (Bradbury maintained that Fahrenheit 451 was his only science fiction book, because he considered that it showed a possible world rather thanthe impossibility of The Martian Chronicles.)
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