Bargain Price for BECOMING RAY BRADBURY

For a very limited time, Jon Eller's literary biography of Ray Bradbury - Becoming Ray Bradbury - is being offered in a special promotion from the publisher, Illinois University Press. In case you don't know, the book is a fascinating study of Bradbury's early writing career, and reveals the influences on Bradbury's developing authorship during the period when he was at his most creative and most prolific.

If you are an e-book user, you can get the full e-book version for a ridiculously cheap price of $2.99. Versions are available for Kindle, Nook and Kobo. The offer is good until the end of June. I don't know whether the offer is geographically limited.

Here's a direct link to the publisher's page. Scroll down to find the links for Becoming Ray Bradbury:

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=11910

Bradbury Unbound

I am pleased to be able to report that Jon Eller's second volume of literary biography of Ray Bradbury is now with the publisher. Bradbury Unbound gives a detailed account of Bradbury's literary life and influences during the 1950s and 1960s, and is a follow-up to the well received Becoming Ray Bradbury.

Jon Eller (pictured here with with Bradbury) runs the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at University of Indiana-Purdue University Indianapolis, and worked with Bradbury on a number of publishing projects. The Bradbury biographies are the result of years of research, must of it assisted directly by Bradbury, who provided hours of interviews and extensive access to his private papers.

I've had the honour and privilege of reading and commenting on Bradbury Unbound as Jon has developed the manuscript over the last few years, and I believe readers will find it even more fascinating than the previous volume.

The editorial process for the book will naturally take some time, so it will be a while before the book is available to buy, but I will post updates when more information becomes available.

Shadow Show Reviewed

The most perceptive review yet of the tribute volume Shadow Show appeared this week in the Los Angeles Review of Books. SF and fantasy scholar Gary K. Wolfe - whose best known essay on Bradbury established the "frontier myth" reading of The Martian Chronicles - has written a lengthy review which not only evaluates the book itself but uses it as an opportunity to gauge Bradbury's literary influence.

Wolfe writes:

Few would consider [Harlan] Ellison and Bradbury as close siblings in any literary or stylistic sense, but [...] there’s some of the genetic material of those old pulp classics in both writers.

But such are the mysteries of literary DNA. Those old retroviruses can express themselves in unexpected ways generations later, and Bradbury was a carrier. He may have read Eudora Welty and Willa Cather and imported some of their stylistic grace into genre fiction, but by the same token he passed along some of the imaginative energy of Brackett or Henry Kuttner to the writers who followed him.

Wolfe then explores each story in the anthology in turn, considering the extent and nature of Bradbury's influence. One of his key points is that nearly every contributor to the book refers in their afterword  to discovering Bradbury at an early age, and nearly every one references Bradbury stories that were originally published prior to 1962. That was the year Something Wicked This Way Comes was published, and it seems to mark a changeover point at which Bradbury switched from "becoming Ray Bradbury" to "being Ray Bradbury", Wolfe observes, consciously echoing Jon Eller's recent biographical volume Becoming Ray Bradbury.

Shadow Show has received a lot of reviews, but many of them have been cursory and lacking in awareness of what the book truly demonstrates. Wolfe, I think, has got it spot on. I haven't read all the stories in the book yet, but his review prompts me to get on with it!

Gary K. Wolfe's full review can be read here.

Locus Award Ballot

It's that time of year: Locus magazine has opened to the poll for the Locus Awards. These awards honour the best published works in the science fiction and fantasy fields. The ballot is open to all, and can be accessed here:

http://www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2012/PollAndSurvey.html

I'm not directly familiar with many of the works listed - life's too short! - but I would draw your attention to Jon Eller's excellent biographical work Becoming Ray Bradbury. This gives a detailed, thorough account of how Bradbury became the author he is, through an examination of the influences that acted on him during his early career. It will be getting my vote.

Incidentally, Jon tells me that he is two-thirds of the way through writing the sequel to Becoming Ray Bradbury, a volume which will cover the period 1953-1972. This is the stage of Bradbury's career where he goes off to Ireland to write Moby Dick for John Huston, and comes back a changed man: a screenwriter, playwright, poet and (shortly afterwards, as the space age gets going) media ambassador for the science fiction field which he had all but left behind. This second volume will appear on a future Locus ballot paper...

Becoming Ray Bradbury Reviews

I've been away from the blog for a while due to pressure of work, but I felt compelled to do an update on the reviews for Jon Eller's excellent book Becoming Ray Bradbury.

The book came out in the summer, and has been gathering positive reviews both in literary circles and in the popular press. One of the most interesting reviews is actually quite an insightful article about Bradbury, using Becoming Ray Bradbury as a springboard: it's Jamey Dunn's article for Illinois Issues, published by the University of Illinois.

The British Times Literary Supplement published a review by noted fantasy critic Roz Kaveney,  who writes "Eller's excellent account makes clear that one of the reasons why Bradbury came to seem an important new voice is that he was never as naive a writer as literary patrons such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley may have assumed." (This review is only viewable online if you have a paid subscription, so I am unable to provide a meaningful web link.)

Other reviews include my own here,  and these others: The Washington Post, Shelf Awareness, Barnes & Noble.

Leiva Reviews Eller; Guardian Readers Review Truffaut

Steven Paul Leiva, the writer and producer who co-ordinated events for Ray Bradbury Week in Los Angeles in 2010, has written a review of Jon Eller's new book Becoming Ray Bradbury.


The review, for Neworld Review, is here.

My own review of Becoming Ray Bradbury is here, and the publisher's page for the book is here.


Meanwhile, over on The Guardian's website, the reading group for Fahrenheit 451 have been discussing Truffaut's 1966 film version of Bradbury's book. It's interesting to see how opinions remain divided on this film. On the one hand, it looks very much a child of the 1960s, but on the other hand the stylisation of the film is, I think, plainer to see forty-odd years on. My own view is that it's a fascinating film to watch, but is far from being a great film. But if you watch it in the context of the films Truffaut made before and after it, you can see how it is part of a continuum.

Becoming Ray Bradbury

If you have a shelf full of Ray Bradbury's books, you may think you know his work well. You'd be wrong.

Professor Jonathan Eller of Indiana University has made it the work of a decade or so to pull off Bradbury's mask and find what's beneath. Some of this work has been done in studies of single works by Bradbury. Eller has edited, co-edited or contributed to volumes such as It Came From Outer Space, Moby Dick: a Screenplay, and The Halloween Tree. These have all revealed previously invisible aspects of Bradbury's work, by publishing intermediate aftefacts such as screen treatments, outlines and screenplays.

In his work with his Indiana colleague Prof William Touponce, Eller has substantially overturned our assumed wisdom about Bradbury's authorship. Their mammoth study Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction presented new readings of Bradbury's major works in light of archaeological diggings into Bradbury's typescripts and working papers. Before Eller and Touponce, we tended to assume that each book Bradbury put out was a reflection of his writing at the time of publication. After The Life of Fiction we can see that the vast majority of Bradbury's work stems from an extensive outpouring of creativity in the 1940s and early 1950s.

Eller and Touponce are continuing to "set the record straight" through their ongoing multi-volume critical edition of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury. This series of books seeks to restore Bradbury's original texts and to establish the original compositional sequence and chronology of Bradbury's short stories. It's really quite stunning to discover how many of Bradbury's classic tales were conceived or written before 1950.

Now Eller has completed a volume which serves as an excellent companion to The Life of Fiction and The Collected Stories.

Becoming Ray Bradbury is a biography of Bradbury's early career, concentrating on his creative, literary and intellectual development. It goes up to the key turning point of Bradbury's professional life: his sojourn in Ireland working on Moby Dick for John Huston. The remainder of Bradbury's career is due to be covered in a sequel volume.

There have been Bradbury biographies before, of course, most notably Sam Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles. Why do we we need another?

The answer to that one is simple. Sam Weller writes about every facet of Bradbury. Not just Bradbury the writer, but Bradbury the young film fan who hung around studio gates waiting for an autograph from W.C.Fields. Bradbury the celebrity who walked out on David Frost on the night of the Moon landing. Bradbury the friend of the stars and honoree of presidents from around the globe. All of this makes The Bradbury Chronicles a rounded and fascinating read.

But what Eller does in Becoming Ray Bradbury is carefully examine the details of Bradbury's writerly development. Here we learn of exactly what Bradbury was reading and writing during his early attempts to become a writer; of the importance of mentors such as Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett; of his encounters with the works of Steinbeck and Hemingway. Some of this is covered in Weller's book, but Jon Eller takes us deeply into Bradbury's reading and can tell us that, for example, in 1944 Bradbury read Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend and E.B. White's One Man's Meat. In many cases, he is able to tell us how and why Bradbury came to each volume: perhaps a chance discovery in a bookshop; perhaps a recommendation from friend Henry Kuttner; perhaps a gift from his wife.

Why does any of this matter? Well, because Eller is trying to piece together factors that influenced Bradbury's writing, thinking and worldview. It is clear in the early chapters that Bradbury was quite susceptible to influence from others, as we discover through the account of Bradbury's aligning himself with the "Technocracy" movement. It is equally clear that the young Bradbury was astute in making up his own mind, and having explored an idea in depth would be quite prepared to toss it aside if it was found wanting.

Becoming Ray Bradbury is particularly good in covering Bradbury's early professional years, presumably in part because Bradbury himself kept good records. (He has a reputation, to this day, of never throwing anything away.) It also gives an excellent account of Bradbury's oscillation between optimism and pessimism in terms of his knowledge and understanding of the world. Many critics are confused over this, and find it hard to reconcile a perceived "anti-science" bias in some of Bradbury's work with a profound optimism found elsewhere.

At the heart of Becoming Ray Bradbury is a pair of chapters dealing with Bradbury's "miracle year", a twelve-month period in which he submitted three of his major works: The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man and "The Fireman" (the earliest published version of Fahrenheit 451.)

You can probably tell by now that I think highly of this book, but that doesn't mean I find it without its flaws and foibles, although they are really quite minor. Although it is far more detailed than The Bradbury Chronicles, it doesn't attempt to cover every aspect of Bradbury's life. For some readers - particularly those who haven't read The Bradbury Chronicles - that might make this seem an oddly-balanced volume. In fact, the book is probably best seen as complementary to The Bradbury Chronicles. I still think it will make perfect sense to anyone who hasn't read Weller.

The only other slight weakness emerges from the difficulty of trying to draw out themes from a literary career while still sticking to a broadly chronological telling of events. There are occasions where the narrative has to backtrack, and with a work as detailed as this it's easy for the reader (me, at least) to have forgotten a crucial detail from a previous chapter.

The book is very clearly written. Don't be put off that this is written by a professor, and is published by a university press. It is free of scholarly jargon and doesn't demand that you have a degree in Eng. Lit.

Becoming Ray Bradbury is a fine companion to The Life of Fiction and The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury. Together, they round out a significant re-evaluation of Bradbury's life and work.

Becoming Ray Bradbury

Publication information has started to appear for Becoming Ray Bradbury, the new book from Jon Eller which I first discussed back in 2009. It's a literary biography, focusing on the factors that influenced Bradbury's development as a writer.

The publisher's web page for the book is here, and it can be pre-ordered from Amazon here.

A bit closer to the release date, I will publish a detailed review of the book. Watch this space!

Becoming Ray Bradbury...and other stories

I hear from Jon Eller at the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies that he finished his book Becoming Ray Bradbury: 1920-1953 in June. It came in at 200,000 words, and is now going through final cuts, down to 150,000 words, as he finalises publication with the University of Illinois Press. The book is a largely biographical influence study of Bradbury's early life and career.

Jon is already at work on the sequel, The World of Ray Bradbury: 1953-1972, and has completed the first 40,000 words of that volume to date.

From previous discussions with Jon - and from preview chapters he kindly allowed me to see - I can report that these new volumes will complement both Sam Weller's 2005 biography of Bradbury, The Bradbury Chronicles, and Eller and Touponce's Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (2004).

As if he didn't have enough to do, Jon will be whiling away the winter months by finalising the contents for the second volume of the Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, which will cover the 1943-1944 period. The first volume is already with the publishers.