Phil guests on WORDS TO WRITE BY podcast

Words To Write By is a podcast for those interested in the craft of writing. Co-hosts Kim and Renee have set themselves the challenge of reading "how to..." books, the ones that claim to reveal the rules you have to follow, or the secrets that only a true writing guru can reveal.

Having progressed through John Gardner's The Art of Fiction (1982), the team are now ready to take heed of the advice of Ray Bradbury, as they tackle Ray's inspirational essay collection on writing, Zen in the Art of Writing.

In their latest podcast episode, they give their final thoughts on Gardner before introducing Zen - and they very kindly asked me to help with the introduction. Click the link below to find more, and to hear me opine on Ray's advice to writers.

https://wordstowritebypodcast.com/podcast/goodbye-gardner-hello-bradbury/

Harlan Ellison story dedicated to Ray Bradbury

Harlan Ellison, who turned 80 just a few weeks ago, has a new short story in the online Subterranean Press Magazine. Titled "He Who Grew Up Reading Sherlock Holmes", the story alludes to both  Conan Doyle's "The Red-Headed League" and Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder". The story is also dedicated to the memory of Bradbury. Read the story here.

Harlan is also one of the latest additions to the Archive of American Television's oral history programme, with a video interview conducted in early 2013, covering most of the steps in Ellison's screenwriting career. Interviews in this series are usually continuous and chronological, but for some reason this one has been broken into short, top-and-tailed segments. While this has created some fun sections, it doesn't seem quite as carefully controlled as the rest of the series, and the sense of chronology is sometimes lost - as when Harlan talks about The Twilight Zone from the 1980s in between his comments on the 1960s series Ripcord and The Flying Nun. You can watch the interview here.

Ray Bradbury Interview

Here's a little-known interview, taken from a 1988 issue of Atlantis Rising, a PR publication from Atlantis Productions, co-producers of Ray Bradbury Theatre. Bradbury talks about the episodes of the series then in production, including "Gotcha", an unusual episode in which Bradbury created new material set in a fancy-dress party; this new material would evolve into the short story "The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair".

Click on the image to embiggen.

Ray Bradbury Miscellanea

A couple of Bradbury remembrances which I somehow managed to miss when they first appeared:

Maclean's magazine has a great little overview of the short stories Bradbury wrote for them, including photos of the page layouts from the original appearances in the 1950s:

And from Ontario's TVO website, Thom Ernst's report on a visit to meet Bradbury around 2006, updated as a brief obituary after Ray's passing:

Fame at last!

Whaddya know, Ray Bradbury is now a Famous Author!

Here's an interview from the series Day at Night, which was recorded in 1974. Bradbury refers to Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) as being published "eight or nine years ago", but he was a couple of years off as the actual airdate of the interview was 21 January 1974). It has many of the familiar interview questions and Bradbury anecdotes, but one or two novelties such as the opening question about fantasy in relation to fantasising.

Incidentally, the whole aechive of Day at Night is online at CUNY-TV, and includes an amazing roster of interviewees.

Lost and Found

Here's an unusual little item, a supposedly "lost" interview with Ray Bradbury. I say "lost" because it seems absurd to suggest that Bradbury - one of the most widely interviewed and media-friendly writers of his generation - could possibly have done an interview that contained anything so unique that its loss would be significant. There are whole BOOKS of interviews with Bradbury out there, and he was profiled for interview-based documentaries at least four times across his career.

Anyway, reservations about the title apart, The Lost Interview of Ray Bradbury does give us a nice glimpse of Ray and his thoughts from about twenty years ago. At this point he was in his early 70s, a time when most people would have long since retired, but not our Ray. Instead, he was writing scripts for his long-running TV series, putting together the short story collection Quicker Than The Eye, and launching his novel Green Shadows, White Whale. I think this is what they call a third act... The film ends with Ray reading his poem "Doing is Being", which alone makes it worth watching.

The Lost Interview of Ray Bradbury - twenty-year-old footage blended with stock footage and (in my view) rather unnecessary visual enhancements - is directed by Harry Hall, and can be viewed in three episodes on Vimeo:

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3

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Meanwhile, the Ventura County Star reports that Michael O'Kelly's documentary about Bradbury - Live Forever: the Ray Bradbury Odyssey - has been screened, and that O'Kelly is now looking for a distribution deal to get the film released to TV and/or DVD. The report recaps much of the story of the making of the film during the last three years or so of Bradbury's life, and also recaps the highlights of Bradbury's life and career. The report is here.

By Definition

Ray Bradbury writes across many genres. I've never counted up how many stories are SF, how many fantasy, how many horror, how many "mainstream" - but I would estimate that only a small percentage are out-and-out science fiction. Bradbury himself claims that only one of his novels is science fiction: Fahrenheit 451. The Martian Chronicles, on the other hand, he considers to be fantasy. Yes, it uses the gimmicks, hardware and aliens familiar from the science fiction genre, but the overall situation of the book he considers to be impossible, and hence fantasy.

Ironic, then, that The Martian Chronicles was the book that first branded him with the science fiction label.

Bradbury's views on his own writing were being clearly expressed way back in the 1950s, and probably earlier. In 1951, the year after The Martian Chronicles was published, he was interviewed by Harvey Breit for the New York Times.

Breit systematically asks Bradbury for his definitions of SF and fantasy. Bradbury makes his distinctions clear, with this description of science fiction:

Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together [...] Science fiction is a logical or mathematical projection of the future.

And as for fantasy?

It's the improbable. Oh, if you had a leprechaun or a dinosaur appearing in the streets of New York - that's highly improbable.

In light of these definitions, it is quite clear why Bradbury continues to characterise Chronicles as fantasy and 451 as science fiction. It is evident that Bradbury's take on SF is that it is primarily about warning us about the future ("If This Goes On...", to borrow a short story title from Robert Heinlein.

Of course, 1951 was also the year of publication of The Illustrated Man, a collection of mostly SF short stories, most of which take the line of "if this goes on". In the Times interview, Bradbury says, "The mechanical age is crushing people. People are confused", and this attitude is reflected in various ways in some of the stories in The Illustrated Man and in Fahrenheit 451. It is this warning about the future that earned Bradbury another label he has struggled to shake off: as someone who is anti-science and anti-technology.

Interestingly, the Times interview ends with Bradbury showing his optimistic side: "When we move out into space, what a revolution!" he declares.

(Source: "Talk with Mr Bradbury", New York Times, 5 Aug 1951, p182)

Falling Upward - Stage Matters - Radio

Falling Upward is Ray Bradbury's play based on his experiences of Ireland in the 1950s. It was last staged in 2009, and the website for that production is still around. There is more archived web coverage of a 2007 run, including press reviews of the play, here.

Also still around - although it took me a lot of creative Googling to track it down - is a 2009 podcast from the series This Way Out: the International Lesbian & Gay Magazine which features Bradbury talking about the play and its inspiration.

The episode is too old to still be offered directly by the This Way Out online archive, but I tracked down a copy on The A-Infos Radio Project: details of the programme and download links are here. (The Bradbury feature begins 46 minutes into the episode.)

Theatre is obviously very important to Bradbury. He has written plays from the 1940s onwards. He voices his enthusiasm for the stage in the opening few minutes of a new short video called Stage Matters, a production of the Theatre Communications Group.




Speaking of radio, I see that Colonial Radio Theatre - producers of award-winning adaptations of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, The Halloween Tree and Something Wicked This Way Comes - have been busy with recording sessions for their new production: Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

We'll Always Have Paris Review...

The Paris Review's latest issue carries one of Sam Weller's interviews with Ray Bradbury. Weller, of course, if Bradbury's official biographer, author of The Bradbury Chronicles. In the course of developing the biography, Weller undertook many hours of interviews with Bradbury. In June of this year, another book containing nothing but interviews will be released. Entitled Listen to the Echoes and consisting of over three hundred pages of chat, the book is available for pre-ordering now.

I confess to being a little (I emphasise little) tired of Bradbury's interviews, in the sense that he often reels out the same anecdotes again and again. But I attribute this to interviewers asking the same questions again and again. Steven Aggelis's Conversations with Ray Bradbury is fascinating precisely because Aggelis carefully selected interviews that allowed us to see how Bradbury's thought evolved over his career. I am hoping that Weller's Listen to the Echoes will work because his in-depth knowledge of Bradbury's life enables him to come up with new questions and new angles.

The Paris Review website has a short extract from the Weller/Bradbury interview, in which Bradbury amusingly recounts what happened when he was invited to adapt War and Peace for King Vidor.




The B-Movie Film Vault Blog has an amusing top ten of the best Ray Harryhausen creatures. At number nine is the rhedosaurus. This, of course, is the dinosaur that was The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, based on the Bradbury story also known as "The Fog Horn". My own review of the film can be found here.




Subterranean Press are highlighting reviews of their edition of Pleasure to Burn, a collection of the stories that were directly ancestral to Fahrenheit 451. I haven't yet seen the book in the flesh, but I believe it has essentially the same fiction content as Gauntlet's Match to Flame. As far as I can tell, however, only Match to Flame has the contextual essays from Jon Eller and Bill Touponce. There are some other small differences as well, but I can't quite figure them all out.




Urban Archipelago Films has announced the DVD release of their film Ray Bradbury's Chrysalis. I haven't seen the film yet, but I know it has been doing well on the festival circuit. The DVD will be out on 27 July 2010 - full details are here. I'm pretty sure this date was announced a while ago, but I may not have mentioned it on this site.




Ever wondered what "a Ray Bradbury" is? Maybe one of these Gene Roddenberrys will know the answer:

Unchanged Habits

The Ventura Country Reporter has just published a new interview with Bradbury, which shows his writing habits to be unchanged, despite his eighty-eight years. Mind you, you can't believe everything you read: this article claims that Bradbury still travels the world giving lectures. Not quite. He doesn't venture beyond Southern California these days, because of his health. Anyway, read the interview here.

Update: the New York Times features a similar (but better written, more quirky, more fun) article in its 19th June issue. I am told this was a page one story!




Here's a nice idea - and one I have used with my own Video & Film Production students on occasion: making a trailer for a book!

Digital Book Talk is a literacy scheme from the University of Central Florida. It has synopses and film trailers for lots of books. One such is this neat trailer for Fahrenheit 451, and another for The Martian Chronicles.




The Steve Canyon volume 2 DVD is now on release. This is the second collection of episodes from an old TV series. The significance for the Bradbury fan is that this volume includes the episode that Bradbury scripted, a Christmas tale called "The Gift".

Reviews of the DVD can be found at DVD Talk and Comic Mix.

Found on the Web

Found on the web:


This interesting description of the Ray Bradbury Theatre episode "The Town Where No One Got Off, which reveals that famed Disney animator Ward Kimball makes a cameo appearance in the episode prologue. This came as news to me! My own review of the episode, incidentally, can be found here.




This interesting interview with artist John Randall York. John frequents the official Bradbury message board, and has been known to post his Bradbury-inspired artwork on the board.

New Interview with Ray

Ray Bradbury talks about books, bookshops, politics and more in a new interview (in video and transcript) at Truthdig.

New Findings: Old Stuff

I've been making new finds of old stuff on the web, most of them thanks to Google Alerts. Here are some curios that have just come to my attention.

Ever wondered what happened to the monorail Montag used to get home in Truffaut's film of Fahrenheit 451? It was a real monorail in France, built as a protoype, and Truffaut chose it because of its futuristic appearance.

The monorail is no longer in existence, but a few years ago some monorail enthusiasts tracked down what remains of the system, including the vandalised car and some sections of track. Find out more by visiting Randy Lambertus's page from 1999.

Going back to 1993, we find Ray Bradbury being interviewed about his alleged total recall. This unlikely gift is what allows him to remember the moment of his own birth. No one really believes this claim, but his belief in it led him to write one of his classic short stories, "The Small Assassin". Bradbury has discussed this in many interviews, but this one from YouTube is one I hadn't seen before. It's from a Canadian TV show called Prisoners of Gravity.

Happy Birthday, Ray Bradbury!

Ray Bradbury turns 87 today, and continues his prodigious publishing output. I probably said this last year, but I'll say it again: he's another step closer to fulfilling the instruction given to him by Mr Electrico when he was a child: "Live forever!"

I heard from William Touponce of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies yesterday. The Center's new journal The New Ray Bradbury Review is being prepared for publication, and will contain a number of articles about Bradbury's work as adapted for film, radio and television. It is due to appear early next year, and should have one or two surprises...

Today's New York Times has a rather charming portrait of Ray on his birthday, with an audio clip from an interview. You can read the story here.

New Books

It always seems to be the height of summer when a clutch of Bradbury books appears over the horizon. I recently received my copy of Match to Flame, the latest in a series of books from Gauntlet press that reveal the complex history of Bradbury's fictions.

This one, edited by Bradbury's bibliographer Donn Albright, shows how Fahrenheit 451 didn't spring from nowhere, but was the culmination of a line of thought which Bradbury had been following through a number of short fictions in the years prior to F451's publication. Match to Flame includes a contextual essay from Bill Touponce, an essay on the texts themselves from Jon Eller, and an amazing set of stories, some of which appear here for the first time. This volume is also the first opportunity to view what remains of the fragments of Bradbury's first attempt at novel-writing, the never- completed When Ignorant Armies Clash By Night.


Coming soon from Gauntlet is another piece of textual detective work from Donn Albright, Somewhere a Band is Playing. This includes Bradbury's novella, which he developed from a screen treatment he originally wrote for Katharine Hepburn. The Gauntlet book includes pages from the screenplay and various fragments of Bradbury's developing story idea.

You can watch Bradbury tell his Katharine Hepburn anecdote on this YouTube page.

The Gauntlet titles are quite expensive, because they are limited editions. However, if you are lucky enough to live in a country where the dollar is relatively weak (the UK, for instance!), now is the time to get online and pick up these bargains. Match to Flame is already shipping - I received copy number 158 out of 750. Somewhere a Band is Playing is currently advertised for release in "Fall 2007".


If you have no interest in seeing how Bradbury got to his completed story, and just want to read it, you need Bradbury's latest book from his mass-market publisher, Wm Morrow. Now and Forever is an unusual book, being neither a novel nor a short story collection: it contains two novellas, "Somewhere a Band is Playing" and "Leviathan '99".

Both of these stories have been worked and re-worked by Bradbury many times over the years. Leviathan, in particular, has periodically made public appearances as a radio play, stage play and opera. Now, at last, the prose version is being made available. I assume that Bradbury was never able to expand the story to a sustainable novel length, and has settled on the novella as being the most appropriate form for the finished text.

Now and Forever is due for release on 4 September 2007. Here are direct links for pre-ordering:

Now and Forever at Amazon.com

Now and Forever at Amazon.co.uk

That UNauthorised biography again...

I thought I might regret it, but I paid good money for a copy of that unauthorised biography: Ray Bradbury Uncensored! The Unauthorized Biography, by Gene Beley. As I have mentioned before, I had concerns that this would not be a very solid piece of writing.

At some point, I will do a complete review of the book, but I wanted here to record my first responses, having speed-read the whole book, and having read a couple of chapters very closely.

My overall impression is of a book that very much needs a strong editorial hand. It needs some fact-checking (example: it reports events of Bradbury's 86th birthday, even though it was published
before that event). It needs some copy-editing (example: names of people spelled inconsistenly, sometimes within a single paragraph).

It also needs systematically revising to make it a 2006 book, rather than a slowly-accreted collection of items written over a period of years. It is rather disturbing to read that Beley had "last heard of" Charles Rome Smith in a particular place - giving the impression that the author has lost track of the theatre director - and then to read an end-of-chapter note reporting Smith's death. Many of the chapters of the book take the form of an article written ten, twenty or thirty years ago, with an "author's note" tacked on the end to bring it up to date. In chapters where Beley is reporting a specific event, such as a particular speech Bradbury delivered, this would appropriately give us a sense of being at the event, and provide important historical context. However, when the chapter is an interview that has no particular point-in-time value, this seems odd. George Clayton Johnson and Harlan Ellison, both very much alive today and (judging from interviews elsewhere) both highly accessible to interviewers, are quoted extensively on their views of Bradbury's writing and character - but the interview quotes are from the 1980s. Ellison is quoted as saying that Bradbury has done nothing of value for thirty years - but this quote pre-dates Bradbury's flurry of writing activity that would include Death is a Lonely Business, Green Shadow White Whale, Ray Bradbury Theater, The Toynbee Convector...

Apart from these editorial weaknesses, does the book have anything to offer? Well, it has a biography of Bradbury, but necessarily with less detail than Sam Weller's The Bradbury Chroniclesoffers. It reports on some of Bradbury's public speaking, quite successfully giving a sense of what it is/was like to be present at such events. It covers Bradbury's legal action against CBS over copyright infringement of Fahrenheit 451, in more detail than I have read elsewhere. It gives some insights into Bradbury's forays into theatre, revealing/claiming clashes between Bradbury and Smith, and between Bradbury and Shank.

It has some charming quotes from "ordinary people" who knew Ray at various points in his life, and some negative comments about Bradbury from various people who have had dealings with him.

And it sounds slightly unkind when discussing Bradbury's disabilities and his current state of health.

And quite a few photos, rather randomly arranged.

Overall, it's a real mixed bag. Probably essential reading for the Bradbury completist, but for anyone else I would say: buy Weller instead.

My top tip is to buy the ebook version, which is a lot cheaper than the printed edition!

Ray Bradbury at 86

Today is Ray Bradbury's 86th birthday. He says he is going to live forever, so he is now one year closer to achieving that aim!

Bradbury has, on many occasions, written of time machines. Some of these are more or less literal transports, such as the device that takes Eckels and Travis back to the Jurassic for a touch of dino hunting. Others are more metaphorical. In "The Toynbee Convector" (1984), a man in an ice-cream white suit claims to have travelled to a glorious future world, and by so preaching of it causes such a world to come into existence. This man sounds very much like Ray Bradbury.

In the much earlier Dandelion Wine (1957), Douglas Spaulding and his friends sit and listen in awe of Colonel Freeleigh, an old man whose reminiscences are so vivid that they feel transported back to the American Civil War. The old man is a time machine.

In this recent interview, Bradbury is conscious that, at eighty-six, he is now such a time machine. It is remarkable to think, as you read Dandelion Wine, that the book's author (thirty-seven years old at the time it was published) is able to project himself into the characters of young Doug and old Freeleigh, is capable of simultaneously being the child and the time machine.

Birthday greetings for Ray are being gathered on his official message board. Brian Sibley offers a birthday tribute to Ray on his ex libris blog.

Pictures and videos of Ray

Nard Kordell (left) has been expanding his excellent site. In addition to his own photos of Ray's old haunts in Waukegan - a must-see for admirers of Bradbury's Green Town stories (Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes) - he now has videos of some of Ray's recent appearances at book signings and other public appearances.


The latest addition is a section of Ray's own photos. It's fascinating to see some of the famous people Ray has met and worked with, and of family members. Did you know there really was an Uncle Einar?


[Uncle Einar image from Charles Addams' cover art for From the Dust Returned, taken from a Booksense interview with Bradbury.]

Which reminds me...

Brian Sibley, who I mentioned yesterday, has posted a delightful blog about his long friendship with Ray Bradbury. Like me, Brian first encountered Bradbury through The Golden Apples of the Sun - which is, in fact, an excellent place to start, since it contains "The Fog Horn", "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" and "A Sound of Thunder", all essential reading.

Brian's blog also links to an excellent interview he conducted with Ray in 2004.

Interviews with Ray

Ray Bradbury has got to be one of the most interviewed authors around. Steven Aggelis even produced a PhD thesis on Ray's interviews (later turned into a book, Conversations with Ray Bradbury). Reading interviews made over a span of years, as Aggelis found, is fascinating. You can see how Ray's opinions gradually change, sometimes hardening, sometimes softening. You can also see how Ray's favourite anecdotes, such as the story of Mr Electrico, become embellished over time.

Unfortunately for the true Bradbury fan, most interviews - certainly most recent interviews - have been rather repetitive. Journalists only seem to want to ask Ray whether we will ever get to Mars, or when his next book is coming out. An exception, however, is this recent interview in the Ventura County Life & Style magazine, which 'rifraf' very kindly uploaded to the official Ray Bradbury Message Boards. The interview is long, which helps. And beautifully illustrated, which also helps. Most important, the interviewee asks questions which are not hurried, and which don't just cover the obvious.