Rare Pulp...?

Ray Bradbury shares the cover of pulp magazine Stories from the Moons of Mars with his friends Henry Kuttner and Leigh Brackett.

You'll be forgiven for not recognising this particular pulp. It never existed! The cover on the left is a fake, but a beautiful one, generated by the magnificent Pulp-o-mizer.

This fun web gadget lets you choose a wide range of presets and customise the cover text, to produce hundreds of different designs. Hours of fun.

Try it here!

Libraries, Kuttner

I keep seeing Ray Bradbury referred to in campaigns to stop library closures. The image to the left is from a library in Charlotte, North Carolina. There is information about the local campaign here.


Henry Kuttner was an important formative influence on Ray Bradbury's early writing career, but Kuttner's work is little known today. Most recently, the so-so movie The Last Mimzy drew upon Kuttner's best known work, the short story "Mimsy Were The Borogoves" (written as Lewis Padgett). The bizarrely named blog Two-Fisted Tales of True-Life Weird Romance gives a neat biography of Kuttner, referencing Bradbury. The blog post also includes a complete Kuttner story, "Bells of Horror", taken from the pulp magazine Strange Stories. An earlier post in the same blog included some Thrilling Wonder Stories pages that contain biographies of 1940s pulp writers, including Kuttner.


In another blog, at Coilhouse, David Forbes contributes an excellent essay about how science fiction literature shifted from a position of technological optimism to a more bleak view. Forbes uses some excellent examples, taking us from early Heinlein and Astounding Stories magazine, through Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and Thomas Disch. It's a very thought-provoking essay, and a reminder that although Bradbury has only occasionally been an SF writer, his position in the genre is solid, thanks largely to the apparently anti-technology stance of his short story collection The Illustrated Man. We can argue all day about whether Bradbury is really anti-technology, and whether any of his work is really science fiction, but his influence on the field and genre of SF is unquestionable.

Bradbury 13, Study guide, interview clips

Over twenty-five years since its production, the National Public Radio series Bradbury 13 is finally available on audio CD in an authorised version. The episodes have been available as MP3 downloads for soem time from The Twilight Zone radio store, but now Blackstone has the complete series on disc and in other formats. It can also be ordered through Amazon.

To learn about the making of the series, read my Bradbury 13 pages here.



I don't know who Mr Connor is, but his English class seems to be studying Bradbury's story "The Veldt". There are some interesting study guide notes - six pages' worth - on Mr Connor's blog here.



On YouTube, Global Science Productions have placed some preview clips of their one-hour documentary on the days of pulp magazines...featuring an interview with Ray Bradbury. For convenience, I have placed the clips below. You might also want to check out the DVD, here. The illustrative material and cutaways make this interview look interesting. This is the first time, for example, that I have seen the UCLA library.

Free Pulps Online

Thanks to a tip-off on the excellent Marooned: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror books on Mars blog, I have been viewing some complete issues of old science fiction pulps magazines on the Internet Archive. These are magazines which have (allegedly) gone into the public domain due to non-renewal of US copyright in the past.

Of the magazines currently online (put there by one Gerard Arhus), there are two which contain Bradbury stories. Planet Stories volume 4 number 6 (spring 1950) contains the first publication of Ray Bradbury's story "Forever and the Earth". Planet Stories volume 4 number 8 (fall 1950) contains Bradbury's "Death Wish", perhaps better known under the variant title "Blue Bottle".

The full list of pulps uploaded by Arhus can be found here. My top tip is to use the "read online" option, as this is quicker than waiting for the PDF versions to download.

It's quite fascinating to see these stories in their original context. In a sense, it's an "accidental" context: Bradbury didn't write these stories to order, and didn't write them for this particular magazine; instead, he would write his stories for himself and then send them out to a range of publications. But it's worth bearing in mind that the garish covers and hokey stories by other writers that surrounded his stories were part of what created the label of "Ray Bradbury is a science fiction writer", a label which he fought many years to shake off. And a fight which continues today!