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.

Searching for Ray Bradbury

Earlier this year Blüroof Press released Searching for Ray Bradbury: Writings about the Writer and the Man by Steven Paul Leiva, a collection of essays written during Bradbury's final years and since his death in 2012. Novelist Leiva was central to several tributes to Bradbury in Los Angeles, and it is thanks to his efforts that the city officially celebrated Bradbury's ninetieth birthday with Ray Bradbury Week in 2010, named Ray Bradbury Square next to the Los Angeles Public Library, and recently dedicated the Palms-Rancho Branch Library in Bradbury's name.

Searching for Ray Bradbury reads as a personal journey, revealing something of what made Bradbury a significant figure in American literature and Los Angeles' civic affairs. It also, in a way, is a search for Steven Paul Leiva, addressing the question: who is this fellow who has helped bring Bradbury the recognition he deserves?

Let me first say that this isn't the kind of book to tell you a great deal about Bradbury - for that, you need a biography like Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles,  or a literary biography like Eller's Becoming Ray Bradbury. But Searching for Ray Bradbury does give a unique view of a moment of transition, where celebration of Bradbury's longevity necessarily gave way to memorialising. 

The slim volume (just under ninety pages) is best seen as a thick chapbook rather than an undersized paperback, and is modestly priced at $5.39 on Amazon, but is also available for Kindle at $1.99. I have read only the print version, but I understand that the Kindle version omits the photographs found in the print version.

The book's cover is a reproduction of Lou Romano's affectionate caricature of Ray Bradbury, originally created for the Writers' Guild magazine Written By (you can read Romano's own fascinating account of the creation of this piece on his own blog, here.) The foreword is written by SF writer and futurist David Brin, who gives his appreciation of Bradbury's ability to both explore the darkness of the human heart and promote a optimistic vision of humankind's future beyond the Earth, an idea which Leiva also picks up on in one of the essays. Brin describes Leiva's book as a "personal and deeply moving tribute" which shines a loving light upon some little known aspects of this intricate and deeply passionate man".

So what of the essays contained here? They were all originally published elsewhere - some of them on Leiva's own blog This 'n' That, others in places such as Written By, KCET.org and The Huffington Post. While each one was written for a different, specific purpose, collecting them together here allows us to see a broader picture. Articles which were illuminating celebrations with Bradbury in life are now joined with items which to some extent eulogise the late author. It's great to see the pictures of Bradbury and Leiva triumphantly enjoying the dedication of Ray Bradbury Week, and quite poignant to then see the photos of the tributes a couple of years on, after Ray's passing.

The first essay, "Searching for Ray Bradbury," originally appeared in an L.A.Times blog,and attempts to give an account of what Ray Bradbury is, and where such an individual comes from. Leiva addresses what most people (think they) know about Bradbury: science fiction, and small-town America. He could have presented this essay as biography, but he chooses instead to take a Bradburyan turn and address it through metaphor:

Where did Bradbury come from? A magnificently powered nineteenth century submarine travelling 20,000 leagues; a time machine traversing centuries; a lost world where dinosaurs roam [...]

Bradbury defies easy categorisation, Leiva decides, concluding that a new word will be needed in dictionaries. "What is Bradbury?" he asks. His answer: "Bradbury is Bradbury."

The second essay, "Ray Bradbury Week in Los Angeles," explains how the previous essay led directly to Leiva's creation of Ray Bradbury Week, a week-long celebration of Bradbury's life and work, timed to coincide with Bradbury's ninetieth birthday on 22 August 2010. I was fortunate enough to get to L.A. around the time of these events, and attended Ray's public birthday party, held in Glendale's wonderful Mystery & Imagination bookshop. I had to leave before the official week began, but the party gave me an opportunity to briefly meet Steven Paul Leiva, and to see him MCing the open-mic tributes to Ray which ran throughout the afternoon. The essay on Ray Bradbury Week is surprisingly brief, and in the context of the book seems unduly modest for such a grand achievement. It's not every day that a major city dedicates itself unreservedly to the celebration of an author, and I can't help feeling that it was a lot more difficult to negotiate than Leiva allows us to believe in this chapter. Nevertheless, the photos in this section speak volumes, showing us Bradbury looking sometimes proud, sometimes awed, and occasionally overwhelmed by his adopted home's expression of affection. (It occurs to me that this chapter will lose some of its power in the Kindle edition, where the pictures have been removed.)

Ray's 90th Birthday Cake: a burning book

Essay three, "London to Los Angeles, Dickens to Bradbury: a Tale of Two Signs" sees Leiva on his first naive visit to London, literally stumbling in the dark as he tries to make sense of his new surroundings, and serendipitously spotting a sign linking a church to a Dickens novel. In parallel to this, he writes of driving around Venice, California, in search of the houses Bradbury had lived in when he first moved to the West Coast. Bradbury makes a brief appearance in this piece, a sad tale in which the old Bradbury house is demolished. Fortunately, a sign attached to the house, commemorating Bradbury's having written The Martian Chronicles there, turns up, and Leiva is the one to report this happy news to others who feared it had been lost along with the house itself. A somewhat rambling piece - how did we get from a flat in London to a demolished house in Venice, CA? - but an effortless one which begins to fulfill the book's title Searching for Ray Bradbury and in the process begins to reveal just a little of Leiva's background.

The third essay also introduces Jon Eller, the co-founder of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, as a somewhat intrepid biographer, and essay number four follows directly on from this, being a review of Eller's book Becoming Ray Bradbury. It's a fine assessment of a fine book, bookended with a couple of anecdotes of Leiva's friendship with Bradbury.

My personal favourite of the essays collected here is chapter five, "Masterheart of Mars". Here Leiva explains how it was that Bradbury, that most non-technical of SF writers (if he even really was an SF writer; Leiva says he wasn't, and I tend to agree) came to be such an enormous inspiration to space scientists, to the extent that the team in charge of the Curiosity Mars rover decided to name the planetary explorer's base "Bradbury Landing" in 2012. Leiva puts it down to Bradbury's almost instinctive address of three aspects of the human condition which led him to advocate moving our species out to the planets, starting at Mars: we have an urge to survive, we have an urge to seek knowledge, and we have a difficult-to-define urge to not be hemmed in. This last is something that Leiva is ambivalent about, saying it is either incredibly primitive, or incredibly advanced. The resolution to that particular conundrum is probably to be found in Leiva's smart characterisation of Bradbury as "a romantic with a nineteenth century imagination combined with twentieth century anxieties", an assessment which successfully accounts for the yearning-yet-jaded view of humankind in The Martian Chronicles.

Ray signs a poster at the Chronicling Mars conference in 2008

Essay six is a brief account of the creation of Ray Bradbury Square, a public space at Fifth and Flower in Los Angeles, right outside the public library that meant so much to Bradbury. Essay seven then continues the story with a detailed account of the dedication ceremony. As with the declaration of "Ray Bradbury Week" there is a sense of celebration, but this time with the tinge of sadness that Bradbury was not around to see the simple legend "Author - Angeleno" beneath his name.


 

Signage at Ray Bradbury Square, Los Angeles

Finally, essay eight tackles the title of the volume, and searches for the real Ray Bradbury. Here Leiva goes into the greatest detail about his own personal connection to Bradbury, which dates back to work they did together on a film adaptation of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland. Leiva points to a transition which had somehow occurred in Bradbury's career, where he slipped from being "just" an author with the near anonymity that so often accompanies authorship, to being a sought-after interviewee, public speaker and raconteur. Leiva almost suggests embarrassment at having, for a time, fallen into just seeing Ray as the the public persona. The essay shows how he re-connected with Bradbury the author through directing a staged reading of "The Better Part of Wisdom" in 2010.

Bradbury as public speaker

Searching for Ray Bradbury is a brisk read, partly because it is a slim volume, but also because of Leiva's essay-writing skill. Because of his initiation of so many Bradbury tributes, there is a danger that this collection could place Leiva at the centre of events, and inadvertently become self-aggrandising. But what lifts the book above this is precisely the way he finds the object of his search: hidden in plain sight, right there in Bradbury the public persona, is Bradbury the humanitarian, Bradbury the author. Leiva finds the true Bradbury by connecting anew with Bradbury's text.

Steven Paul Leiva at Mystery & Imagination bookshop in 2010

Blink and you'll miss it

The Simpsons' 24th "Treehouse of Terror" episode - due to premiere this weekend - has an elaborate re-make of the entire Simpsons title sequence. I lost count of the number of familiar SF/fantasy genre references. There's a Bradbury reference in there, but if you blink you may miss it... so here it is, frozen for your extended enjoyment.

Here we see Ray inking up the Illustrated Man. And who's that looking over his shoulder? Richard Matheson?

And now, the full sequence:

Memorable Bradbury

On the anniversary of Ray Bradbury's death, Nancy Lambert wrote about five memorable Bradbury stories. The five - "There Will Come Soft Rains", "The Night", "The Fog Horn", "I Sing the Body Electric!" and "The Lake" - are all excellent choices, although it would be very easy to come up with twenty-five equally good ones. Read what Lambert has to say at Tor.com.

Speaking of memorable stories, there is a special 60th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, out now from Simon & Schuster. I know it's out there, because there have been sightings in the field (see the photo below from jkt). However, if you visit online bookstores such as Amazon you may struggle to find this exact edition - and even the publisher's web page gives you little reason to think there is anything special about the book, apart from the new cover art.

So what's so special about it? How about the new introduction by Neil Gaiman? How about nearly 20,000 words of historical essay from Jon Eller of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies? And how about the collection of articles and reviews from Kingsley Amis, Margaret Atwood, Gilbert Highet and Bertrand Russell?.

The cover art, incidentally, was chosen from a competition. The other contenders can still be viewed on the competition's Tumblr page.

This is a major new edition, but because the text of Fahrenheit 451 is identical to the previous printing, Simon & Schuster have omitted to flag up the significant additions to this volume. Fortunately, they do seem to be shipping them out to major bookstores (those few that remain...) such as Barnes & Noble. 

Bradbury Events This Weekend

In Chicago, Otherworld Theatre are staging various events in a Ray Bradbury Festival: several performances of Bradbury's own stage play version of Fahrenheit 451, a discussion panel featuring Mort Castle and others, radio drama and more.

Full details are here. Many thanks to Sara Livingston for alerting me to these events.


Meanwhile, in New York on Sunday there is a performance of selected songs from the new musical based on The Martian Chronicles. I have reported on this production previously (when it was being referred to as a sci-fi opera, two terms which have now been dropped as it was felt that they were giving a misleading impression). You can learn more about Sunday's event here, and more about the musical project here. Thanks to Daniel Levy for keeping me informed of developments with this ambitious project.

One Year On...

Exactly one year ago Ray Bradbury passed away.

Although gone, he has been anything but forgotten. In the year since his death there has been a square named after him in Los Angeles, right next to the city's library; a tribute panel at the Science Fiction Research Association conference in Detroit; tribute books from Steven Paul Leiva and William F. Nolan; a 60th anniversary special edition of Fahrenheit 451 from Simon & Shuster; and, forthcoming, new studies by William Touponce and Jonathan Eller, and the second volume of the Collected Stories Critical Edition.

Not to mention special tribute editions of Rosebud magazine and Famous Monsters.


Onward! as Ray was so fond of saying.

2013 Oscars Ceremony: Ray Bradbury in memoriam

Last night's Oscars ceremony had its usual in memoriam section,

which included a brief quotation from Ray Bradbury.

"The ability to fantasize is the ability to grow."

Tributes to RB

There's a couple of free events next weekend (23 Feb 2013), one in Glendale, California, and the other in Indianapolis, Indiana:

Glendale's Mystery and Imagination bookshop, where Bradbury used to have his public birthday parties, is hosting readings by members of Bradbury's own theatre company. Here are the details:

Meanwhile in Indy, the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies' director Jon Eller will be speaking about Bradbury at the Irvington branch of the Indianapolis Public Library.

Details of the event are here.

Seasons Greetings!

I'm sure I've said this before, but Christmas isn't a season usually associated with Ray Bradbury. He was more of an October guy. One of the few Bradbury compositions set at Christmas was "The Gift", a TV script he wrote for the 1950s series Steve Canyon. You can read my review of this episode here.

As 2012 draws to a close and people start summing up the year, a few more Bradbury tributes have begun to appear, usually grouped with other "people we lost this year". Here are three such short tributes, from Time, the Los Angeles Times and MyDesert.com.
 

Planetary Society Tribute

In September, the Planetary Society held a tribute to Ray Bradbury. Founder Louis Friedman talked about Bradbury's siginificance to real-life planetary exploration. Bradbury's contribution to this field was not scientific or technical - he was no scientist, after all. What Bradbury DID bring was an immense enthusiasm on the key question of why our species is driven to explore.

Whether you agree with Bradbury or not, there is no doubt that he was a prominent poetic voice, particularly when the American space programme went into contraction post-Apollo.

Here is Louis Friedman's talk. It includes a lot of archive photos of Ray at JPL (and elsewhere), some of which I had never seen before.

Bradbury Landing!

As expected, yesterday - what would have been Ray Bradbury's 92nd birthday - saw some more tributes paid to Ray:


Practical Magic author Alice Hoffman recalled her first direct contact with Ray, and his response to the story she submitted for the tribute volume Shadow Show in "A Birthday Wish For Ray".


Bradbury's friend, the British writer and broadcaster Brian Sibley uploaded a radio documentary he made in 1989 for the BBC World Service.


The Curiosity rover on Mars dedicated its landing site to Ray, announced in a tweet which reads "In tribute, I dedicate my landing spot on Mars to you, Ray Bradbury. Greetings from Bradbury Landing!" Here's the photo of Bradbury Landing:

Space.com was the first website to attempt to place "Bradbury Landing" in the context of other named landing spots on Mars. Read more here.


In their 11.30am (PST) press conference, the NASA/JPL team started with Ray Bradbury - playing a clip of him from the 1971 "Mars and the Mind of Man" symposium - and concluded with a short video showing Ray's last visit to JPL in 2009, when he was shown models of Mars rovers and was allowed to drive one of them in simulation. NBC have the best coverage of the contents of the press conference, and have included the two video clips, here.

What Kind Of Writer?

While I'm not sure that the title is terribly appropriate, Steve Almond's recent article "Why Ray Bradbury Was Ahead Of His Time" for the Boston Globe shows some good insight into what makes some of Bradbury's science-fiction stories tick. Steve Balshaw, writing for Mancunian Matters, reminds us that Bradbury wasn't just a writer of science-fiction, but arrives at some similar conclusions.

While I like both of these articles, they both reflect on the familiar "classic period" of Bradbury, and fail to even acknowledge anything he wrote after 1962. Still, it's good to see that there are plenty of intelligent readings of the familiar works out there.

Bryce Wilson, writing for New Times doesn't go so deeply into the individual stories, but does grapple with the most appropriate way to characterise Bradbury as a writer. He suggests "Midwestern surrealist" might be an appropriate term, or at least a term that is as good as any.

A Biographer Remembers Ray

Gene Beley, the author of the unauthorised biography entitled Ray Bradbury Uncensored!  wrote a remembrance of Ray recently. Gene recounts how he first spoke to Ray, after he posted an ad in a Waukegan newspaper asking "Ray Bradbury, where is your past?" The full article is online here.

Gene's previous writings on Bradbury include this report (with photos) on Ray's 2009 birthday party.

Ray Bradbury Uncensored! is available from iUniverse and various online bookstores.

Tributes Continue

As the headline says: the tributes continue. Comic-Con took place last week, and featured a well attended tribute panel which included Margaret Atwood, Sam Weller, Marc Scott Zicree and others. There are plenty of accounts of this panel on the web, such as this one.

Zicree talks more about Bradbury in this BBC radio interview.

Fans in Pittsburgh staged their own tribute by reading Bradbury stories.

Other tributes inevitably come wrapped up in reviews of the new tribute volume Shadow Show.

Gloria McMillan of Arizona University has put out a call for papers inviting scholars to contribute to a proposed book with the working title The Tucson Bradbury Chronicles: Mars is The West. This essay volume will take as its starting point the fact that the young Ray Bradbury lived for a while in Arizona, but will explore Bradbury's engagement with the western US in broad terms. Such academic volumes are often a long time in development, so it may be some time before anything comes of this, but I will post more information when it becomes available.

Impact

It's a month since Ray Bradbury shuffled off this mortal coil. At the SFRA conference in Detroit last week, several conversations involved "where were you when you heard the news" threads, a bit like "where were you when you heard that JFK was assassinated?" or "where were you when you heard about the Challenger disaster?"

The actual announcement of Bradbury's death was quite low key: a relative tweeted it, but it took a couple of hours for the more  formal news services to pick up on it. Around this time, there wasn't much information being given, so people started casting around. Nothing shows the impact of the man's passing as much as the "hit counter" on this very blog. You can see the day of Bradbury's death quite clearly, as the normal level of traffic is thoroughly dwarfed:

Green Town Tribute

As I mentioned a while ago, Bradbury's home town of Waukegan Illinois - fictionalised as Green Town in his books Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer and Something Wicked This Way Comes - paid tribute to Ray on the day he died. TV news crews were in attendance, and so we have an opportunity to see a little of the event at the city's public library:





There is now gathering momentum for some kind of memorial to Bradbury in Waukegan, and the 1903 Carnegie Library (currently empty and disused) is naturally being looked at as a potential centre for honouring his memory. In his lifetime, Bradbury supported the campaign to save the Carnegie from demolition, and indicated that he would support some kind of Bradbury collection being deposited in the building, perhaps turning it into a museum or tourist attraction.

Though it may be sad to think that Bradbury's death would be the trigger for some action to finally be taken to restore the Carnegie Library to public life, it would be a fitting place to commemorate one of Waukegan's favourite sons.

There is more information about the preservation of the library at the website of the Carnegie Preservation Project. My thanks to Wayne Munn for the link.

Fred Pohl on Bradbury

There aren't many writers still active who were exact contemporaries of Ray Bradbury. Ursula LeGuin, Richard Matheson and Brian Aldiss come close, but they all began publishing in the 1950s, around a decade after Bradbury got started as a professional.

Fred Pohl was born about nine months before Bradbury, and he is still active today, writing both fiction and... blog posts.

Fred's blog is The Way The Future Blogs, a play on the title of his autobiographical book The Way The Future Was. In a recent post, Fred blogs some memories of his association with Ray.

I had the privilege of meeting both Fred and Ray, and saw them together on a panel about Mars. They both have a connection to the red planet, Bradbury through his Martian Chronicles, and Pohl through his award-winning 1976 novel Man Plus and its sequel.

Hence, they both delighted in playing with the red planet:

The Leavetaking

Yesterday Ray Bradbury was laid to rest in a small-scale, private ceremony in Los Angeles. He is beside his wife Maggie in Westwood Village Memorial Park. As you can see from the list of others who have been buried there, Ray is also in company with many people he knew: writer Robert Bloch, screenwriter Harry Essex. cinematographer James Wong Howe, and the writer who gave him a huge break by rescuing one of his short stories from the reject pile, Truman Capote.

Discussions are underway for ways of remembering Ray: there is talk of a celebration of his life to be held either on his birthday (August) or at Halloween; there is talk of naming something after him in Los Angeles - something which was already under discussion in his lifetime, but which didn't come to fruition in time for Ray to see it; and calls for the Waukegan Public library to be renamed in his honour. Whether any or all of these tentative ideas come to pass remains to be seen, but I will post updates here if anything tangible emerges.



Tributes to Bradbury continue to appear, too many to link to. As before, I want to link just to the best of these:

• The Los Angeles Times has a report on the tributes from "ordinary" people.
• The Guardian carried an article by Margaret Atwood, in which she tries to uncover why Bradbury became such a widely treasured American writer. Atwood, the author of The Handmaid's Tale has had a career which in many ways reflects Bradbury's. Like him, she is novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter. Like him, she has had some tussles over whether her work is science fiction or something else. Curiously, her working definition of science fiction is almost opposite to Bradbury's. Bradbury's distinction between SF and fantasy was that SF (such as, for him, Fahrenheit 451) could happen, but fantasy (The Martian Chronicles) was about things that were impossible. Atwood, on the other hand, once dismissed SF by implying that it was about the impossible, famously using the phrase "talking squids in outer space".
• The organiser of Los Angeles' Ray Bradbury Week tributes in 2010, Steven Paul Leiva, has blogged some photos of himself and Ray, and a link to an interview he gave about Ray on an NPR station in LA.
• The Los Angeles Review of Books has completed its three day series of reflections on Bradbury's work with articles by (among others) Bradbury scholars Jon Eller, Robin Anne Reid and Bill Touponce, and SF/fantasy critics John Clute, Gary K. Wolfe and Rob Latham. Read all three parts with these links: part one, part two, part three. This last section contains essays which are probably the first since Bradbury's death to refer to shortcomings or disappointments with aspects of Bradbury's writing, and perhaps are a sign of how the scholarly community will now seek to grapple with what Bradbury's work really meant. I have no problem with this at all, but I do wonder whether some of the critics have read much of Bradbury's post-1962 writing.

Brian Sibley pays tribute to Ray - UPDATED!

Award-winning dramatist, biographer and blogger extraordaire Brian Sibley put together a fine personal tribute to Ray.

He is now following it up with a tribute on BBC Radio 4. He will be in conversation on the obituary programme Last Word at 4pm British time this afternoon.

The programme will then be available to listen to for at least seven days on the BBC iPlayer. You will find a direct link to the broadcast on the programme's web page, here.



Other excellent tributes to Ray Bradbury have been appearing in the last couple of days. Here are some of the best:

• The Los Angeles Times has a whole set of features on Ray, his life and his legacy
• The Guardian reported on Barack Obama's tribute to Ray, and also published Neil Gaiman's appreciation and an obituary written by SF critic David Pringle
• BBC News has a collection of articles about Ray, including an excerpt from a Wogan TV interview
• BBC Radio 4's Today programme carried an interview with author and SF historian Brian Aldiss

UPDATE: Neil Gaiman has also uploaded a recording of himself reading his story "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury" at an event last November. The recording is here, and Neil blogs about it here.

Tributes to Ray

Yesterday was just a crazy day. I heard about Ray's passing quite early in the day, but didn't want to report it or comment on it until Ray's family had made an official announcement. It was Ray's grandson, the actor Danny Karapetian, who first broke the news via Twitter. After that the web was awash with messages of remembrance, condolence and tribute.

The message boards on the official Bradbury website (where I am deputy moderator) were lit up like I've never seen. My own humble blog got more hits in a day than it usually gets in a month. Even non-Bradbury sites filled up with tributes, such as Harlan Ellison's message board.

I have no wish to link to every tribute out there, but I thought it would be worth linking to some of the best content about Ray.

Author Joanne Harris (writer of Chocolat) was interviewed about Ray's influence on her. You can read what she says, and listen to part of the interview here.

The great and the good from the UK - everyone from Mark Gatiss to Jonathan Ross, Duncan Jones to Edgar Wright - offered tributes to Ray, and you can read some of them here.

BBC Radio 4's PM programme had a report on Ray's death, and a short feature on his life and work:

 

Ray's friend Brian Sibley posted a beautiful tribute to Ray, drawing on a friendship and correspondence that stretched back over thirty-some years. Read it here.

Finally, Jon Eller of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies has posted an obituary, and was also interviewed about Ray's life and work for Minnesota Public Radio. Read and listen here.