To The Future!

A supposedly newly discovered video has been published of Ray Bradbury giving his view of the future - from twenty years ago. Incongruously* titled "Success in Cyberspace", the ten-minute piece has Ray in his office talking (apparently off-the-cuff) directly to camera with specific reference to his short story "The Toynbee Convector".

While much of what he says will already be familiar from countless interviews and speeches, this re-telling of "Toynbee" is relatively rare. Ray makes a specific point of using the time-traveller of the story as a metaphor for his own optimistic view of the future.

The background story of what this video was made for, and how it came into existence (and was subsequently "lost") is all told on this page from Information Age, which hosts the video in its entirety. It is claimed to be from an early use of high-definition video, but the quality of the clip itself looks decidedly sub-VHS to me.


*Why incongruous? This is the man who would later tell us we have "too many internets".

Jon Eller lecture online

On 8 November 2012, Bradbury scholar Jon Eller presented the John D. Barlow Lecture at his home institution of Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis. In the lecture, Jon gives an account of Bradbury's development as an author, and shows how the later decades of Bradbury's career were drawn more towards Hollywood and the space programme, and less towards original fiction.

That said, he also points out the remarkable output of Bradbury's final decade, which saw the publication of two novels and many other books of short stories, poetry and essays.

Jon titled his lecture "Cry the Cosmos", after Bradbury's famous space-age essay for Life magazine. The lecture is now available in its entirety on YouTube, and the video includes images from Jon's presentation and a question and answer session.You can view the lecture here.

Father Electrico

Further to my earlier post about the Christopher Slatoff sculpture Father Electrico, here are two videos about it. The first shows the bronze casting process, and the second shows the sculpture and gathered crowds on the night of the unveiling.



Bronze Pour @ La Fonderie from Nathan K on Vimeo.



Fr. Electrico By Christopher Slatoff from Nathan K on Vimeo.


And if you want to see more, John Sasser has a gallery of images on Facebook.

Montag Sings. Oh yes, Montag Sings.

One of the more bizarre aspects of Bradbury's work is its frequent slippage from one medium to another. He will start with a screenplay, turn it into a short story, adapt it for stage, novelise it, on and on.

And on more than one occasion he has added music, or at least had a composer add music.

Now, with something as potentially light as Dandelion Wine, I can just about accept and understand why someone might want to create a musical. But I struggle with the idea of operatic renditions of works such as Leviathan '99 and Fahrenheit 451.

Which brings me to this odd little item: a German language operatic version of Fahrenheit 451, by Brenton Broadstock. If you get bored with the introduction, fast forward to about 1:30. That's where the drama begins. Enjoy!

F451 Comes Alive

Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 continues to be a popular choice for theatrical staging. News reaches me of a current production in Goshen, Indiana. Ticketing information is here.

The SouthBend Tribune has a behind-the-scenes article here.

And here's a video clip:




Meanwhile, in Chicago, the Manifest Urban Arts Festival is bringing Bradbury's characters to life. Learn more here - or by watching this video clip:

New Interview with Ray

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

Video Clips

Almost forgotten, tucked away on the memory card of my stills cameras, I have two video clips from the recent Eaton Conference, "Chronicling Mars". As a lecturer in Video and Film Production, I can't say I am proud of the technical quality of the picture or sound, but they were taken very much as an afterthought - as, sitting in the audience for Ray Bradbury's presentation, I suddenly remembered that my stills camera also recorded video clips.

So, for posterity, here are my two clips of Bradbury in action.

First, Ray at the start of his presentation:






Second, Ray answers a question about the character of Fedallah in his screen adaptation of Moby Dick (1956):

All Summer in a Day

One of the most asked-about Bradbury stories is "All Summer in a Day". Barely a day goes by without someone posting to the Bradbury message boards enquiring about their vague memory of a short film they were once shown at school.

I was quite amused to discover this web page from the Chicago Tribune about "seasonal affective disorder," which refers to Bradbury's story. The page also has a direct link to the full text of the story.

As for the film, it occasionally appears on YouTube and elsewhere, no doubt without permission of the copyright holders. Its latest appearance is here.

In case you were wondering, the image on the left is the cover of the March 1954 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction which contained the first appearance of "All Summer in a Day".

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

Vision of... the future?

Another of Ray Bradbury's famous friends is comedian Stan Freberg, best known for his parodies. At some point in the dim and distant past, Bradbury and Freberg worked together on a TV commercial...for prunes. This commercial has recently popped up on Google Video (among other places). It's amusing for its apologetic Bradbury performance, but also for its rather well conceived representation of a typical science-fictional future family; almost indistinguishable from those seen in supposedly serious adaptations of Bradbury's stories.

Here's the video:

When Alfred met Ray...

Well, I've never been too sure whether Alfred Hitchcock ever met Ray Bradbury, but Mr B certainly worked for Mr Hitch on many occasions: he contributed several scripts to Hitch's TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

By all accounts, Hitch was quite hands-off when it came to his TV show. He diligently and good-humouredly did his bits to camera (scripted by someone else), and made a point of directing a few episodes of the shows each year. For the most part, however, the actual producing work was done by his trusted collaborators Joan Harrison and Norman Lloyd.

Bradbury began writing for the screen in the 1950s, and selling work to the Hitchcock series helped him develop as a screenwriter, and no doubt prepared him in some way for his own monumental weekly anthology series, Ray Bradbury Theatre.

You can read a little more about the Bradbury-Hitchcock collaborations on my Hitchcock series pages.

And if you make your way over to GUBA, you will find that two of the Bradbury episodes are available online:

• The Jar - adapted by James Bridges from the Bradbury story - is one of the best-remembered of all Hitchcock TV shows

• The Life Work of Juan Diaz - adapted by Ray Bradbury from his own short story - is the episode Bradbury is most pleased with. This is his last Hitchcock script, and shows that he can handle teleplays just as well as short stories.

Be warned, though: GUBA links tend not to last very long (particularly if the video clip has been uploaded without approval of the copyright holder). Get them while you can!

Editing Ray Bradbury

Ever wondered what's involved in establishing the definitive version of a text, when that text has passed through a series of editorial hands? Professor Jon Eller specialises in this field, and has made substantial contributions to Bradbury scholarship.

Jon's contribution to Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (co authored with Bill Touponce; Kent State University Press, 2004) was primarily in tracing the textual history of Bradbury's major works, revealing for the first time the extent of Bradbury's continual re-writing and re-development of his fiction.

Jon also edited the handsome Gauntlet Press edition of The Halloween Tree, which presented several variant texts of Bradbury's short novel alongside his award-winning teleplay version.

At the end of April, Gauntlet should be issuing Match to Flame. This volume, edited by Donn Albright, traces the roots of Fahrenheit 451. Jon has edited and annotated the texts presented in this volume.

Jon recently gave an account of his work editing Bradbury in a lecture at Indiana University. A video of the lecture (lasting just under an hour) is available here.

Bradbury 13 news? And a Bradbury documentary.

A company called Strategicom have contacted me, saying that they are working with Mike McDonough on licensing of Bradbury 13. It sounds as if moves are afoot - finally - to get this classic piece of radio drama officially re-released.

As I have blogged previously, Bradbury 13 (most of it, anyway) was once released on cassette, but a CD or official download version has never appeared. I hope this is now about to happen. Watch this space!


Meanwhile, I spotted a new Bradbury documentary DVD on Amazon. Ray Bradbury: Dancing Among the Muses sounds, from a customer review, a rather cheap affair. However, the producers' web page for the DVD makes it seem rather more professional. They have a trailer online (which friend Nard also found on YouTube), which includes Ray telling the familiar Mr Electrico tale. This might be worth further investigation...

Farewell Summer, video odds and ends

Advanced reviews have started to appear for Ray Bradbury's forthcoming book Farewell Summer. This, you may recall, is his sequel to Dandelion Wine (1957), although most of it was written at the same time as the original novel, and both books were originally conceived by Bradbury as a single novel.

Publisher's Review's text is posted on the Amazon page for the book. Kirkus Review's text is available on their site, but only to paying subscribers. However, over at the Ray Bradbury Message Board, Walloon has posted the Kirkus text. Many thanks, Walloon.

There are some interesting Bradbury-related video clips on YouTube these days. Nard has alerted me to Exposure Three: a short behind-the-scenes feature on the making of The Small Assassin. And then there is this quirky little piece: The Adventures of Ray Bradbury. This is a little comedy that parodies the persona of Bradbury - not so much his fiction or writing style, but his Ray Bradbury Theater persona. Until I saw this, it had never occurred to me that Bradbury was a celebrity capable of being parodied, but I guess he is!

Other Bradbury-related material on YouTube can be found here.

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.]