Orbiting Bradbury's Mars

Coming soon, Orbiting Ray Bradbury's Mars, edited by Gloria McMillan. The blurb for this essay collection says:

Noting the impact of the Southwest on Bradbury, some of the essays analyze Bradbury’s southwest metaphors: colonial pollution of a pristine ecology, the impacts of a colonial invasion upon an indigenous population, the meeting of cultures with different values and physical aspects. Other essays view Bradbury via the lens of post-colonialism, drawing parallels between such works as The Martian Chronicles and real-life colonialism and its effects. Others view Bradbury sociologically, analyzing border issues in his 1947 New Yorker story "I See You Never," written long before the issue of Mexican deportees appeared on the American literary horizon. From the scientific side, four essays by astronomers document how Bradbury formed the minds of many budding scientists with his vision.

The book is due for release towards the end of the 2013, but is available for pre-order now from the website of the publisher, McFarland. McFarland previously published Visions of Mars, to which I contributed an essay on Bradbury's Mars.

New Short Film - All Summer in a Day

All Summer in a Day is a short film production funded via Kickstarter, the crowd-funding website. It's based on the Ray Bradbury short story, which has been filmed once before. The Kickstarter target was a modest $5000 or so, which was reached in April.

You can read more about the production here, and here is the trailer/pitch:

Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013)

It was reported today that animator Ray Harryhausen has passed away. He was 92 years old.

He and Ray Bradbury were born in the same year, and first met in Los Angeles when they were both in their teens. They shared a passion for dinosaurs and King Kong, and remained friends across the decades.

The two Rays never directly collaborated, but they both had credits on the 1950s movie The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Bradbury wrote the story the film derived from; Harryhausen brought the Beast to life with his amazing animation, achieved on a remarkably low budget.

Some years later, Bradbury wrote a short story called "Tyrannosaurus Rex", about a monstrous film producer and the stop-motion animator who wreaks sweet revenge on him. Harryhausen was clearly the model for the animator (but I don't think the real-life producer has ever been identified...).

Later still, Bradbury made a fictionalised version of Harryhausen into a central character of his Hollywood novel Graveyard for Lunatics.

As the two Rays aged, and travel became difficult, they saw less of each other. Their last meeting was about six years ago when London-based Harryhausen made his last trip to Los Angeles. The photo above shows the two at a public event in 2007.

Three years ago, Ray Harryhausen announced that he was donating the life's work - models, papers, the lot - to the National Media Museum in Bradford, England. This should ensure that his work is properly memorialised, and that researchers will be able to gain access to his sketches and working papers.

Looking back, I am surprised to see how often I mentioned Harryhausen on this blog, but when you consider the importance of the two Rays to each other, there is no real surprise. Click here to see previous posts about the late, great Ray Harryhausen.

Books on Bradbury, new and forthcoming

It's nearly a year since Ray Bradbury died, but interest in his work continues, as evidenced in a number of books newly released or announced.

Searching for Ray Bradbury is a slim, inexpensive volume from Bradbury's friend and collaborator Steven Paul Leiva. It collects Steven's writings on Ray, previously published in various newspapers, magazines and websites. I'm currently reading this book, and will be reviewing it here in the near future. For now, I'll just say that it captures some of the spirit of celebration of the events Steven co-ordinated in recent years, such as Los Angeles' Ray Bradbury Week and the dedication of Ray Bradbury Square.

Nolan on Bradbury is William F. Nolan's return to writing about his lifelong friend. A highlight of Nolan's early career was his publication of The Ray Bradbury Review, the first study of any aspect of Bradbury's work. Nolan would soon develop a career as a creative writer which paralleled Bradbury's, with work in the fields of SF, fantasy, horror and crime fiction, and with significant excursions into screenwriting. Nolan's list of significant books includes the novel Logan's Run (written with George Clayton Johnson) and the scrapbook-style The Ray Bradbury Companion. Now Nolan on Bradbury promises to collect "sixty years of writing" about Bradbury, and is adorned with a Joe Mugnaini rendering of Bradbury's "The Pedestrian". I hope to review this book soon.

Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys is William Touponce's latest study, attempting to map Lovecraft's notion of spectral literature as "literature that involves the gothic themes of the supernatural found in the past but also concerned about modern society and humanity", and showing how his tradition or mode of writing developed through the twentieth-century. Bill's previous work on Bradbury is extensive, including the study Ray Bradbury: the Life of Fiction (written with Jon Eller) and directing the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies from 2007-2011. This book is listed for publication in October... the ideal month for Bradbury.

Finally a brief note on The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: a Critical Edition, Volume 2. I am pleased to report that I have been appointed as a consultant on this volume, which is currently approaching it's final shape. The contents of the volume are more or less settled, with just a few items of the critical apparatus still to be completed. I'll give more details when I can. (Volume 1, of course, is already available.)

Bradbury Poster

I recently had to produce a poster outlining my PhD research project in terms that could be understood by a non-expert. I went for a straightforward approach of a brief description and some simple illustrations drawn from book covers, film posters and DVD sleeves. As it was produced for viewing online, I opted for a landscape design.

The poster was on display for two weeks on the website of Liverpool University during the "Poster Day Online" event. The event is now over, so I can make it viewable here.

Click here, then, to view the full-size PDF of The Cinema of Lost Films: Ray Bradbury on Screen.

Bradbury, Ellison: Writing for the Screen

Last week I attended the Eaton Science Fiction Conference (which this year was combined with the Science Fiction Research Association conference) in Riverside, California, to present a paper on the screenwriting styles of Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison.

The overall conference programme was ridiculously full, with seven simultaneous panels for most of the conference's three days. This is an amazing expansion since my first Eaton in 2008, which just had a single strand of panels.

My paper was part of a panel I had proposed on screenwriting. The paper title was "Screenwriting: Spectacle, Specificity and Speculative Fiction", and my intention was to illuminate the challenge of writing a screenplay for an imagined world, using examples from the scripts of Bradbury and Ellison to show two distinct strategies.

Bradbury tended to write non-technical scripts, resulting in a style of script which looks for all the world like a modern-day "spec script" - although he developed this style as early as the mid-1950s. Ellison, on the other hand, developed his craft in television in the early 1960s, in a time when it was common practice for the scriptwriter to write more or less in a shooting-script format, a style which is generally more prescriptive and more technical in terms of camera directions.

Over time, Bradbury's style became more and more simplified, and his scripts tend to read like very clear short stories. The heavy use of metaphor we often find in his short stories is largely absent, however, as he recognised how important it was to be unambiguous in describing a fantastical world in a screenplay. Ellison, on the other hand, developed a remarkable specificity in his scripts, which makes for some stunning visual concepts which challenge the director and production team to match his vision.

Time permitting, I intend to develop the paper for journal publication.

The other contributors to the panel were Julian Hoxter of San Francisco State University, author of Write What You Don't Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters (New York: Continuum, 2011) and Michael Klein of James Madison University. Julian spoke on the emergence of the "spec script" format and its impact on action in blockbuster movies. Michael spoke on the mythos of Frankenstein as it developed in both Shelley's original novel and its first film adaptation. I learned a lot from both presentations, and appreciated both speakers' contribution to the panel.

Fahrenheit 451 Marathon Read

Mark DiPietro of the Edge Ensemble Theatre Company contacted me to pass on news of an event on 11 May 2013: a marathon reader's theatre presentation of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The venue is Heberton Hall-Keene Public Library Annex in Keene, New Hampshire.

Mark writes:

"The whole idea is that 'getting lost in a good book' is something that's disappeared for many people, especially young people, with smart phones, iPods, iPads and earbuds stuck calling to them continuously. (Bradbury even foretold the earbud sensation in Fahrenheit 451, with the omnipresent 'seashells' that preoccupied Mildred Montag.) Marathon reads - i.e., reading an entire work of literature in a single setting - have been catching on at many colleges and high schools. (Here's a story from the New York Times about college campuses doing marathons of War and Peace, Paradise Lost, and other literary works.

We got the idea after hearing about these other marathons and decided that Bradbury's novel would be the perfect length and subject matter to stage our own marathon. The Edge Ensemble has recruited students from four schools in Southwestern New Hampshire as our readers/performers, along with community members and Edge Ensemble performers. We're also working with 5th- through 8th-graders who are members of an Opera Club at a local elementary school. The students are writing an original opera based on Fahrenheit 451 called "Operas Burning," which they'll perform in June at the Colonial Theatre in Keene. The Edge Ensemble is working with the students on performing techniques, and the students will attend the marathon theatre production on May 11.

Our goal is to make this a public event and get as many people to come out and participate in the Fahrenheit marathon as possible - to get them reading Bradbury's novel, and to get them reading, period."

Thanks, Mark, for all the detail on this event.

For more information, visit the Edge Ensemble website.

Big Read - the Bronx!

The writer Jason Marchi tells me that on 28 April 2013 he will be giving a lecture in the Bronx, New York, about being mentored by Ray Bradbury, and their close friendship over the last 12 years of Bradbury's life. It's one of the many events being held in the Bronx, which has adopted Fahrenheit 451 for its community Big Read programme. The full programme of events can be seen here.

Other US cities have also adopted Fahrenheit 451, which continues to be a popular book in this scheme. Find out where else has chosen Bradbury using this interactive map.

A Night At The Opera

The question I am most often asked (apart from "What's the title of that story where the summer only lasts a single day?") is: "Do you like everything Bradbury did?"

The answer is quite simple: No.

While it's true that I tend to use this blog to focus on positive stories about Bradbury and his work, there's plenty that I don't like. But I just don't see the point in wasting my energy on things that don't interest me. So you won't very often hear me discuss Bradbury's later short story collections, which contain some very slight stories (or should I say "stories"). And you won't hear much from me about Let's All Kill Constance, the weaker of Ray's three mystery novels.

And you won't hear much about... operas or musicals.

Bradbury had a fascination for these forms of theatre, and devoted quite a bit of time from the 1960s onwards to developing all sorts of things for the musical stage: Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, Leviathan '99 and more. I haven't seen a single one of these performed, mainly because they were staged only briefly, and on a whole 'nother continent. But even if they were staged just around the corner from me, I would tend to stay away for the simple reason that I can't stand musicals!

The only exceptions I make are: cartoon musicals, and musicals involving puppets. But even these can try my patience.

Imagine my mixed feelings, then, when I learned that Daniel Levy and Elizabeth Margid had developed a new opera based on Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

The website for the project includes a substantial amount of the text and music for the show, some of it placed alongside Bradbury's original text, and I actually quite like being able to sample sections of the production in audio and/or video and/or text. I suppose it allows me to take it in small doses, whereas I would never be able to sit through an entire opera.

As a book, The Martian Chronicles does have a lot of musical content. The first time that Earth people "appear" to the Martians is through a song which Ylla hears in her head. Then comes a Martian opera, where the singer loses control and finds herself channeling a strange alien language. And when the Earthmen of the third expedition arrive on a Mars that resembles a small American town, they are greeted by the sound of Beautiful Ohio. There is clearly a lot of potential here for musical interpretation, and I would hope that this is reflected in the new opera.

Levy and Margid should be congratulated for managing to interest this opera skeptic. But I wish they would change the awful "sci-fi" label on the splash page of their website. Bradbury himself fought against labelling The Martian Chronicles as any kind of science fiction, let alone the downmarket kind suggested by the term "sci-fi".

Bradbury and the Group

For many years, a group of Los Angeles-area writers got together for mutual support and to review each other's works in progress. Ray Bradbury was one of them.

What I didn't know is that the core of the group was established as far back as 1948, with the publication of Best American Short Stories 1948. Apparently some enterprising soul went through the book, found out which of its authors lived within easy distance of LA, and invited them to join the group.

Terry Sanders' 1963 documentary Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer includes a short sequence showing the group reviewing Bradbury's "Dial Double Zero", although I'm not sure whether this reflects how the group really operated, or whether it is highly staged.

Now E.E.King has blogged about "the group", and reproduced a 1973 article by Bradbury's writer friend Sid Stebel, who Ray apparently described as "the best writing teacher that ever was!" The article is taken from the Los Angeles Times, Calendar section, 24 June 1973.