A Sound of Thunder

Yesterday I posted a brief announcement that the Take Me To Your Reader podcast about "A Sound of Thunder" was now live. Today, I thought I would post some convenient links for anyone who wants to find out more about the story and the media adaptations.


First, here's the link to the podcast, featuring yours truly as "special guest".


The Ray Bradbury short story is still copyrighted, so shouldn't really be out there on the web. But it is one of the most reprinted stories in history, and it is quite ubiquitous online. Here is just one of many finds that Google led me to.


The Ray Bradbury Theater episode is a quite faithful adaptation of the story, and although it shows its age (and lack of budget), it's still a pretty good presentation of the Bradbury original - and has a script by Bradbury himself. Watch it on YouTube here. And if you want to know more, read my review of the episode.


The much-maligned 2005 film version has some entertainment value, but as we all agreed in the podcast, you really have to leave your critical faculties at the door, since the expansion of the story to feature-length has been done without much intelligence, logic or scientific understanding. Not that science fiction has to be scientifically accurate - but if you expect to fool the viewer into believing the impossible, you need to do it without insulting their intelligence. Watch it on YouTube here.


If you want to do the right thing, here are links for purchasing some of the above. These links are "Amazon.com affiliate links": each purchase made after following these links will generate a small donation to the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, to help preserve and promote the legacy of Ray Bradbury.


A Sound of Thunder (Widescreen Edition)

A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories

The Ray Bradbury Theater: The Complete Series

Ray Bradbury (1920 - 2012)

Today would have been Ray Bradbury's 95th birthday.

Let's start planning for the Bradbury Centenary in 2020. Onward!

Update: to tie-in nicely with Ray's birthday, the Take Me To Your Reader podcast I guested on has now gone live. You can listen to our lively discussion of "A Sound of Thunder" here:

http://pavementpodcast.com/podcast/tmtyr-episode-28-deaunt-chaynj-ennithnng-a-sound-of-thunder-feat-phil-nichols/

Special thanks to Seth, Colin and James for getting the episode edited and online in time for 22 August!

Take Me To Your Reader

Last night I joined the regular team of the podcast Take Me To Your Reader to record an episode devoted to Ray Bradbury's short story "A Sound of Thunder" and two media adaptations of the story.

The idea behind Take Me To Your Reader is that the presenters will read a science-fiction book or short story, and then watch the film(s) based on the story. Previous topics have included Planet of the Apes (in all its filmic incarnations), Carl Sagan's Contact, and Jurassic Park - and many, many others. I've listed to maybe six or seven episodes previously, and always found them enjoyable for their careful but accessible analysis of how stories adapt from one medium to another.

"A Sound of Thunder" is unusual in being a quite short story which has been adapted into a full-length feature film, necessarily entailing the invention of a lot of new material. The film, directed by Peter Hyams and released in 2005, went out into the world almost unnoticed: it had a limited release, and then went quietly to DVD with a minimum of publicity. It didn't help that the company behind it went bust, and it almost never got finished.

The earlier screen adaptation was from Bradbury's own script, for Ray Bradbury Theater. I've always quite liked this version, although it has its flaws - you can read my review of the episode here.

I won't pre-empt the conclusions of the Take Me To Your Reader episode, but let's just say that all of us involved in the recording found the movie to be hilarious in places... but it is, alas, not intended to be a comedy...

We spoke via Skype, with one end of the conversation being recorded in Oregon and my end being recorded in the UK, so  the episode now needs to be edited to make a seamless whole. It should be ready by the end of the month. I'll post a link as soon as it goes live.

Meanwhile, if you're interested in SF adaptations, why not check out some of the earlier episodes, here.

During the recording, I recommended that newcomers to Bradbury's fiction should start with one of the compendium volumes, either The Stories of Ray Bradbury or Bradbury Stories. The two books are completely complementary, with no overlap at all in their contents. Each book contains a wide range of story types, and each one makes a perfect introduction to Bradbury.

Below is an Amazon link. If you click on this link, any Amazon purchase you make will generate a small donation to the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies.

Facebook

Bradburymedia has been a little quiet of late, for which I apologise... but if you are feeling deprived of news and insights on all things Bradbury, please make sure you visit the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies on Facebook.

I maintain the Facebook page in my role as "Senior Advisor" - and tend to make short quick posts there several times a week. Often it will be for posting links I have found to other resources, the kind of thing that isn't quite substantial enough to warrant a full blog post. Recent posts include details on August events to celebrate what would have been Ray's 95 birthday, and an obituary for the sculptor who created Disney's animatronic Abe Lincoln (the inspiration for Ray's short story "Downwind from Gettysburg").

And for those of you who avoid/despise/detest/don't understand Facebook, I should point out that the page is public. You don't need a Facebook account to view it. (But if you are a Facebook user, we would welcome a "like" from you, if you haven't already "liked" us.)

Join us here:https://www.facebook.com/pages/Center-for-Ray-Bradbury-Studies/766546360037269

The Whispers - Premiere Episode

The Whispers - ABC's new SF drama series based on Ray Bradbury's "Zero Hour" - premiered on Monday. According to Variety, it got reasonable ratings, so I assume its future on primetime US television is assured for the time being.

The opening episode had some strong behind-the-scenes talent attached. Writer-producer Soo Hugh has been associated with Under the Dome. Not the greatest series of all time, but one which at least is sometimes able to sustain some mystery and suspense. Co-director Mark Romanek made the admirable Robin Williams film One Hour Photo, although his career since has never quite matched up to that early work.

Because of the Under the Dome connection, I half-expected The Whispers to be full of artificial suspense, shocks and surprises. Instead, it had multiple plot threads which started out independently but turned out to be connected. Nothing earth-shattering, but not bad TV plotting, especially in setting up what I assume might be a five-year series if those ratings hold up.

Not surprisingly, the show very quickly diverges from Bradbury's original story. However, what Bradbury-derived material there was seemed quite fine to me. There were the kids taking instruction from Drill, the parents talking on the phone and not quite paying enough attention to the kids - this taken directly from "Zero Hour". The mother at the beginning of the episode who died falling through the treehouse reminded me of another Bradbury story, "The Small Assassin", where a baby causes a mother to fall downstairs and die. Then there was the beardy guy in the hospital, who was covered with tattoos. Ah, Soo Hugh read "Zero Hour" in The Illustrated Man, I thought to myself. There's even one sequence which has visual echoes of "The Screaming Woman" from Ray Bradbury Theatre.

 

Of course, for every Bradbury element, this Amblin Entertainment production also had a Spielberg element: the kids, of course, plus the toys that take on a life of their own, and the mystery-object-found-in-the-desert (how could it possibly have got here?) - this could have been Close Encounters, or ET, or Poltergeist.

Overall, though, it was far better than I feared, and good enough to make me want to see more. I didn't care for the deaf kid (unconvincingly written and performed), and the mystery-object-found-in-the-desert (how could it possibly have got here?) was visually underwhelming. But otherwise, good stuff. I doubt there will be any Bradbury after this first episode, though.

One thing struck me as odd. There wasn't any credit to Bradbury on-screen anywhere that I could see. I imagine this is a contractual matter between ABC and the Bradbury estate, and it's none of my business. But if I were Don Congdon Associates, I would have insisted on a "based on a story by Ray Bradbury" credit at the head of each episode.

 

Over on io9, a reviewer suggests that The Whispers misses the point of Bradbury's story. It's a good review, which gave me a few chuckles. But it seems to me that you can't expect an open-ended TV series to have the same point as a short story that runs to just a few pages. I would hope that The Whispers is designed to reach a conclusion at some point, but it's not being advertised as a closed serial of defined length. Rather, it is typical network TV fare, working on the principle of "let's keep it going as long as we can, and possibly consider concluding it at some unspecified point in the future - if we don't get cancelled at short notice". The best we can expect, I think, is that "Zero Hour" be treated honorably as the jumping-off point for the series, after which it becomes its own thing.

The Whispers = "Zero Hour"

On Monday 1st June, ABC airs the first episode of The Whispers, a science-fiction TV series based on Ray Bradbury's short story "Zero Hour". The series was announced a long time ago, and has been delayed several times. Let's hope the wait has been worth it.

"Zero Hour" was first published in 1947, in the pulp magazine Planet Stories, a regular home for Bradbury stories in the 1940s. Today you can find it in several Bradbury books: it's in the 1951 collection The Illustrated Man, the 1960s compilation S is for Space, and the 2003 retrospective collection Bradbury Stories: 100 of his most celebrated tales.

Planet Stories, fall 1947 issue.  Click to embiggen.

Bradbury's story is about an alien invasion with a difference. The alien - Drill - finds a way of communicating with Earth children.The children incorporate Drill's ideas into their play, and eventually enable Drill to take over the Earth. Like John Wyndham in The Midwich Cuckoos, Bradbury manages to tap into something inherently frightening about children. Perhaps they are too innocent, so that they just have to be up to something.

But what Bradbury's story is really about is... bad parenting. As with another of his classic short stories, "The Veldt", the parents just don't pay enough attention to the kids. They've got enough adult things to pre-occupy them, and would rather just send the kids off to play, or to sit in front of the TV. Their lack of interest in what their kids are up to, and specifically their lack of interest in the children's play, becomes the parents' downfall.

Bradbury often said that he didn't predict the future, but instead tried to prevent it. "Zero Hour" is a classic Bradburyan warning: pay more attention to your kids, or else...

"Zero Hour" has remarkable staying power. Although the story is dated in places, and clearly reads like something from the 1950s (although it was written in the 1940s), it is sufficiently non-specific about future technologies that it can stand up well today. It has long been popular in other media, too. It was all over American radio in the 1950s: it was adapted for Dimension X in 1950; Lights Out in 1951; Escape in 1953; Suspense three times (1955,1958 and 1960); X Minus One in 1955. And it has been made into a short film, and adapted by Bradbury himself for TV's  Ray Bradbury Theater - see the Youtube video below.

Although Bradbury's short story is still in copyright, somewhere along the line Anthony Ellis' 1950s radio script for "Zero Hour" slipped into the public domain, and has become a popular source for re-enactors of old-time radio. You can find the script here.

At the time of writing, I haven't seen The Whispers. Given that there have been some dreadful adaptations of Bradbury over the years, I am not expecting much from the series. But I have my fingers crossed that Bradbury's concept is strong enough to shine through whatever ABC can do to it!

Ray Bradbury - "Minor Poet"

On 10th July 1972, Ray Bradbury​ was the first speaker in a twelve-week series of free lectures entitled Cosmic Evolution: Man's Descent from the Stars at San Francisco's Exploratorium. "I will be participating as a minor poet and sub-minor philosopher," Ray said, "seeking to explain our age and the great three-billion-year age ahead."

By this time, Bradbury had been closely associated with space - partly through his fiction, but more importantly through his non-fiction writings and public speaking.

Other contributors to the lecture series were all scientists, including: Freeman Dyson, who lectured on intelligent life in the universe; Nobel Prize-winning chemist Melvin Calvin, on the origin of life; and Philip Morrison, who concluded the series with "The Context of Mankind: a Summation."

Five years later, Bradbury and Morrison would sit together on a NASA panel with novelist James Michener and explorer Jacques Cousteau, discussing "Why Man Explores". The answer to such a question clearly required not just a scientific answer, but a poetic one.

Start Date for THE WHISPERS, based on Bradbury short story

After much unexplained delay, ABC has finally announced an air date for the new series The Whispers, which is based on the classic Ray Bradbury short story "Zero Hour".

TVLine.com broke the news, and published the first preview of the official poster.

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is the latest release from Colonial Radio Theatre, the audio drama company whose previous hits include Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Halloween Tree.

As with Colonial's Bradbury productions, 20,000 Leagues stays true to the source material - although if you are only familiar with the 1954 film (or any of the many TV remakes), there may be some surprises for you here. The first surprise might be the cover art, seeming to imply that Captain Nemo is perhaps some kind of Indian nobleman, but even this is true to Jules Verne, although it is in Verne's sequel The Mysterious Island that this aspect of Nemo's past is revealed.

Verne's extraordinary voyage is really a tour of the world under the sea, in itself a rather undramatic premise. It succeeds by the vividness of the wonders he describes, and by the verisimilitude of the fantastic events that befall the cast of characters: the French scientist Arronax, his assistant Conseil, and Canadian whaler Ned Land, all of whom become unwitting captives of the myterious Captain Nemo. The other element which draws the reader (or listener) forward is the mystery of Nemo himself. What motivates his vengeful attacks on ships of all nations? Who are the other occupants of Nemo's wondrous submarine the Nautilus? How can they possibly survive life beneath the oceans?

Colonial's Nemo is J.T.Turner, who plays him as appropriately larger than life. Although we never fully discover all of Nemo's secrets, we do learn of his intense sadness when there is loss of life among his own crew, and we do learn of an emotional trauma related to his wife and children. It is to Colonial's credit that these humanising elements of the story are retained alongside the rollicking adventure of fighting giant squid and escaping from cannibals.

Something else I admire about this production is its period setting. It might have been tempting to either update the story, or eliminate the specifically outdated elements. But I'm pleased to see that this version clearly keeps the story before the completion of the Suez Canal, and even allows Verne's mistaken assumption that the South Pole is on a floating ice cap (as the North Pole is), rather than on the terra firma of the continent of Antarctica.

Ordering details for Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea can be found on Colonial's website: http://www.colonialradio.com/

The April Witch

Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals when the breeze blew. She perched in a lime-green frog, cool as mint by a shining pool. She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns. She lived in new April grasses, in sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth.

It's spring, thought Cecy. I'll be in every living thing in the world tonight...

- Ray Bradbury, "The April Witch", Saturday Evening Post, April 5th 1952.