Happy Birthday, Ray Bradbury!

Ray Bradbury turns 87 today, and continues his prodigious publishing output. I probably said this last year, but I'll say it again: he's another step closer to fulfilling the instruction given to him by Mr Electrico when he was a child: "Live forever!"

I heard from William Touponce of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies yesterday. The Center's new journal The New Ray Bradbury Review is being prepared for publication, and will contain a number of articles about Bradbury's work as adapted for film, radio and television. It is due to appear early next year, and should have one or two surprises...

Today's New York Times has a rather charming portrait of Ray on his birthday, with an audio clip from an interview. You can read the story here.

When it's gone, it's gone...

One of the earliest commercial recordings of Bradbury stories is a 1962 LP featuring Burgess Meredith reading two stories: "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "Marionettes, Inc."

As far as I know, this has never been released on any other format. The LPs are not exactly rare - they pop up on eBay from time to time.

The estimable Zombie Astronaut, whose blog is a constant source of audio rareties, some classic, some just bizarre, has posted MP3 files of this LP. I don't know how long the link will stay active, so you should listen while you still can: click here.

For more information on Bradbury material released on tape or disc, see my list here.

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:

Conference Presentation

I nearly forgot to blog this one...

On Saturday I presented another conference paper on Ray Bradbury. This one, at the second Edge Hill Short Story Conference, was about three Bradbury short stories which have been adapted many times for radio, film and television: "Mars is Heaven", "Zero Hour" and "The Veldt".

The aim of the paper was to gather some thoughts on why some stories retain their popularity through repeated re-tellings. There are two areas that intrigued me when I was doing the research for the paper, and I hope to follow up on these at a later date.

The first is that some of the stories work reasonably well even when stripped of their original background or "landscape". This thought occurred to me when listening to various cold-war era radio adaptations of "Zero Hour", which still work (just) without the science fictional background elements that feature prominently in Bradbury's short story.

The second is that Bradbury's poetic prose style - throwing out metaphor after metaphor in the white heat of progressing the narrative - invites an "inner life" for the story in the mind of the reader. This, I believe, is part of Bradbury's appeal to his readers. And since each reader will conjure up subtly different mental images as they read, so (possibly) the stories invite multiple, variant adaptations.

I am currently working on some more Bradbury papers (don't ask me how I find the time) for the proposed New Ray Bradbury Review. I understand that this is likely to see print early next year.

Old Friends...and more

Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen, friends since their teens, yesterday signed books together at the Mystery & Imagination bookstore in Los Angeles.

Both Rays were born in 1920, and both were members of the same LA science-fiction group in the 1930s...where they mingled with the likes of Robert A. Heinlein, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton and many others.

In 1953, Ray H. made a film based on a Ray B. story - The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. In 1990, Ray B. made a fictionalised version of Ray H. into a character in his novel A Graveyard for Lunatics.

Nowadays, Ray Harryhausen makes his home in England, but the two Rays still meet up from time to time. The photo above (click to enlarge) was sent to me by John King Tarpinian, a regular insider at Mr B's book signings. Many thanks, John.



The Planetary Society recently sponsored a performance of Green Town by Ray Bradbury's theatre company. You can read about this - and listen about it - on this page on the Society's website.

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!

Photo Gallery

Several months ago John King Tarpinian was kind enough to send me some Bradbury photos. John has been literally working alongside Ray Bradbury for some time - he runs the bookstall at Ray's Pandemonium Theatre productions. It has taken me a while to get round to uploading these images, but they are now well and truly up: visit my new Photo Gallery to view them.

John has also provided some reviews and other information on the Pandemonium Productions, which I hope to incorporate into some new pages on Ray's theatre work in the not-too-distant future. Watch this space...

(You can view more of John's photos on this other Ray Bradbury site.)

Dandelion Wine wins award

Jerry Robbins of Colonial has just sent me this excellent news about their audio production of Dandelion Wine (reviewed on my site here):

Just a quick note to announce that for the second year in a row, Colonial has won "The Ogle Award" for "Best Fantasy Production of The Year" with "Ray Bradbury's DANDELION WINE." This was our first collaboration with Mr. Bradbury, and it's great to have won with his script - he was very happy to hear the news! The award ceremony will be on July 6th in Minneapolis and will be presented by David Ossman of the Firesign Theater. Ray will also be awarded the LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD In Science Fiction Audio, along with Norman Corwin.

The Ogle is named for Charles Ogle, the first actor to play the Frankenstein Monster on film, in Edisons 1910 production, and is presented by The American Society for Science Fiction Audio.

Congratulations to Jerry, Ray and all involved. And watch this space for news of their forthcoming production of Something Wicked This Way Comes...

The Veldt: New Radio Adaptation

"I wrote The Veldt because my subconscious knew more about children than has often been told." Ray Bradbury wrote these words in his introduction to his stage play version of his classic story.

"The Veldt" tells the story of a futuristic nursery, where children are kept occupied by a virtual reality environment, which can conjure up any world they can imagine. The children's parents ultimately pay the price for offloading childcare responsbilities onto a machine.

Bradbury seems to have concocted this tale primarily as an observation on the potential for "evil" inherent in children. As such it is a companion piece to "Zero Hour", "The Small Assassin" and "The Playground". In all of these tales, children conspire to do bad things.

"The Veldt" has remained one of Bradbury's most popular stories, and has been adapted for radio, television and film many times. Its popularity back in the 1950s was giving a huge helping hand by the radio adaptations. These, no doubt, came about in part because Bradbury's nursery is an obvious analogy for the then new - and, to radio, threatening - medium of television.

Bradbury has little interest in technology, and probably didn't care that his story was criticised for technological implausibility. However, the story has been used many times over the years as an exemplar of virtual reality, and today's technology (particularly in interactive media) seems to have at last caught up with Bradbury's once implausible concept.

A "modernised" version of Bradbury's story has just been produced by BBC radio. It builds in some of our modern day concerns about how children waste/spend their time. In my view, little modernisation is really necessary, since Bradbury got the issues spot on in the original story. However, playwright Mike Walker has created a vibrant new version on the story. And anyway, I am always pleased to encounter a new dramatisation of a Bradbury story.

If you are quick, you can catch the play via the BBC's "Listen Again" feature by clicking here. The link will be valid until 28th May, after which the BBC will replace it with a different play.