Bradbury Rare TV

A very rare piece of television created by Ray Bradbury has been announced for DVD release.

In the 1950s, Bradbury scripted a single episode of Steve Canyon, a series based on the comic strip created by Milton Caniff. Now, by arrangement with the Caniff estate, a second DVD collection of episodes is to be released - including Bradbury's episode, entitled "The Gift".

For my (rather brief) page on Steve Canyon, click here.

For the official news of the release, click here.

And The Bradbury Award Goes To...

The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) have announced that the 2009 recipient of the Ray Bradbury Award will be Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. The award is given for outstanding work in a dramatic medium.

Whedon is quoted as saying:

Like everyone who picks up a pen, I was a rabid Bradbury fan and as greatly influenced by him as any other writer I read. To receive the award named for him is an honor I'd not dreamed of. In my defense, it didn't exist back then. What did exist were the very lovely, very twisted and very human stories that warped my impressionable mind, and that I have tried, in whatever medium they will let me, to measure up to.

The full story is on the SWFA website, here. The award will be presented at the annual Nebula Awards bash in April.

Reviews of Bradbury's latest book We'll Always Have Paris are popping up around the place. I haven't had time to read the book yet myself, but I'm encouraged to see some positive press being received for this volume. See what the Los Angeles Times has to say here. And the Toledo Blade here.

Ripples

Ripples travel at their own speed, and those emanating in the US can take a while to cross the pond to the UK. Which is my excuse for not knowing sooner about The Ripple Effect, a literacy initiative in Richmond, Indiana. Earlier this month there was a staging of Bradbury's stage version of Fahrenheit 451, as this is one of the books Ripple Effect has chosen for its 2009 initiatives. Its website has a few useful links and articles about Bradbury, the role of dystopian fiction, and other related topics.

As a lecturer in film production, I was particularly interested in the "Visions of the Future" film competition which invites people to make their own utopian or dystopian film.

There is another competition inspired by F451 in Bradbury's home town: Waukegan Public Libraries is running its 25th Annual Ray Bradbury Contest. Previously a writing contest, this year the competition embraces mutlimedia submissions. Full details available here.

Speaking of F451, Kevin Cowherd of the Baltimore Sun suggests F451 as ideal winter reading. All those flames you see, guaranteed to melt away the snow and ice. Read his amusing and well informed article here.

And don't forget that the National Endowment for the Arts' "The Big Read" programme has a wealth of F451 resources, including a twenty-minute radio show about the book. The site also now features two versions of a superb film profiling Bradbury, directed by Lawrence Bridges. I first saw the short version previewed at the Eaton Conference in May 2008 - in this version Ray comes across as energetic, passionate, humorous. The longer version (approximately twenty minutes) gives a more detailed biography of Bradbury, but still entirely in Bradbury's own words. Bradbury's advancing age and declining health have sometimes diminished his persuasiveness as a speaker, but both versions of this film manage to restore him to his peak. I can't help thinking that Mr B must have been exhausted when the interviews were over. Direct access to the two versions of the film is here.

Nothing to do with F451, but relevant to the idea of "visions of the future": What does Ray Bradbury Theatre have in common with Blade Runner and Pushing Daisies? The answer is the Bradbury Building, an architectural icon which has found a remarkable life for itself in science fiction and fantasy film and television. Here is a superb illustrated article that catalogues all the major appearances of the building which, incidentally, is NOT named after Ray Bradbury.

Browsing Books

I found time to add to the main part of my site - I now have a page for We'll Always Have Paris, Bradbury's latest collection of new short stories. And thanks to HarperCollins, I can now offer a "browse inside" facility for this and some other books on my own site. Take a look below.

I also have a page for Masks, Gauntlet Press's latest effort in what can best described as Bradburyan archaeology. It's what they do best, in my view: digging into Bradbury's filing cabinets for abandoned works, finding the off-cuts and discards, and then attempting to make some sort of sense out of them. Of course, it's really the doing of Bradbury's master bibliographer Donn Albright, all watched by the scholarly eye of Eller and Touponce.

And now, have a good browse:

More Bradbury sightings on the web...

Tobias Anderson's one-man Bradbury show The Illustrated Bradbury has just received a rave review from The American Chronicle. Mr Bradbury was in attendance on the same day as the Chronicle's reviewer, prompting this observation:

One touching moment in the presentation was during "The Foghorn." Tobias Andersen, in the persona of the lighthouse keeper, was commenting on the cry of the mysterious beast from the sea and the plaintiff foghorn, when I heard a loud sigh from the audience. Mr. Bradbury was in attendance and he was reacting to the sound of his own words being delivered with such passion from the stage. It was beautiful.

Another, brief report appears here in Pasadena Now.



When was the last time you awarded a book three Ws? That's the rating The Weekender has given to Bradbury's recent book Summer Morning, Summer Night. This review is perhaps a little confused (or confusing), referring to the book as both a novel and short story collection, and omits to mention that it is a collection of off-cuts and therefore likely to appear highly disjointed to the read who is unaware of the text's history. It is, of course, the volume of material that didn't make it into either Dandelion Wine or its sequel Farewell Summer.


Blogger Celtic Lady has posted about real dandelion wine, and gets us in the mood by quoting evocative passages from Bradbury's book.

Miscellaneous Bradburyiana

The Lake County Sun-Times, based in Chicago, has a few items of interest to the Bradbury fan. On 18th February Ted Gioia posted this appreciation of The Illustrated Man. And on 23rd February came this scrapbookish history of Bradbury's hometown of Waukegan... and this strangely unexplained tiny article about Mr B.


Urban Archipelago's film of Ray Bradbury's Chrysalis is now out on the festival circuit. This, you may recall, is the feature film debut of the folks who brought us the short film of A Piece of Wood. The official website of Chrysalis is here, and its MySpace page carries details of forthcoming screenings. I haven't seen the film yet, and I haven't seen many reviews. One visitor to the Boston Sci-Fi Film Marathon has posted this less than positive review.

Slow Down, Mr B!

I never thought it would happen, but Ray Bradbury, nearly twice my age, is moving too fast for me to keep up with. I have two of his recent books in my "to read" pile, and he already has another two out. And another two scheduled for release. Not to mention the three stage plays already stacking up in California...

The two books already out - and not yet showing up elsewhere on my website - are Masks and We'll Always Have Paris.

Masks is an unfinished novel, originally written in the 1950s. It would have been Bradbury's second novel, after The Martian Chronicles. Gauntlet Press have now released the text for the first time, restored from various drafts and fragments located by Bradbury's bibliographer Donn Albright. From this description, you may gather that this isn't an ideal book for the newcomer to Bradbury; instead, it's more suited to the Bradbury completist, the reader who likes to see how Bradbury does it. The volume also contains a handful of previously unpublished short stories.

Ordering information for Masks is to be found on Gauntlet's site, here. If you are in the UK, you can save on shipping by buying from The Book Depository - they offer free delivery.

More suitable for the general reader is Bradbury's latest short story collection from Wm Morrow. We'll Always Have Paris is titled to reflect Bradbury's love affair with the French capital, a love he developed when consulting for Disney on Disneyland Paris. The French, of course, last year reciprocated the affection by awarding Bradbury the honour of Commander of Arts and Letters. Bradbury wears his medal to almost every public event he attends.











On stage, Bradbury is flourishing at present. The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit recently had a successful, if short, revival. According to the LA Times, the play "wears well". Read their review here.

Replacing Suit at the Fremont Centre Theatre, Pasadena, is Tobias Anderson in The Illustrated Bradbury. This is a one-man show in which Anderson adopts the guise of the Illustrated Man and other Bradbury characters. Information about the play can be found here (click on the "pick a show" dropdown, and select "Ray Bradbury Presents").

Running in parallel with Anderson's show is Falling Upwards, Bradbury's play based on his Irish experiences. Bradbury claims this production is the best he has ever seen of any of his plays, and who would dare to disagree? Full details about this production (at the El Portal Theatre, North Hollywood) can be found at www.raybradburysfallingupward.com

Finally, the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts is nearly upon us. It's held in Florida every year, and is considered to be one of the leading academic events in the field. I'm pleased to have had a paper accepted, so I will be presenting "Ray Bradbury's Time Interventions", which looks at how Bradbury has made use of time in his fictions - time travel, youth vs age, encounters with the younger or older self, etc.

I was shocked to learn of the death of writer and director Michael Crichton. All the news stories I've seen have referred to him as "Jurassic Park creator Michael Crichton". Which is, of course, correct.

But he was also the creator of The Andromeda Strain, The (First) Great Train Robbery, Rising Sun, Congo, Airframe and lots of others. All of them high-concept, all of them told at breakneck speed, all of them meticulously researched, and many of them putting forward a concept or concern that would shortly afterwards become real news. (Only this week, journalists got all excited by the idea that we might clone a mouse that has been dead for sixteen years; the first step toward a Jurassic Park scenario.)

What I loved about Crichton was how he was able to create an air of authority in his fictions. The Andromeda Strain is thoroughly, academically referenced. It just so happens that the documents referenced are all made up.

He took it a step further in Congo, by not only making it all up, but by trying to make it as implausible as a Victorian adventure novel.

Many of his books were turned into films, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Adaptation is always a tricky business, but most of Crichton's novels were structured and paced like a movie. Where the adaptors followed his blueprint, they usually achieved a successful dramatisation. Where the adaptors thought they knew better, embarrassment would often result.

Congo. What were they thinking?

Crichton was a million miles from Ray Bradbury in style and working methods. Crichton's writing was undecorated, swift and transparent. Bradbury's is poetic, laying a strawberry window between reader and page. Crichton could turn out a novel in a couple of weeks. Bradbury focuses on short bursts of fiction, and has been known to agonise for years over his longer works.

But Crichton, like Bradbury, understood that the magical is what makes us remember a story or film. It may be the verisimilitude and documentary realism that made his books page turners, but it was the T. Rex that made us remember Jurassic Park, the Yul Brynner character on the rampage that we recall from Westworld, the people whose blood has turned to crystals that haunts us from The Andromeda Strain.

So maybe it is all right to remember Michael Crichton as "the creator of Jurassic Park", if we remember him for the magic of it.

Bits and/or Pieces

Halloween moves ever closer. It holds little personal interest for me in real life, but I appreciate a good Halloween depiction in literature or film. So, too, does this Guardian book blog, one of the few general Bradbury appreciations I have seen in the British press.

Out of sync with the season, I today received my copy of Summer Morning, Summer Night. This is the missing link between Dandelion Wine and its sequel Farewell Summer. Literally. Bradbury conceived of one large work, but back in the '50s decided to publish only half (DW). Just recently the second half (FS) was published, and as a follow up SM, SN is now available from Subterranean Press - but order soon, as it sounds like stocks will sell out.

Just over a half of SM, SN is material previously published in short story form. The remainder is material previously unpublished, mostly in the form of short fragments, episodes that somehow didn't fit into the text of either of the other two books. There are some longer stories, however, and I have enjoyed the tiny amount of the book I have read so far. However, it feels like a book that will only make sense to a completist, someone already familiar with both DW and FS.

Last weekend I saw the Catherine Wheels/National Theatre of Scotland production of Something Wicked This Way Comes. A splendid production of one of Bradbury's most awkward stage plays. If you get the chance to see this production, I highly recommend it. However, abandon your preconceptions of what SWTWC should be like, and be prepared for a fun, energetic and inventive piece of theatre. I hope to post a full review soon.

Welcome to Bradburyville

Bradburyville is a new town (for want of a better word, and no doubt there is a proper word for it) in Second Life. There were some opening events yesterday, albeit too late in the day for UK residents to enjoy, but the place remains open for you to wander around and explore. The landscape is dotted with familiar Bradbury places: a place to get dandelion wine, a carousel, a porch where you can just sit and swing. The most shocking element is Mr Electrico's electric chair. If you see it, think twice before sitting!

Second Life requires you to register and adopt a fictional identity. It also requires you to download the Second Life client, which is around 34MB.

I spent some time in there yesterday, but didn't have time to explore thoroughly. It was slightly deserted when I visited, but I did see someone I knew. Although, of course, he looked different, being an avatar.

The following link will take you there, and provides further instructions if you haven't a clue what I'm talking about!

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Bradburyville/129/127/24