Bradbury in...Belgium!

I'm recently returned from Belgium, where I presented a paper at the "Science Fiction Across Media: Adaptation/Novelisation" conference. My paper, entitled "Adaptive Behaviours", was another in my series exploring ways in which Bradbury's prose fictions adapt to other media. This time I focused on the short story "A Sound of Thunder" and discussed key adaptations for TV and film, as well as various graphic adaptations. It was an elaboration of some ideas I first considered in this post.

Also presenting at the conference was Aristea Chryssohou of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who did an excellent analysis of Francois Truffaut's film version of Fahrenheit 451.

There were additional delights of being in Belgium, one of which was the opportunity to visit the iconic Atomium. Although this has no direct connection to Bradbury, there are certain thematic connections, which I hope to blog about soon.

Bradbury news

Author Alice Hoffman - writer of Practical Magic and The Story Sisters, among others - has written a short piece for NPR about Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. "I owe Ray Bradbury a huge debt, one that can never be repaid," she says. Read the article here (I originally linked here, but this link seems to have died.)



California Artists Radio Theatre has updated its website with some photos of the recent performance of Leviathan '99. The production was recorded for future release by CART. See photos of the cast - including William Shatner, Sean Astin, Norman Lloyd, Samantha Eggar, Walter Koenig - with Bradbury and the legendary radio producer Norman Corwin here.

Bradbury in...Bulgaria!

Bradbury's work is often written about it the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK. But he has a wide readership throughout the world. A remarkable insight into how Bradbury is perceived in Russia can be gleaned from friend Pavel's website, www.raybradbury.ru. I don't read Russian, but just clicking around the links is interesting, and if you have the patience to use an internet translation service, you can read some of the site in sort-of English.

Until today, I knew nothing of Bradbury's reception in Bulgaria. It hadn't even occurred to me that Bradbury would be known in that country. But Young Jedi's Holocron has this fascinating account of Bradbury's critical reception in that country, complete with cold-war era distortions of fact, such as the time that Bradbury's house was burned to the ground. (Don't worry, never happened. But someone in Bulgaria thought it did. Apparently.)

F451 Graphic Novel

News on a new graphic adaptation of Fahrenheit 451: artist Tim Hamilton has, with Bradbury's approval, been preparing this new version which will get its debut in Playboy, of all places. This isn't such a bizarre place, though; Bradbury's original book-burning tale first saw print in Hefner's adult magazine, as the short story "The Fireman".

Read about the publishing plans in this Publishers Weekly story, and read more in this profile of Tim Hamilton.

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:

More F451

It's been a good five years since the picture on the left was taken. It shows a meeting between Ray Bradbury and screenwriter-director Frank Darabont, when Darabont was delivering his screenplay for the proposed new film of Fahrenheit 451.

The wheels turn slowly in Hollywood, if they turn at all. IMDB stills lists Fahrenheit 451 as in development for 2010. The last news that came my way was a year ago, when Darabont announced with regret that he was looking for a leading man for the project, to replace Tom Hanks.

If you're wondering what all the fuss is about, the Mystery Man On Film blog has recently posted an excellent article about Bradbury's original novel, Truffaut's 1966 film adaptation, and Darabont's as yet unfilmed screenplay. Read it here.

I have some pages of my own on various incarnations of Fahrenheit 451: you can read about the origin of the book here, and Bradbury's own stage play adaptation (British premiere) here.

Meryl Streep reads F451!

Coming up later this month is a new initiative in New York, called Project 451. Designed to promote literacy, it's being launched at the 2009 Literature to Life Awards. Find out more at the event website and at the Project 451 website. Who thought we would ever watch Meryl Streep read from Ray Bradbury? Here she is:

Pick up a penguin...

Despite his long publishing history, only one of Ray Bradbury's titles has ever been released through Penguin, the distinguished British paperback imprint. That one title is The Day It Rained Forever, which is a variant of the US book A Medicine for Melancholy.

This is one of many Penguin SF titles documented in a new website devoted to the art of Penguin SF, put together by James Pardey. It looks an excellent resource, and I have already spent a few hours rambling through the contents.

The Day It Rained Forever is covered here - but don't limit yourself to just this one book!

Found on the Web

Found on the web:


This interesting description of the Ray Bradbury Theatre episode "The Town Where No One Got Off, which reveals that famed Disney animator Ward Kimball makes a cameo appearance in the episode prologue. This came as news to me! My own review of the episode, incidentally, can be found here.




This interesting interview with artist John Randall York. John frequents the official Bradbury message board, and has been known to post his Bradbury-inspired artwork on the board.

Time to confer...

I recently returned from Orlando, Florida, where I presented at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The conference theme was "Time and the Fantastic", and my paper was on Ray Bradbury's use of time.

Before writing the paper, I doodled a spider diagram containing as many Bradbury stories I could think of which had a significant, fantastical use of time. Every couple of days I would remember another story with a time theme and add to my arachnid scrawl.

From the doodle, I eventually chose to focus on four major recurring uses of time in Bradbury stories:

• SF-style time travel (as in "A Sound of Thunder" and "The Fox in the Forest"
• Time travel in service of wish-fulfillment (as in "The Kilimanjaro Device")
• Fantastic evocation of the past (as in "A Scent of Sarsaparilla")
• Encounters with the younger or older self (as in "A Touch of Petulance", and the stage play of Dandelion Wine

Of course, by choosing this topic I was opening one enormous can of worms...nearly every Bradbury story makes use of time in some fantastical way. However, it has given me plenty of material for future study and has already suggested further papers.

Speaking of which, I have another paper to present at "SF Across Media", a conference to be held at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Fortunately, the conference is in English - my Flemish isn't up to much!

In this paper, I will be looking at adaptations of "A Sound of Thunder" in various media.