New Bottles, Vintage Wine...

The long-running audio drama version of The Twilight Zone will shortly feature a dramatisation of "I Sing the Body Electric!", the only episode of the original TV series to be scripted by Ray Bradbury. According to the TZ Radio Drama blog, Dennis Etchison has written the new version to take into account not just the original episode, but some of Bradbury's ideas which didn't make it to screen.

"I Sing..." is actually one of the strangest items in Bradbury's back catalogue. The short story is quite well known - from the eponymous short story collection first published in 1969 - but not many people know that the story first saw light of day as the Twilight Zone episode, which Bradbury scripted c.1960. This puts "I Sing..." in the same category as The Halloween Tree and Something Wicked This Way Comes: a Bradbury media creation which only later became a literary text.


Here's an item to file under "wish I'd been there" heading: on 17 March in Fresno, California, there was a two-day symposium on Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The event tied in with the Big Read campaign. The event was moderated by writer and academic Howard V. Hendrix, who I met in 2008 at the Eaton Conference where we both presenting papers on Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Fresno seems quite keen on F451...


It looks as if the ghastly cover of The Stories of Ray Bradbury, in print in hardcover from Knopf since 1980, is soon to vanish, replaced by this new cover with the Everyman label. As far as I know, this is all that's changed about the book, apart from (possibly) a new introduction. The publisher's page for this new edition is here.

To tie in with the new edition, the Wall Street Journal has a new interview with Ray.

Spring Miscellanea

I've been away from the blog for a while, as I have been bogged down with writing. In February I turned in a paper for a book, a substantially re-written version of a paper I originally presented at the 2008 Eaton Conference at University of California, Riverside. It's about the Martian Chronicles story "And The Moon Be Still As Bright" in its various media incarnations. As part of my research, I thought I should go back to the original story, so I bought the 1948 issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories in which it appears. The book is likely to be called Chronicling Mars, and is being edited by George Slusser, Eric Rabkin and Howard V. Hendrix. I have no publication details just yet, but I expect that it will be released some time in 2010.

Immediately after finishing that paper, I started on another. This one is looking at images in selected Bradbury short stories. I feel the need to stop, and emphasise that I said IMAGES rather than IMAGERY. By which I mean that the paper looks at Bradbury's use of PICTURES such as photos, paintings and tattoos.

While I've been busy with that, a few Bradbury-related items have come to my attention which I haven't yet flagged up. So, by way of catching up with the backlog...

From Macmillan books comes a PDF teacher's guide to accompany the new graphic novel version of Fahrenheit 451. Just because Bradbury's novel has turned into a comic, it doesn't mean it can't still be used in the classroom!

I don't know what the provenance is of this next item, but it seems to be a transcript of a speech or presentation that Bradbury gave in 1969. It is held on the website of Caltech, but whether that means Bradbury delivered the presentation there I simply don't know. It has some nice photos of Ray in his ice-cream suit doing his inspirational speaker bit. I don't think it really contains anything I haven't read elsewhere, but it is clearly from the time of the first moon landing, so it has certain historical charm. See for yourself, here.

I noticed in the knew Knopf catalogue that there is a new edition of The Stories of Ray Bradbury. No new content (although this one has an introduction that I don't recall seeing in the original edition), but a new cover - not the best I have ever seen, but a bit more modern than the original design that seems to have remained in print since the 1980s. The Knopf catalogue is here, Bradbury is on page 135.

Finally, from Halloween 2007 comes LAWP Newsflash - a publication of the Los Angeles Writing Project. On page 3 is the story of one person's encounter with Ray Bradbury.

Merchandise

Apart from the limitless books, I never really associated "Ray Bradbury" with "merchandise". Thirty years ago, when the TV version of The Martian Chronicles was produced, there was some merchandise. The excellent blog Plaid Stallions has images of the full range of Martian figures!

Inspired by Ray?

If you look on YouTube or any of the other places where amateur film-makers can upload their work, you will find an enormous number of works inspired by or derived from Ray Bradbury's creations. It's nothing new: generations of schoolkids have created their own versions or variations of Bradbury's stories, it's just that it is now easier than ever to put these works into a public forum.

In the past, Bradbury has been asked whether it's permissible for amateurs to make films of his works. His reply has usually been along the lines of "it's okay to make a film, as you long as you don't do anything with it" - by which he means, feel free to flex your film-making muscles, but don't publish unless you've paid for publication rights to the underlying material.

Often the amateur works we find on the web are things made by students as coursework. These are often direct re-presentations of Bradbury's material, as in this piece found on Vimeo, which is essentially a reading of "Kaleidoscope" with added music and visuals.

Ray Bradbury's Kaleidoscope Abridged: Narration for BECA 230 and 231 from Geoff Norman on Vimeo.

The creator of the above, Geoff Norman, gives credit to Bradbury for the story and (on the original Vimeo page) gives an explanation of what we are watching and how it came about.

Another type of work often found is something which takes Bradbury's ideas as a springboard and either uses them as the basis of a new creation, or as a reference point for an homage. An example in this category is the short animation Between the Lines, found on Aniboom. It seems to be the work of a small team of people, and does not directly acknowledge Bradbury's work. However, it uses the same premise as Fahrenheit 451 and has a lead character named "Ray".

Film history - on the radio

From Brian Sibley comes news of an old but new radio series.

Old: it's from 1999. New: it's been revised and newly updated.

Starting on Tuesday 19th January at 10.30pm GMT on BBC Radio 2, David Puttnam's Century of Cinema is Lord Puttnam's and Brian's major series to mark one hundred years of cinema. I can't believe it's ten years since this was first broadcast - it seems like yesterday.

Some of the contributors/interviewees in the original programmes are now no longer with us, so we are fortunate that their testimony was captured while they were still around. The series will, apparently, bring us right up to date with new material to cover the last ten years.

The BBC information on the programme is here, and with any luck the shows will be available on the BBC iPlayer after broadcast. (Note for non-UK listeners: iPlayer audio content is available throughout the world!)

What has this to do with Ray Bradbury? Click on the Sibley tag below to find out about Brian's Bradbury connections!

"I am Herman Melville"

The US radio show and podcast Studio 360 recently ran an interview with Ray Bradbury in which he discusses his writing of the screenplay for Moby Dick. It's a tale Bradbury has told countless times, but this version - despite originating as something as simple as a phone interview - is Bradbury at his performative best. It's neatly packaged together with audio clips from the film's soundtrack. Listen to it here.

Kip Voytek's blog kip/bot/blog refers to this interview as an example of the importance of immersing yourself in something if you wish to become the master of it. Bradbury famously woke up one day and decided, "I am Herman Melville"; following which he was able to briskly complete the screenplay which he had been struggling with for many weeks. Read Voytek's article here.

My page about the making of Moby Dick is here, and I have other pages related to the film and screenplay here.

Free Pulps Online

Thanks to a tip-off on the excellent Marooned: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror books on Mars blog, I have been viewing some complete issues of old science fiction pulps magazines on the Internet Archive. These are magazines which have (allegedly) gone into the public domain due to non-renewal of US copyright in the past.

Of the magazines currently online (put there by one Gerard Arhus), there are two which contain Bradbury stories. Planet Stories volume 4 number 6 (spring 1950) contains the first publication of Ray Bradbury's story "Forever and the Earth". Planet Stories volume 4 number 8 (fall 1950) contains Bradbury's "Death Wish", perhaps better known under the variant title "Blue Bottle".

The full list of pulps uploaded by Arhus can be found here. My top tip is to use the "read online" option, as this is quicker than waiting for the PDF versions to download.

It's quite fascinating to see these stories in their original context. In a sense, it's an "accidental" context: Bradbury didn't write these stories to order, and didn't write them for this particular magazine; instead, he would write his stories for himself and then send them out to a range of publications. But it's worth bearing in mind that the garish covers and hokey stories by other writers that surrounded his stories were part of what created the label of "Ray Bradbury is a science fiction writer", a label which he fought many years to shake off. And a fight which continues today!

Winter Warmers

Over on the Bradbury message board, regular poster Doug Spaulding just drew my attention to this hilarious news story that puts a whole new spin on book-burning, Fahrenheit 451 style!

I can only think the old folks in question took inspiration from the ending of Truffaut's film version...

Writers' Encounters

Vincent Eaton has written of an early-career encounter with Ray Bradbury. The encounter itself doesn't sound too inspiring, but what Bradbury said seems to have stuck with him. Read all about it on Vincent's blog.

Screenwriting guru Lew Hunter mentions an encounter with Bradbury at a screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It's in this PDF document from Hunter's website.

Believe it or not

I bring you this item out of a devotion to completeness, and as a public service. If you are easily offended, look away now!

Ray Bradbury has certainly influenced people in a wide range of different art forms. They don't come more different than this: "ManWhoreDickPig" by a... [coughs] music artiste calling himself Ray Bradbury. Not for the fainthearted, either in its unique musical styling nor in its lyricism. Although I defy anyone to make out the lyrics without use of the "lyrics" tab.