One Year On...

As I was giving Bradburymedia a tidy up, I was quite shocked to discover that it's a whole year since I did any of my Lockdown Choices posts!

I started them during the 2020 lockdown, as a way of contributing something to the Bradbury centenary year - because many of the events planned or proposed for 2020 were cancelled or postponed. So I started working chronologically through Bradbury's books, giving a potted history of each one and passing on my recommendations of which stories are worthy of your time.

Looking back, I see that I managed eleven of these posts, all of which were adopted (with permission) by the official Ray Bradbury website, which is run by the Bradbury estate.

It was never my intention to stop at eleven; it's just what happened. Around that time I got swamped with university work, and when I emerged from that I was off and running with my Bradbury 100 podcast. Somehow, I never quite got back to continuing the lockdown book reviews. Maybe I'll pick it up again this summer...

I don't think I ever pulled all of the Lockdown Choices pages together in one place, so I'm going to make amends below. I have, by the way, now inserted my Bradbury 101 videos into the relevant pages, so everything ties together.

 

Phil's Lockdown Choices:

01: Dark Carnival (1947)

02: The Martian Chronicles (1950)

03: The Illustrated Man (1951)

04: The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

05: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

06: Switch on the Night (1955)

07: The October Country (1955)

08: Dandelion Wine (1957)

09: A Medicine for Melancholy/The Day It Rained Forever (1959)

10: The Small Assassin (1962)

11: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)

To be continued...?

Short Story Finder

One of the most useful features of my website is the Ray Bradbury Short Story Finder. It lets you find out which books contain any given story, and where each story made its first appearance.

I've just done an update - adding some missing (albeit obscure) late-career Bradbury books, including Summer Morning, Summer Night.

And I've extended the "Eller References" This is the unique numbering system devised by bibliographer/biographer Jonathan R. Eller: each story receives a two-part numeric code, where the first part denotes the year of first publication, and the second part indicates the publishing sequence within the year. Eller's system is used systematically in the book Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, and several years ago Jon very kindly gave his permission for me to use the same system here. What I've added today is some additional Eller References which extend beyond The Life of Fiction. 

I hope you continue to find the Short Story Finder useful! 

A Fresh Lick of Paint...

I wonder how many visitors to this site realise that there is more to it than the blog. Do you ever go to the sidebar?

You know, the sidebar:

It's just over there, on the right >>>>>>> 

Unless you're on a phone, in which case it might be hidden under the three dots somewhere...

Anyhoo, I've just re-done the sidebar to add direct links for my associated activities - the podcasts and the Youtube channel. And if you care to explore the Ray Bradbury Books section (for example) you will, I hope, see that I've updated the banner on all pages. At least, I think I have. But I've probably missed some pages.

 

 

If you spot anything missing, banner-wise, do please let me know in a comment.

What's that? Superficial, you say? Yes, I'm afraid all I've done is added a lick of paint. But the underlying cracks remain, watching to be patched-up another day...

Bradbury 101 - new episode: Fahrenheit 451

Time for another episode of my Youtube series Bradbury 101. 

We've now reached the year 1953, and the release of Ray Bradbury's first true novel, Fahrenheit 451. Except...

The first appearance of Fahrenheit was actually a collection rather than a novel!

Confused? You will be! Watch and learn below.

You can find out more about Fahrenheit 451 from my blog post on the book, here: https://bradburymedia.blogspot.com/2020/04/lockdown-choices-issue-5-fahrenheit-451.html

 

Bradbury 101 - new episode - The Golden Apples of the Sun

Here's another of my Bradbury 101 series, freshly released on Youtube.

This one explores Ray Bradbury's 1953 book The Golden Apples of the Sun, which was the first Bradbury book I ever encountered (in the mid-1970s). It's also the favourite of many Bradbury admirers that I've spoken to.

It has a blend of fantasy, science fiction and "realism" which places it apart from Breadbury's earlier books. And you could argue that this blend is what would characterise most of Bradbury's short story collections from this point forward. Viewed in this way, Golden Apples can be seen as a turning point in Bradbury's published works.

I hope you enjoy this. Let me know in the comments!

You can learn more about Golden Apples in my blog post from last year: https://bradburymedia.blogspot.com/2020/04/lockdown-choices-issue-4-golden-apples.html

Science Fiction 101 New Episode

My other podcast, Science Fiction 101 which I co-host with Colin Kuskie, has a new episode out today. There's a very, very brief, passing mention of Ray Bradbury, but most of the time we're talking about science fiction in general. News, a discussion of space and why it's an obsessively recurring motif in science fiction, and our usual round of suggestions and recommendations of what to read and what to watch.

You can find Science Fiction 101 by clicking right here.

Bradbury 100 - April 2021 update

I've produced another brief episode of my audio podcast Bradbury 100, intended to bring you up to date with some things in the Bradbury universe. Listen to the episode below, or through your podcast app.

Bradbury 100 · B100 - episode 20 - April 2021 update

 

Show Notes

My Bradbury 101 Youtube channel is here.

Orty and Sandy on Ray Bradbury & Comics, and Ray's Waukegan can be viewed here. 

Listen to Bradbury biographer Jon Eller on Ray and the FBI on the Dead Writer Drama podcast from American Writers Museum.

Listen to Bradbury Center director Jason Aukerman and RBEM's Patrick Mullins on the Nation of Writers podcast from American Writers Museum.

 

Bradbury (and others) versus John Huston

A well known part of Ray Bradbury lore is the time the author spent working on Moby Dick (1956) with Oscar-winning writer-director John Huston. Bradbury spent less than a year with Huston, yet that brief period had a lasting effect on the rest of Ray's life and career.

The screenplay credit on the film opened doors for him, enabling him to become a screenwriter who had freedom to choose which projects to devote his time to. The historical accident of Huston wanting to work in Ireland (where he had a home) led to Ray falling in love with Dublin and its people, some of whom would turn up as characters in the plays and stories he was inspired to write in the following decades. And the intense engagement with the text of Moby Dick itself led Bradbury to a fascination with the novel's mechanisms and symbolism, a fascination he had to work through for himself in his play, radio play, opera and novella Leviathan '99 - a space-age retelling of Herman Melville's book.

Eventually - about forty years after working with Huston - Bradbury felt compelled to pull together his recollections and his fantasies into a novel: Green Shadows, White Whale. The reader is left wondering how much of the novel to believe. On the one hand, it is a genuinely accurate reminiscence of some of his adventures with Huston, confirmed by third parties who were there at the time. But on the other, there are stories within - such as the ghostly "Banshee" - which can't be anything but the work of a master fantasy writer.

 

Bradbury isn't the only person who felt compelled to put their experiences with Huston on record...

Novelist Peter Viertel fictionalised his adventures in White Hunter, Black Heart, later filmed by Clint Eastwood. It can't be coincidence that the wording and rhythm of Bradbury's title Green Shadows, White Whale matches that of Viertel's.

 

 

Katharine Hepburn, who suffered through Huston's filming of The African Queen, wrote up her experiences in The Making of The African Queen. Bradbury reported that it was Hepburn's book which confirmed that there was a good story to tell of working with Huston.

 

 

But way back before anyone else was writing up accounts of time with Huston, there was Charles Hamblett. He was with Huston in the Canary Islands during the filming of some of the shipboard action of Moby Dick, and found the whole thing so bizarre that he had to write a humorous novel about the whole affair, The Crazy Kill.

 

 

Bradbury 101 - episode 4: The Illustrated Man

 I somehow found time to make another Bradbury 101 Youtube video. This time, it's about The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury's 1951 short story collection.

I've gone with another shock-tactic headline for the video: Ray Bradbury, Stuck in Science Fiction. This is because The Illustrated Man is the book which really landed Bradbury with the label "science fiction writer". Although he'd been writing SF from early in his career, he was pretty much done with the genre by 1951; much of his new fiction from this point was anything but science fiction. Think Dandelion Wine, the Moby Dick screenplay, Something Wicked This Way Comes, etc.

And yet, with two books of (arguably) SF in a row - The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man - he gained both a reputation and a label that he found hard to shake off.

Read more about the book here.

I hope you enjoy this quick run through of the Illustrated Man stories. Let me know if you'd like more of this type of thing!

Science Fiction 101 - episode 2

Just a quick note that the second episode of my non-Bradbury podcast dropped a few days ago. Science Fiction 101 is a general SF podcast in which Colin Kuskie and I review science fiction books, films, TV and anything else that crosses our radar.

You can pick up episode 2 through your podcast app, or via the Science Fiction 101 blog: https://101sf.blogspot.com/2021/03/its-about-time-episode-2-of-podcast.html