The Los Angeles Times “Jacket Copy” blog posted a salute to Ray Bradbury on his 89th birthday:
It’s hard not to think of Ray Bradbury as a true Angeleno: He’s lived here for a full three-quarters of a century. But in fact the author of “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” was born in Illinois, 89 years ago today. Happy birthday, Mr. Bradbury!
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the link.]
The Crotchety Old Fan cracks wise about the latest literary manifesto before confessing that it gave him a novel idea:
So cool in fact that I’ve even started writing the first ever steampunk-greenpunk crossover fiction. Take a look: Revolt of the Plant People…
Crotchety, you’re a pretty funny guy!
The Anticipation membership breakdown was distributed to the staff. It shows 3,921 people present, 4,497 total memberships.
The FOLLE committee will be distilling these numbers into an official Worldcon attendance figure for the Long List. For example, the memberships for comps and stuffed animals will probably be dropped from the warm body total.
Anticipation had 159 fans take advantage of the Taster Membership policy, leaving within three hours of paying for a daily membership and getting a refund of all but $20.
See membership breakdown after the jump.
Kevin Standlee has posted a video of Anticipation’s former Worldcon chairs photo session on YouTube. Those attending spanned over 50 years of fanhistory, from Dave Kyle to Robbie Bourget.
Chaos Manor reminded readers today that Amazon sells the CD recording of Heinlein’s lecture at the Naval Academy for $12.95, if you want to personally experience that historic hour when the Dean of Science Fiction outlined his moral vision for the survival of the human race.
Heinlein delivered the James Forrestal Memorial Lecture to the Brigade of Midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy in April 1973. He spent the beginning of his lecture talking about freelance writing and the balance speaking on patriotism. A version appeared in Analog as a 5,800 word guest editorial titled “Channel Markers” in January 1974. Others took an excerpt from the latter portion of the lecture and published it under the title “The Pragmatics of Patriotism” (and it was later included in Expanded Universe.):
Why would anyone elect a career which is unappreciated, overworked, and underpaid? It can’t be just to wear a pretty uniform. There has to be a better reason.
As one drives through the bushveldt of East Africa it is easy to spot herds of baboons grazing on the ground. But not by looking at the ground. Instead you look up and spot the lookout, an adult male posted on a limb of a tree where he has a clear view all around him – which is why you can spot him; he has to be where he can see a leopard in time to give the alarm. On the ground a leopard can catch a baboon… but if a baboon is warned in time to reach the trees, he can out-climb a leopard. The lookout is a young male assigned to that duty and there he will stay, until the bull of the herd sends up another male to relieve him. Keep your eye on that baboon; we’ll be back to him.
Today, in the United States, it is popular among self-styled ‘intellectuals’ to sneer at patriotism. They seem to think that it is axiomatic that any civilized man is a pacifist, and they treat the military profession with contempt. ‘Warmongers’ – ‘Imperialists’ – ‘Hired killers in uniform’ – you have all heard such sneers and you will hear them again. One of their favorite quotations is: ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’
Reading this after so many years, I had a personal thought that I wish I could have been as effective as that baboon in the tree when I was calling out problems with recent Hugo rules changes. Instead, it seems to me the Worldcon was a picnic for leopards.
[Via Chaos Manor.]
Olly Klassen’s love for Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea drove him to collect souvenir pins, build model subs, and search for Nautilus patches, coins and paperweights.
He wasn’t anyone who was going to be satisfied with owning a copy (or three) of the movie that he could watch anytime. He also needed to have the perfect viewing environment.
Now Klassen has fulfilled his dream of living in a piece of Nemo’s Nautilus by creating a home theatre where he can sit surrounded by the steampunk décor that so fascinated him.
[Via James Hay.]
Poet and sf author Gene Van Troyer, 58, died July 17 of cancer.
Van Troyer worked as an English teacher in Japan. He served for a time as an assistant editor of Star*Line, newsletter of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.
With Grania Davis, he edited Speculative Japan: Outstanding Tales of Japanese Science Fiction and Fantasy, presenting stories by Japanese writers in English translation, a book launched at Nippon 2007.
He is survived by his wife Tomoko, daughter Miika, and sons Makato and Akito.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]
Every summer journalists write a few more “Where’s my jetpack?” articles that insist on answering rhetorical questions like “Why doesn’t our world look like Frank R. Paul’s covers for Amazing Stories?” But Brian Fies’ Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow represents the first time I’ve seen anybody get a whole novel out of the question:
Fies shows this world through the eyes of a father and son who age very slowly relative to the world around them. Buddy, the son, is about 8 when he and his father visit the 1939 World’s Fair and not too much older when they are building a bomb shelter in their basement in 1955. Fies took that poetic license so he could highlight the parallels between popular science and real life. “This 36 years of American history starts out with society being optimistic and maybe a little naïve about science and technology and ends with society being very pessimistic and cynical,” he said. “It occurred to me that sounded very much like the arc a child goes through from 8 to 19.”
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]
Some people distrust whatever the cool kids are into. But that’s almost never anything written by a man about to turn 89. Just the same, Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune says she feels guilty for liking graphic novels. It was hard for her not to let that keep her from praising the new version of Fahrenheit 451:
The new graphic version of “Fahrenheit 451” has helped sort out the contents of my soul. And I’m happy to report that I’m in the clear. I am quite certain that I’d be trumpeting the virtues of this work even if graphic novels weren’t on everybody’s hot list, even if a graphic novel weren’t as trendy an accessory as an Obama campaign button.
National Public Radio hasn’t been the least bit ambivalent about its love for the project. NPR aired a 4-minute story about it:
When Ray Bradbury was 15 years old, he saw images of books being burned in Hitler’s Germany.
“It killed my heart and killed my soul,” he says, “and the memory of Hitler burning the books caused me to sit down and write Fahrenheit 451.”
Then they ran a feature on the artist:
Rendered in a vividly noir manner by artist Tim Hamilton, a longtime Nickelodeon Magazine contributor and a founding member of the hip webcomic collective ACT-I-VATE.com, Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation adds to the claustrophobia of Bradbury’s original nightmare vision.
NPR is also the place to find a 5-page excerpt.
And they reminded listeners that Bradbury produced the original manuscript of Fahrenheit 451 on a typewriter in a basement at UCLA. NPR has posted Nina Gregory’s interview with Ray:
He told her about the $9.80 he spent — 10 cents per half hour — to rent a typewriter in 1951 so that he could hammer out the first draft of Fahrenheit 451.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the links.]
By John King Tarpinian: I’m taking an educated guess here and saying that more than one or two readers of File 770 are fans of Twilight Zone. If I am correct, then you have to go out and get the new copy of Dark Discoveries Magazine’s 50th Anniversary issue of Twilight Zone.
There are articles by William F. Nolan, Earl Hamner, Jr., Richard Matheson and articles about everybody else associated with the show…including Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont and Rod Serling.
I am proud to say that there are two photos of events that I organized — the three legends event which was, sadly, the last time Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen and Forrest J Ackerman were together. Also, George Clayton Johnson’s 80th birthday party.
At least three of the surviving writers for the Twilight Zone will be at Ray Bradbury’s birthday party this Saturday…and maybe a couple other names associated with the series.