A Bradbury Centennial-and-a-Half

A roundup of Ray Bradbury links.

(1) PUBLIC RADIO. Morning Edition has clips from last month’s Read-A-Thon in “Marking The Centennial Of Author Ray Bradbury’s Birth”.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. Oh, I remember reading “The Illustrated Man” when I was a kid in school. NPR’s Petra Mayer reports on his legacy.

PETRA MAYER, BYLINE: Ray Bradbury is sometimes called the poet of science fiction. His words demand to be read aloud.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MARJORIE LIU: (Reading) He opened the bedroom door. It was like coming into the cold marble room of the mausoleum after the moon has set.

MAYER: That’s author and comics creator Marjorie Liu taking part in a massive online read-a-thon of Bradbury’s classic “Fahrenheit 451,” held to mark his hundredth birthday. This is the moment where Montag, the hero, finds his wife overdosed on sleeping pills.

(2) A HALF-CENTENNIAL. At the Soho Photo Gallery — “Elizabeth Nahum-Albright – I Saw it at Ray’s House”.  

I Saw it at Ray’s House is a photographic journey through more than 70 images that captures moments of magic and gentle decline in the house of Science Fiction giant, Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). Many of the photos were taken the year after he passed away, as books and objects that defined his seventy-year career were staged and packed for preservation. Some were taken while he still lived and wrote in the house; I had a unique and deeply personal connection to the author, allowing me unique access to the space where he lived for more than half a century. These photographs have become a study of a person who was deeply engaged in many aspects of American culture. They are the last photos of the house as it was when Bradbury occupied it, and together they offer points for reflection on the themes of collection, as well as what a person’s possessions say about who they were and what they valued. The project is a study in how we touch everyone we’re close to–– when we pass on we leave something behind, whether it be physical objects or memories that continue to live with those we cared about. 

(3) FEARSOME COMICS. “Seasons Of Terror Brings Stephen King and Ray Bradbury Comics”Bleeding Cool has the lowdown.

Seasons of Terror is a graphic anthology that features four stories adapted to comic books by Richard Chizmar. The stories are by Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Robert McCammon. Each story is illustrated by a different artist, Dennis Calero, Ray Fawkes, Francois Vaillancourt and Steve Wands.

(4) DON’T EXPECT TO READ IT. The new issue of The American Scholar has an unpublished Ray Bradbury story, “The Joke” – which you have to be a subscriber to read (so why am I linking to it?)

Although best known for his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury was also a prolific writer of short stories, having published his first while still a teenager. This previously unpublished story likely dates to 1950, the year The Martian Chronicles appeared. Bradbury brought a fertile imagination to bear on his works of fantasy, horror, and science fiction—some of the most popular of the last century. As his close friend and bibliographer Donn Albright remembers, that imagination kept firing even while the writer was asleep. “Ray woke in middle of the night,” Albright recalls, “and would write dreams down, then later go back and ‘finish’ them. It’s the case here and in many of his stories.” Bradbury, however, never quite finished “The Joke.” According to the scholar Jonathan Eller, the writer meant to compose one additional scene, in which the protagonist, a young writer named Charlie, meets his friend Hank at a bar, on the night of his 30th birthday. Bradbury sketched the scene out in three sentences, which we include here in italics. —Ed.

(5) DOGGING IT. Episode 6 of Jeffrey Kahan’s Mentors and Role Models Podcast has a Bradbury angle: “Phil Nichols and I talk Bradbury, Bloch, and Pink’s Hotdogs!”

Along the way they reference this video of Harlan Ellison reading.

(6) BRADBURY IN THE PULPS. The latest issue of The Pulpster features coverage of the Ray Bradbury centennial.

…It won’t be a regular edition. Think of it as THE PULPSTER ANNUAL. While not Sears Roebuck catalog thick like an AMAZING STORIES ANNUAL, number 29 of THE PULPSTER will be almost twice as large as last year’s edition, coming in at 84 pages plus covers.

And a lot of great content will be filling those pages!

THE PULPSTER has two major themes this year: the 100th anniversary of the birth of author Ray Bradbury, and the 100th anniversary of the debut of BLACK MASK.

(7) TRILOGY COMPLETED. Steven Paul Leiva reviews the third and final book in Jonathan R. Eller’s Bradbury biography: “With Bradbury Beyond Apollo A Clear-Eyed And Penetrating Bio Is Concluded”.

With the publication of Bradbury Beyond Apollo (University of Illinois Press), Jonathan R. Eller has completed his three-volume self-designated “biography of a mind” of the author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Dandelion Wine, and hundreds of published short stories. Eller began with Becoming Ray Bradbury in 2011, followed that up with Ray Bradbury Unbound in 2014, and it has been six long years for this conclusion to reach us. Although the book’s publication date of August 22, 2020, the centenary of Bradbury’s birth, is so appropriate, it is easy to forgive Eller. 

The obvious question then is, was it worth the wait? I suppose each reader must answer that for themselves, but it was for me.

… I have a particular affection for this third volume, as it includes the years I knew Bradbury as a colleague and friend from 1977 to the end of his life. Indeed, I come in as a minor character in Bradbury’s story when Eller writes about our work together on a film project (unfulfilled and unsatisfactory for us both) in 1982-83. And my organizing of a series of city-wide events celebrating Bradbury’s 90th birthday in 2010, Ray Bradbury Week in Los Angeles. But affection is not assessment, and in assessing this volume, I was struck not only by Eller’s compassionate if still objective eye on Bradbury but by just how fine a writer Eller is himself.

(8) LYRICAL BRADBURY TRIBUTE. Today’s roundup concludes with a Filer’s verse left as a comment in 2018.


By Peer

Now I feelpressure inside the mountain
I feel pressure, burning the peers
And I feel pressure, hollowing souls
And I feel pressure, filing the peer
And I hope you remember thee

Oh, should my pixels scroll
Then surely I’ll do the same
Confined in ticked boxes
We got too close to the Baen
Calling out Ray hold fast and we will
Watch the books burn on and on the martian side
Dandelion comes upon the wine

(With pressure from Ed Sheeran)


[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Dennis Howard, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories.]

3 thoughts on “A Bradbury Centennial-and-a-Half

  1. On many occasions when it was appropriate to read something aloud, I chose Ray Bradbury; more often than anybody else. The way his words worked touched me from the first time I touched a page containing his name.

    But I do remember a letter column in one of the pulps advising: “If you can’t think of anything else to write a letter about, your can always write “I love Ray Bradbury because…” or “I hate Ray Bradbury because…” in five hundred words or less.”

    From the perspective of now it seems strange that he was controversial before he was universal.

    I also remember respectable writers lamenting that he might choose to read his poetry as part of a presentation. I so treasure the sound of his voice in the long corridors of my memory entrancing every nuance to make the letters dance where on the page they could only lie in wait to excite surprise.

    And his kindness.

    When I first moved to Berkeley my brothers took me walking in the hills and the fog rolled in. We came to strange old houses and then a stair descending forever toward a dim glow. I was, in that moment, in “Dandelion Wine,” that terrifying walk down that stair in dim darkness, and the night was made for me out of his prose as much as the lack of light and the fog.

    Oh yes, I loved Ray from the moment I met him, and I still love him, for his words mean he will never die. And I thank the Gods that books are really, really, hard to burn.

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