(1) Ray Bradbury was mentioned by Rachel Bloom on October 8th’s Late Late Show at about 25:50.

P.S. You can skip forward to the spot but they will NOT let you skip the commercials.

(2) In December, Big Finish will distribute an audio dramatization of Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”, starring Derek Jacobi and Hayley Atwell.

(3) Ray is mentioned in this KPCC radio piece about the reopening of Clifton’s Cafeteria.

Clifton’s inspired people like Ray Bradbury and Walt Disney who went there for the ambiance and for the food, but Clifford Clinton made sure that anyone could afford a meal at his restaurant. There were always affordable birthday cakes, Jell-O and a meat carving station that was part of serving Thanksgiving year round. Because goal wasn’t just to nourish your soul, but your stomach too… affordably of course.

In 2011 Clifton’s shut down. Bought by developer Andrew Meieran a year earlier, the hope was that it would only be closed for a few months.

Five years later it’s finally opening.

(4) Ray was a member of LASFS since about 1937, as was Robert Heinlein. That was when the club met at Clifton’s on Broadway. The newly reopened café has a corner booth on the 3rd floor dedicated to Ray. There is a family donated tchotchke on a shelf above the booth.

The LA Times took note of these facts in its reopening story.

10. The ghost of Ray Bradbury. Bradbury spent decades at Clifton’s, when he was broke and when he was not, holding court in a booth on the third floor. His corner booth has been lovingly restored, and his family is donating various Bradbury paraphernalia to the restaurant, so that it can fill the wooden shelves above his table.

(5) Bradbury spoke at Clifton’s in 2009 and was filmed for a documentary.

Legendary author Ray Bradbury describes what it was like when the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society met at Clifton’s Cafeteria in the 1930s. The room they met in is still there, and looks basically the same. This was produced for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2009, and I always liked what we came up with. Graphics, editing and music by the talented Mr. Dismukes.

 

(6) Mr. Sci-Fi visits two of the spacesuits used in The Martian and talks about that film, Robinsoe Crusoe on Mars and Ray Bradbury and The Martian Chronicles.

(7) Earlier this year Kent State University press issued h The New Ray Bradbury Review, No. 4 edited by Jonathan R. Eller.

Creative fragments set aside for a day that never came

Each previous The New Ray Bradbury Review, prepared and edited by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, examines the impact of Bradbury’s writings on American culture and his legacy as one of the master storytellers of his time. The late Ray Bradbury’s metaphor-rich imagination led to a prolific and highly influential career spanning seven decades, but it also left a decades-long field of deferred fragmentary fictions and story ideas that would remain unfulfilled creations. For Number 4, William F. Touponce, founding editor emeritus of the Review, has gathered and introduced fascinating examples of story ideas, brief story openings and endings, and extended story openings that will forever remain dreams deferred.

The fragments presented in this issue illustrate Bradbury’s progressive stages of creativity during story composition, and to that end some of the physical elements of presentation are preserved in layout. The selections are followed by a list of recent discoveries that supplement the comprehensive checklist of known fragments included in previous editions of the Review. Number 4 concludes with Jonathan Eller’s “Fragmentary Futures,” a survey of Bradbury’s surviving preliminary outlines and projected timetables for future books—tenuous documents that convey a sense of the instability lurking beneath Bradbury’s solid and enduring achievements as a masterful teller of tales.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for these stories.]