(1) If, like me, you’re a fan who has no books for sale yet inexplicably loves knowing all the inside minutiae of the publishing business, don’t miss Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s explanation of eBook territorial sales rights at Whatever, and the charming series of confessions with which it concludes:

Does this sound like a lot of bullshit gobbledegook? Probably. Is it true? Absolutely. Did it happen because everyone rolled out of bed one morning and said “Let’s make global ebook retailing baroquely complicated, because annoying our customers is fun”? No. Does the book industry need to be rethinking how it handles this stuff? Yep. Is it? I think it’s starting to. Meanwhile, you wanted to know why–and that long explanation is the “why.”

(2) George R.R. Martin gets raked over the coals by Cracked (5 Awful Official Websites of People Who Should Know Better) for having a crappy website:

The site could only have been designed by Martin, or someone in his family, because if he’d hired literally anyone who has ever designed a website before, they would never have landed on this particular look. To the site’s credit, it’s not aggressively loud or bright, like a lot of other terrible websites, but it’s still unforgivably simple, and not in an elegant sort of way. More in a “Bullshit, I’ll bet you $500 I can design a fully functioning website in 12 minutes, just watch me” sort of way.

Taral says, “I guess there’s a lesson to be learned — if you’re going to be a household name, you have to keep up with fashions in web page design.  I suspect it’s not a lesson most of us need to learn anytime soon…” 

(3) Darth Vader was caught on video trying to argue his way out of a parking ticket at a street fair. Lamest use of The Force evah!

(4) Let the nostalgia flow as you watch Bob Shaw in this old 30-minute installment of “Celebration” aired in 1981 on Granada TV. The first half is documentary, the second a short time travel film, Encounter With a Madman, written by Shaw and starring the then unknown Jenny Eclair.

(5) One of the special features on Disc 2 of Arnold Kunert’s DVD Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection (2005) is a 20-minute roundtable discussion with Ray Bradbury, Harryhausen and Forry Ackerman videotaped at Clifton’s Cafeteria in the same Brown Room where they attended LASFL meetings in the late 1930s.

(6) James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors of The Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 discuss the value of awards in The Nebula Awards 2012: A Look Back And A Look Forward on Huffington Post —

Jim: Speaking from personal experience, the impact of a nomination on a new writer can be profound. It’s hard for any writer to know exactly how she is doing, once she starts selling regularly. Income doesn’t necessarily tell the story. Reviews are a crapshoot—are bad reviews worse than no reviews? Readers may or may not check in. And there are no promotions. Nobody gets to be Vice President of Slipstream or Project Manager for Space Opera or Director of the Zombie Division.

Yes, we have to believe in ourselves and know in our hearts that what we have to say is worth saying, but it helps when our colleagues offer some validation. Best-of-the-year editors certainly have this power, but they are individuals whose sensibilities are theirs alone. But when an organization of your colleagues proclaims to the world that you have written an elite story, you have to believe them. I think that helps the next time your curl your fingers over a keyboard.

Y’know, it’s been 29 years since my appearance in Nebula Award Stories Sixteen (an essay, “Whatever Weirdness Lingers”). Thanks for the gig, Jerry!

(7) STAR – San Diego helped prepare a tv/movie memorabilia exhibit for the San Diego County Fair. Look for it in “Area Fifty Fun” in the infield next to the tunnel on the west side of the fairgrounds. The SD County Fair runs through July 8.

[Thanks for these links goes out to John King Tarpinian, Taral Wayne, Michael Walsh and Andrew Porter.]

Here are 16 developments of interest to Ray Bradbury fans:

(1) Ray Bradbury reminisces about LASFS meetings in the Brown Room at Clifton’s Cafeteria in this YouTube video. Then Robert Clifton, owner and grandson of the founder, Clifford Clifton, guides viewers through the premises to the hallowed meeting room.

For those who are insatiably curious about this fanhistorical shrine, more old photos are posted on the Clifton’s Cafeteria website.

(2) See a video of Ray delivering his poem “If Only We Had Taller Been” at a JPL symposium as Arthur C. Clarke, journalist Walter Sullivan, and scientists Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray listen in. The poem, written to commemorate Mariner 9 Mars Orbiter mission in 1971, begins:

Short man. Large dream. I send my rockets forth
between my ears,
Hoping an inch of Will is worth a pound of years.
Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal Mall:
We’ve reached Alpha Centauri!
We’re tall, O God, we’re tall!

(3) The last piece by Ray to be published while he was still with us – “Take Me Home” in The New Yorker.

(4) The L.A. Times covers Musical works inspired by Ray Bradbury.

(5) Here what Bill Nye the science guy said about Ray’s passing.

(6) Bruce Sterling shows he truly understood The Space Age Prophet in an op-ed for the New York Times.

His pedigree was impeccable, though. He came from “Lassfuss,” the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, a primeval caldron of sci-fi geek culture, founded in 1934. In my own caldron of Austin, our literary mentor, Chad Oliver, came to us from Lassfuss. He told how he and Bradbury and the “Twilight Zone” screenwriter Charles Beaumont would hunt for all-night burger joints, talking sci-fi until dawn.

It sounded so wondrous that we never understood that we were hearing a hard-times story. This was Depression-era California, and the real Bradbury was displaced from the Midwest to Hollywood, like a Steinbeck Okie, one of countless thousands who went West and inadvertently created a big chunk of postwar culture.

(7) Letters of Note posted Ray’s letter telling what it felt like to write “The Fireman” (forerunner to Fahrenheit 451) in the UCLA library:

I moved into the typing room along with a bunch of students and my bag of dimes, which totaled $9.80, which I spent and created the 25,000 word version of “The Fireman” in nine days. How could I have written so many words so quickly? It was because of the library. All of my friends, all of my loved ones, were on the shelves above and shouted, yelled and shrieked at me to be creative.

(8) It’s easy to understand why Margaret Atwood, in her epic tribute for the Guardian, empathized with this characteristic of Ray’s:

He ducked classification and genre corrals as much as he could: as far as he was concerned he was a tale-teller, a writer of fiction, and as far as he was concerned the tales and the fiction did not need to have labels.

(9) What Daniel J. Flynn thinks is right (what else?) in The American Conservative:

Ray Bradbury is a pretty good reason to visit the library. There, America’s most accessible short-story writer will let you time-share without charge an amazing vanilla-ice-cream-colored suit with six Mexican-Americans; he will waive the price of admission to a fall fair where the carnies try to steal the youth from youths; and he will take you for free from the junkyard to Mars on a spare-parts ramshackle rocket.

(10) In Reason, Charles C. Johnson went farther, annointing Bradbury a libertarian in “Ray Bradbury: Enemy of the State” –

Bradbury, who died this week at the age of 91, was a man of the right, a detail sadly airbrushed out of most obituaries this week. Like the best science fiction writers, he imagined worlds and realms outside the grasp of government, where the focus was always on the people that populated them, not on the gizmos in their pockets.

(11) In reality there’s somehing for everyone in Ray’s fiction because political consistency was not one of his gifts, as Binoy Kampmark shows in Ray Bradbury’s World, an essay for Counterpunch.

When he is ventriloquising about worlds past or elsewhere, Bradbury echoes a suspicion of the existing one: we are unfit for the technology we produce. This is itself an engineered repudiation on Bradbury’s part, having himself been a previous follower of the technology cult.  Novelists are entitled to veer.

(12) The Telegraph’s Bradbury obituary shows why one of his best-known word pictures has become woven into the language:

“A Sound of Thunder”, Bradbury’s best, and possibly best-known, short story, imagines a “Time Safari” which offers hunters the chance to shoot dinosaurs. On their return, they discover that one of them has stepped on a butterfly, that the world has changed irrevocably, and that a tyrant has become president. The description of the dead butterfly falling “to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time” was credited with popularising the term “Butterfly Effect” in chaos theory, through a conflation with the meteorologist Ed Lorenz’s example of the potentially huge impact of the flapping of a seagull’s wings.

(13) CBS Sunday Morning aired Sunday Passage: Ray Bradbury (2:08) – “The late science fiction author Ray Bradbury wrote books that both predicted the future of technology and expanded the imagination of millions.”

(14) A copy of The Martian Chronicles made it to Mars even if its author didn’t:

The Planetary Society wanted to put a time capsule on the red planet for future human explorers and sought permission from Bradbury to include his futuristic novel on a mini-DVD containing Mars-themed literature, art and music, and the names of 250,000 Earthlings.

Soon after landing in 2008, Phoenix snapped a picture of its deck showing the disc next to an American flag. The spacecraft operated for five months before freezing to death.

(15) Dave Lowe drew “Goodbye Ray Bradbury” for Para Abnormal, The Comic.

(16) Bryant Arnold managed to inject a bit of humor into an otherwise mournful news story with his art for Sci-Fi Legend Ray Bradbury Dies (Cartoonaday.com.)

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian and Martin Morse Wooster who sent me most of these links.]