Tag Archives: Ray Bradbury

Raising a Glass to Ray

Today as I write this is August 22. Ray Bradbury was born on this date in 1920. I’m not going to look at any of his stories. As I said on this year’s Lovecraft birthday post, I’ve been kind of busy.

But I did want to take a moment to acknowledge him and the impact his work has had on my life. Bradbury was one of the greatest short story writers the world has ever produced.  There are still a number of  his stories I’ve not read.

Yet.

Especially from the last couple of collections. I was busy trying to keep up with a toddler when they came out. I’m hoping to do a deeper dive later this year when things slow down. Until then, I’ll raise a glass tonight in his memory.

Singing the Body Electric

Let’s talk about cycles and rhythms of life, shall we? If you are fortunate to have enough stability in your life, then life will begin to develop cycles and rhythms. For example, it’s August. Summer classes are over, but the fall semester hasn’t started yet.

For a number of years now, I’ve read something by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) and posted about it on this date, August 22, in honor of his birth. The fact that the high temperatures for the last couple of days have been in the 70s (in Texas in August!!), making me think of fall and October and Bradbury. Continue reading

“Free Dirt” from Beaumont and Bradbury

Today, January 2, is the birthday of Charles Beaumont (1929-1967). Beaumont was one of the writers of the original Twilight Zone. The reason Rod Serling asked Beaumont to write for him can be easily seen in Beaumont’s work.

One of Beaumont’s mentors was Ray Bradbury. Bradbury wrote in the introduction to Best of Beaumont (1982) that he and Beaumont lived in the same part of Los Angeles and used to pass a cemetery that had a sign advertising FREE DIRT. Continue reading

Bradbury Birthday Bonus Blog

In addition to looking at Bradbury’s  short stories “The Illustrated Woman” and “The Illustrated Man” in the previous post, I wanted to look at a pair of stories that might not be familiar to many of you. Those stories are “The Pendulum” and “Pendulum”. The former was written by Bradbury alone; the latter in collaboration with Henry Hasse. These could be a bit of a challenge to track down, although “Pendulum” is currently in print in The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury. Continue reading

A Look at Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Woman”

Yes,  the title of this post says “woman”, not “man.” No, that’s not a typo. Most people who read this blog are familiar with The Illustrated Man, a short story collection in which the framing device is a tattooed man whose tattoos show the stories. That’s not what this post is about. Bradbury also wrote a short story titled “The Illustrated Man” which probably served as the inspiration for the framing device in the collection of the same name.

Patience, please. We’ll get there. Just not yet. Continue reading

To Ray, With Much Thanks

Today (August 22, 2020) marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ray Bradbury. If you’ll indulge a bit of nostalgia, I’m going to discuss the impact Ray had on my life.

It must have been the 6th grade, but it might have been the 5th. It’s been too many years now to be sure. One day in Mr. Thayer’s reading class, there was a guest waiting when we arrived from whatever class we’d been in before.

I don’t recall the gentleman’s name, but he was there to read to us. He told us was going to read a story by Ray Bradbury, who was a science fiction writer. Continue reading

Retro Hugos: Final Thoughts on the Short Stories

So just to recap, here is the shortlist in the short story category for the Retro Hugos:

  • The Wedge”, Isaac Asimov (Astounding Science Fiction 10/44)
  • I, Rocket”, Ray Bradbury (Amazing Stories 5/44)
  • And the Gods Laughed”, Fredric Brown (Planet Stories Spring ’44)
  • Desertion”, Clifford D. Simak (Astounding Science Fiction 11/44)
  • Huddling Place”, Clifford D. Simak (Astounding Science Fiction 7/44)
  • Far Centaurus”, A.E. van Vogt (Astounding Science Fiction 1/44)

Links are to the posts of the individual stories. While I enjoyed all of these stories and will probably reread them at some future date, I didn’t find them all equally good. This is simply my not so humble opinion; your mileage may vary.

“The Wedge” was the weakest of the stories here. In part, I think, that’s because it’s part of a bigger story arc. I suspect it’s on the final ballot in part due to the reputation of the Foundation series and the author. Ditto for the Bradbury minus the series angle. I could say the same about the two Simak stories as the Asimov except that these are in my mind the two strongest tales on the list.

As for the Brown and Van Vogt entries, they are both examples of their author’s best work at this length. I tend to favor the Brown a bit over the Van Vogt, but that might be because it was one of only two stories (the other being “I, Rocket”) that I hadn’t read before and was therefore fresher.

As for which which of the Simak I think was the strongest, that’s a tough call. I would probably go with “Huddling Place”, although I can easily convince myself that “Desertion” is the better of the two. Some I’m going to compromise and declare a tie.

And just a sidenote of possible interest.  DAW books began publishing a series of anthologies in somewhere around 1980 (I’m too lazy to look it up) entitled Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories. Each volume collected what Asimov , with the assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, considered the best stories of the year.  The first volume covered 1939, and the series ran for 24 volumes, with a 25th published by NESFA Press and edited by Robert Silverberg after Asimov’s death. The sixth volume covers 1944, the year of the current Retro Hugos.

That volume contains 13 stories, Eight of them are on the Retro Hugo ballot. One which isn’t is Leigh Brackett’s “The Veil of Astellar”, which should be on the novelette ballot. Don’t get me started. After the Retro Hugos have been awarded, I will probably reread the rest of the stories. I read this book in high school, and I don’t remember some of the stories.

I’ll start on the novellas I haven’t already covered in the next post. The story will be “Killdozer!” by Theodore Sturgeon. That story was revised for book publication, so I’m reading it in, you guessed it, The Great SF Stories 6,

Retro Hugos: “I, Rocket” by Ray Bradbury

“I, Rocket” first appeared in the May 1944 issue of Amazing Stories.  It is available in a replica edition.

The early 1940s were a productive time for Bradbury. He had a number of stories published in the science fiction pulps and in Weird Tales. Not all of these stories were reprinted in Bradbury’s collections during his lifetime. If you are interested in these stories, the Kent State University Press is slowly (and I mean slowly) publishing what is supposed to be an eight volume set of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition.  I came across a remaindered copy of the first volume at a Half Price Books a few years ago for a little under twenty bucks.  For Father’s Day this year, I bought myself the second and third volumes. The difference in price was nontrivial.

“I, Rocket” is in the first volume, although I read it in the collection Forever and the Earth, which was published by PS Publishing about 15 years ago. This year is the centennial of Bradbury’s birth, and I’ll be looking at some of these stories closer to his birthday.

But I digress. Let’s talk about “I, Rocket”. Continue reading

Christmas Ghosts: “The Wish” by Ray Bradbury

This Christmas ghosts post is going to be a little different. I’ve been traveling most of the day and don’t feel like writing much.  Fortunately, I don’t have to.

Sue Granquist, AKA Goth Chick at Black Gate, has done the heavy lifting for me.  You need to read her post. It contains a link to a PDF of this story. Ms. Granquist has written a powerful and moving account of what this story means to her. I can’t top it. I read this story back  in high school when I read Bradbury’s collection Long After Midnight. In the years since, I had forgotten the story entirely. It simply didn’t have a huge impact on me when I was fourteen (give or take a year). Now that my impending geezerdom is on the horizon, I can relate to it much better. Fortunately not yet as much as I probably will some day.

Go read it.  You can thank me later.

A New Series of Posts in Honor of Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury was born on this date, August 22, in 1920.  We lost him in 2012.  Bradbury was one of the first science fiction and fantasy writers I read.  A friend of our reading teacher came to class one day and read “The Screaming Woman” to us from the collection S is for Space.  I was hooked.

The public library in Wichita Falls had a number of Bradbury paperbacks in the children’s section, mostly the editions that had a drawing of Bradbury on the cover.  I’d seen them but didn’t really know what they were about.  After the man read the story, I checked out every one of them.  And when I read all of those, I tracked down the rest over the next few years.  I was fortunate because not only were they all in print at the time, but new editions were being published.  Those were the days.

A few weeks ago, something came across my twitter feed about the influence Henry Kuttner and Leigh Brackett had on Bradbury.  They both mentored  him, and Bradbury had written about his friendship with the two writers.

So I decided I could do a series of posts on those.  They’ll start sometime in the next month.  I’ve already got the first one planned.  I just need to reread the stories I’ll discuss in it and then write the post.  That will be after classes start next week.