Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 21, 2020

Penultimate Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. Ray Bradbury, born August 22 (tomorrow!), 1920, died June 5, 2012, 91 years old (or young, as he probably would have said). He had suffered a stroke in 1999, recovered some mobility, but he usually dictated his writing to one of his daughters for the next decade. On May 28, 2012, a week before he died, he wrote a short essay for the New Yorker’s “Sci Fi” issue which was published in the double issue of June 4 - June 11. The New Yorker, applying its usual misunderstanding and condescension of science fiction/fantasy writers, illustrated the essay with a painting of a skull on fire, a dark demonic image. Bradbury’s essay was about his love for his grandfather and a fire balloon they launched from the lawn in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1924. It is a remarkably gentle, deeply affectionate revelation of awe, transition, loss, and beauty. The grandfather died the next year. In a few spare words, his farewell as best as he could make it, Bradbury for one last time lit a pathway from a sense of wonder to an intimation of immortality. He explained one marker of this experience was his short story “The Fire Balloons,“ which was later incorporated first into The Illustrated Man and later into The Martian Chronicles. Thus once again, as he had consistently accomplished throughout his writing life, Bradbury brought his art around again to unity, to wholeness, to reconciliation. The essay was wasted on The New Yorker, but it was a graceful wave to a lifetime of hard work, his joy in that work, and to millions of readers around the world.

Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 16, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. After the small but significant success of Dark Carnival (1947), Ray Bradbury was slowly but steadily moving out of the 1-3 cent/word markets of the the pulps and the genre magazines. The year of his first book saw his third sale to Mademoiselle and his first sale to The New Yorker.. He still fired off crime stories and sf/fantasy stories as often as possible. He had married Marguerite McClure in 1947, and the pressure to make a living was stronger than ever. Within 5 years, however, his sales were steady to Collier's and McCall's and other "slicks." Did you know "The Veldt", still one of his most famous stories, was first published in magazine form in The Saturday Evening Post in 1952? Bradbury put together from such hard work another short story collection in 1951. He framed it as stories told in the tattoos of a carnival man, tattoos that moved and acted out the tales. The Illustrated Man had 18 stories, another powerful line-up, including "Rocket Man" (which Elton John honored with a song), "The Last Night of the World," and "Marionettes, Inc." Interestingly, Bradbury's frame of the illustrated man has often been dismissed as weak and artificial. If you ask readers, however, that image is the memory launch of delighted accounts of some of the stories. The critics say, that's just Bradbury stitching together unrelated stories. The readers say, the tattoos are testaments of the past, the present, and the future, just like the stories, they are the writer himself, don't you get it? As usual, I side with the readers. My paperback from 1972 with its brilliant uncredited cover (right image, the other is the first edition) has my penciled dots for wow-stories on 10 of the 18 stories, and again I remember the rest as well. i skimmed a number in preparation for this post, and I was struck by the stripped-down efficiency of many of the stories. Some are mostly dialogue. "George, I wish you'd look at the nursery," opens "The Veldt." This is not the lyrical, word-intoxicated Bradbury. This is the lean laconic Bradbury. Just 31 when this book was published. Great things yet to come.