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.

Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 15, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial Post. Now it is time to consider the essential Bradbury books in order — a week to go before his birthday on the 22nd. Dark Carnival was published in 1947 by Arkham House, the legendary publisher run by August Derleth, publisher of H.P. Lovecraft and other legends of dark fantasy. Most unusually and a testament to the rocketing career of Bradbury, it was republished in hardcover 8 years later, with the author having full license to revise and extend his debut collection from basement to attic, to use a metaphor that he himself would have liked. He threw out 12 stories and added 4 and revised others. He titled it October Country. For 65 years now it has not been out of print and is the third bestselling Bradbury title behind Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury refused for decades to have Dark Carnival reprinted, finally relenting to a special edition in 2001 — albeit even then with a new introduction and five new stories. Bradbury is sometimes accused of recycling stories many times over, but the way to properly understand his recasting and resetting is to think of an artist building a sand carving on the beach with best sand possible. Do you accuse the artist of recycling the sand? At any rate, October Country, because of its landmark fame and international influence, is forever Bradbury Country. Most of its stories have been dramatized many times over. Some have become so embedded in the cultural psyche that they are relayed as urban legends. ”The Jar,” “The Emissary,” “The Small Assassin,” “The Crowd,” “The Skeleton,” and, of course, “Homecoming” are among the best of the best, transcendent of categories or genre. In my venerable 1974 paperback I had put a pencil dot next to the stories that shivered me to the bone, stories that I knew I would remember, signals to a future me. I dotted 12 of the 19 stories. And I was right. I only have to read the first sentence, the first paragraph, and I shiver with delight and happy memory. And I still remember the other 7, too. For example, the first sentence of “The Small Assassin”: ”Just when the idea occurred to her that she was being murdered she could not tell.” October Country, indeed.

Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 14, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centenninal post. With the centennial day (August 22nd) a week away, it is time to address the cat in the room. Ray Bradbury loved cats. Cats figure in his fiction from the beginning to the end, the latter suggested in his collection, The Cat's Pajamas (2004). Bradbury had suffered a stroke in 1999. He recovered to be able to use a wheelchair and a walker, and he continued to visit sf/fantasy convention until 2009, but his writing became dictation to one daughter and arranging for collections of his rich trail of short stories. His favorite and longest-lasting author photo for his books was of him and his black cat in front of a bookcase. The dark calico in the final photos survived him. In his fiction cats were the closest he came to describing an alien intelligence, one independent of human standards and arbitrary in a human perspective only because so little understood. It is telling that cats often come out better in his stories than children do. Children often are without moral engagment and therefore possibly dangerous, as in "The Veldt" most famously. Cats, on the other hand, may take an interest, but they lack the personal taste for vengeance. Bradbury's most-often repeated quote on creativity used cats as an analogy, one understood by those of us who understand cats as equal companions rather than as pets: “That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”