BRADBURY, Ray (Raymond Douglas)

(1920-)

   US writer, born in Waukegan, Illinois; in 1934 his father, a power lineman who was having trouble gaining employment during the Depression, moved with the family to Los Angeles, but images of the small-town Midwest always remained important in RB's stories. RB discovered sf FANDOM in 1937, meeting Ray HARRYHAUSEN, Forrest J. ACKERMAN and Henry KUTTNER, and began publishing his FANZINE Futuria Fantasia in 1939. His first professional sale was "Pendulum" with Henry HASSE for Super Science Stories in Nov 1941. In that year he met a number of sf professionals, including Leigh BRACKETT, who generously coached him in writing techniques. He later collaborated with her, completing her "Lorelei of the Red Mist" (1946 Planet Stories).By 1943 RB's style was beginning to jell: poetic, evocative, consciously symbolic, with strong nostalgic elements and a leaning towards the macabre - his work has always been more FANTASY and HORROR than sf. Many of RB's early stories, mostly written 1943-7, were collected in his first book, Dark Carnival (coll 1947; cut 1948 UK; cut vt The Small Assassin 1962 UK); quite a few of them had originally appeared in WEIRD TALES. All but 4 of the stories in the later The October Country (coll 1955; 1956 UK edition drops 7 stories and adds "The Traveller") had already appeared in Dark Carnival, but many were revised for this new book. Although some of these stories had sf elements, they could more accurately be described as weird fiction. RB used occasional pseudonyms in those early years; in non-sf magazines he appeared as Edward Banks, William Elliott, D.R. Banat, Leonard Douglas and Leonard Spaulding, and he wrote one story, "Referent" (1948), in TWS under the house name Brett STERLING. Much of his early sf was colourful SPACE OPERA, and appeared in TWS and PLANET STORIES.One of these latter stories was "The Million Year Picnic" (1946). Later it was to appear in his second book, which remains RB's greatest work, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (coll of linked stories 1950; with "Usher II" cut and"The Fire Balloons"added, rev vt The Silver Locusts 1951 UK; with"The Wilderness" added as well, rev 1953 UK). This book, which could be regarded as an episodic novel, made RB's reputation. Almost at once he found a new market for short stories in the "slicks", magazines such as Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, McCall's and COLLIER'S WEEKLY. Of the more than 300 stories he has published since, only a handful originally appeared in SF MAGAZINES. This was one of the most significant breakthroughs into the general market made by any GENRE-SF writer.THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES is an amazing work. Its closely interwoven stories, linked by recurrent images and themes, tell of the repeated attempts by humans to colonize Mars, of the way they bring their old prejudices with them, and of their repeated, ambiguous meetings with the shape-changing Martians. Despite the sf scenario, there is no hard technology. The mood is of loneliness and nostalgia; a pensive regret suffuses the book. Colonists find, in "The Third Expedition", a perfect Midwest township waiting for them in the Martian desert; throughout the book appearance and reality slip, dreamlike, from the one to the other; desires and fantasy are reified but turn out to be tainted. At the beginning, in a typical RB image, the warmth of rocket jets brings a springlike thaw to the frozen Ohio landscape; at the end, human children look into the canal to see the Martians, and find them in their own reflections. All the RB themes that were later to be repeated, sometimes too often, find their earliest shapes here: the anti-technological bias, the celebration of simplicity and innocence as imaged in small-town life, the sense of loss as youth changes to adulthood, and the danger and attraction of masks, be they Hallowe'en, carnival or, as here, alien mimicry. The book was dramatized as a tv miniseries, The MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1980).For the next few years the evocative versatility of RB's imagery kept a freshness and an ebullience unspoiled by occasional overwriting; what later came to look like a too cosy heartland sentiment was generally redeemed by the precision and strangeness of its expression. RB's talents are very clear in the first of his few novels, FAHRENHEIT 451 (1951 Gal as "The Fireman"; with 2 short stories as coll 1953; most later editions omit the short stories; rev 1979 with coda; rev 1982 with afterword). In its DYSTOPIAN future, in which books are burned because ideas are dangerous, we follow the painful spiritual growth of its renegade hero, a book-burning "fireman" and secret reader who finally flees, pursued by a Mechanical Hound attuned to his body chemistry, to a pastoral society of book "memorizers". François Truffaut's interesting film version, FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966), has as much of Truffaut as of Bradbury.Two other books published as novels, neither of them sf, are Dandelion Wine (1950-57 various mags; fixup 1957), in which an adolescent life is recorded in terms of a single summer in a small town in a series of vignettes, and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), an episodic, rather heavily symbolic tale of GOTHIC transformations in a small town, possibly written in homage to Charles G. FINNEY's The Circus of Dr Lao (1935), which RB had already anthologized in The Circus of Dr Lao and other Improbable Stories (anth 1956), a collection of fantasies.RB's vintage years are normally thought to be 1946-55; his other short-story collections of that period are certainly superior to those he produced later. They began with The Illustrated Man (coll 1951; with 2 stories added and 4 deleted, rev 1952 UK), in which the tales are given a linking framework; they are all seen as magical tattoos which, springing from the body of the protagonist, become living stories. Three were filmed as The ILLUSTRATED MAN by Jack Smight in 1968. Later collections are The Golden Apples of the Sun (coll 1953; with 2 stories deleted 1953 UK) and A Medicine for Melancholy (coll 1959; vt with 4 stories removed and 5 added The Day it Rained Forever 1959 UK). These last two books were combined as Twice Twenty Two (omni 1966). No later RB collection approaches the above in quality. The other important collection of early stories, drawing from many of the books already listed, is The Vintage Bradbury (coll 1965), which has now been superseded by the massive retrospective The Stories of Ray Bradbury (coll 1980; UK paperback in 2 vols 1983).Yet in the late 1950s and 1960s RB's mainstream reputation continued to grow. He has appeared in well over 800 anthologies. In the USA, at least, he is regarded by many critics as a major literary talent. Sf as a genre can take little credit for this: RB's themes are traditionally US and, although early on he often chose to render them in sf imagery, it would be mistaken to see RB as basically an sf writer. He is, in effect, a fantasist, both whimsical and sombre, in an older, pastoral tradition. The high regard in which he is held can indeed be justified on the basis of a handful of works, with THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, FAHRENHEIT 451, and many stories from the late 1940s and the 1950s among them; it is here, too, that RB's small but very influential contribution to sf is located, which had much to do with sf's ceasing to be regarded as belonging to a genre ghetto.RB is a reasonably prolific writer, but some have found his work from 1960s onwards to be increasingly disappointing, especially his plays and poetry, which have often been described as both stiltedly rhetorical and oversentimental. On the other hand, some of his theatrical work has been well received (THEATRE). Those of his subsequent collections to include a substantial amount of previously uncollected work are The Machineries of Joy (coll 1964; with 1 story cut, 1964 UK), I Sing the Body Electric (coll 1969),Long After Midnight (coll 1976) and The Toynbee Convector (coll 1988); it was I Sing the Body Electric that received the most adverse criticism for its alleged soft-centredness.Just as it had come to seem, in the 1980s, that RB was content to become a grand old man (he won the NEBULA Grandmaster Award in 1989 for his lifetime achievements), his career took a new turn. Like many sf writers in the 1940s he had published some crime fiction in the mystery pulps - some collected in A Memory of Murder (coll 1984) - and now in the 1980s he turned to crime fiction again. Death is a Lonely Business (1985) and its sequel A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990) are his strongest work for many years. Some of the old density and power return in their almost surreal conflations of appearance and reality. They are of strong associational interest for readers of his sf and fantasy (deliberately returning to many of the key metaphors of his work in these fields, with the canals of Venice, Los Angeles, standing perhaps for those of Mars), and are good examples of RECURSIVE fiction, in that both are to a degree romans a clef, with recognizable sf characters in them, not least a 1950s version of RB himself. Ray HARRYHAUSEN, for example, appears thinly disguised in the second, which revolves around the film world.RB's work in film has been interesting. Two important early sf B-movies were loosely based on short stories by him: IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) and The BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953). Neither, however, has any perceptible Bradbury quality. By far his best screenplay was that for Moby Dick (1956); RB shared credit on this with John Huston. The 18min animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright (1962) was based on an RB story and screenplay, as was the made-for-tv film Picasso Summer (1972), based on RB's "In a Season of Calm Weather" (1957), on which he received a screenplay credit as Douglas Spaulding. Several Russian films (RUSSIA) have been based on Bradbury stories, including VEL'D (1987), based on "The Veldt" (1950). Tv adaptations of his work have appeared in The TWILGHT ZONE (both series) and, notably, on RAY BRADBURY THEATRE (1985-6). Many of RB's stories have also received COMIC-book adaptation. 16 can be found in two books: The Autumn People (graph coll 1965) and Tomorrow Midnight (graph coll 1966). (EC COMICS.)A touching symbol of the high regard in which many of RB's peers hold him is the interesting anthology of stories in Bradbury settings, The Bradbury Chronicles: Stories in Honor of Ray Bradbury (anth 1991), ed William F. NOLAN and Martin H. GREENBERG.

   PN

   Other works: Switch on the Night (1955), a juvenile; Sun and Shadow (1953 Reporter; 1957 chap); The Essence of Creative Writing (1962), nonfiction; R is for Rocket (coll 1962), all but 2 stories having appeared in earlier collections; The Anthem Sprinters, and Other Antics (coll 1963), short plays; The Pedestrian (1952 FSF; 1964 chap); The Day it Rained Forever: A Comedy in One Act (1966), a play, not to be confused with the UK collection of the same title; The Pedestrian: A Fantasy in One Act (1966), a play; S is for Space (coll 1966), all but 4 stories having appeared in earlier collections; Bloch and Bradbury (anth 1969; vt Fever Dream and Other Fantasies 1970 UK), collecting stories by RB and Robert BLOCH; Old Ahab's Friend, and Friend to Noah, Speak his Piece (1971), verse; The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and other Plays (coll 1972); Madrigals for the Space Age (coll 1972), words with music by Lalo Schifrin; The Halloween Tree (1972), juvenile; Zen and the Art of Writing (coll 1973; exp vt Zen in the Art of Writing 1990), nonfiction essays; When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed (coll 1973), collected verse; Ray Bradbury (coll 1975 UK), retrospective collection; Pillar of Fire, and Other Plays for Today, Tomorrow and Beyond Tomorrow (coll 1975), plays; Long After Midnight (coll 1976); Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns (coll 1977), verse; The Mummies of Guanajuato (1978), illustrated version with photos by Archie Lieberman of "The Next in Line" (1947);To Sing Strange Songs (coll 1979 UK); The Ghosts of Forever (coll 1981), a large-format illustrated book with essays, stories, verse; The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope (coll 1981), verse; The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury (coll 1982); Dinosaur Tales (coll 1983); Fahrenheit 451/The Illustrated Man/Dandelion Wine/The Golden Apples of the Sun/The Martian Chronicles (omni 1987 UK); Fever Dream (1948 Startling Stories; 1987 chap), juvenile illustrated by Darrel Anderson; Classic Stories 1 (coll 1990), reprint anthology containing all but 5 stories from The Golden Apples of the Sun and R is for Rocket; Classic Stories 2 (coll 1990), reprinting most of A Medicine for Melancholy and S is for Space, with 4 of the 5 stories omitted from Classic Stories 1; On Stage: A Chrestomathy of His Plays (coll 1991), 10 one-act plays, being effectively an omnibus of The Anthem Sprinters, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Pillar of Fire; a series of stories put into COMICS format: The Ray Bradbury Chronicles: Volume 1 (graph coll 1992), \#2 (graph coll 1992), \#3 (graph coll 1992), \#4 (graph coll 1993), \#5 (graph coll 1994),\#6 (graph coll 1994) and \#7 (graph coll 1994).As Editor: Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow (anth 1952).

   About the author: The Ray Bradbury Companion: A Life and Career History, Photolog, and Comprehensive Checklist of Writings (1975) by William F. Nolan, supplemented by Bradbury Bits \& Pieces: The Ray Bradbury Bibliography: 1974-1988 (1991) by Donn Albright; The Bradbury Chronicles (1977 chap) by George Edgar SLUSSER; Ray Bradbury (anth 1980) ed Martin H. Greenberg and J.D. OLANDER; Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie (1984) and Ray Bradbury (1989), both by William F. Touponce.

   See also: ALIENS; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ARKHAM HOUSE; ARTS; ASTEROIDS; CHILDREN IN SF; CLICHES; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; END OF THE WORLD; ESCHATOLOGY; FANZINE; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; INVASION; LIVING WORLDS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MARS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MESSIAHS; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; PASTORAL; POETRY; POLITICS; PSYCHOLOGY; RADIO; RADIO (USA); REINCARNATION; RELIGION; ROBOTS; ROCKETS; SEX; SPACE FLIGHT; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; TELEVISION; TERRAFORMING; THRILLING WONDER STORIES; TIME PARADOXES; TIME TRAVEL; TRANSPORTATION; VENUS.