Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Olympus Has Fallen/White House Down

 

I was recently reminded of the concept of Twin Films, that’s when two film studios come out with really similar movies in the same year, like in ‘97 when both Dante’s Peak and Volcano came out or ‘98 when Antz and A Bug’s Life came out. But what I didn’t realize is pretty much this happens at least once EVERY year going back to the 1950s and it happened more sporadically before that. The very first example is there were two versions of Ivanhoe that came out in 1913!

So anyway, I’m going to watch twin movies from any given year and give my opinion on which ones worked for me and which didn’t and why.

2013 Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down.

White House Down starring Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx is more of a light hearted action movie. Foxx plays the president and the humor comes from the buddy cop feel of the non-combat ready president running around with the action guy Tatum. One sequence that is really memorable is Tatum driving around in one of the president’s cars while under heavy fire and Foxx leaning out of the window and firing a rocket launcher and then dropping it. There is a lot of action, but it never feels heavy, it just feels fun.

Olympus Has Fallen is the opposite. It is so completely void of fun that it feels more like a funeral than a movie. And the action feels much more gratuitous. I felt like why am I watching this as a seemingly endless number of secret service agents in the White House are mowed down by the villains, or the cabinet members are tortured for their codes.  You don’t feel anything for any of the characters because you are never given any reason to. I liked the First Lady played by Ashley Judd but she dies at the beginning of the movie. But Gerard Butler as the secret service agent and Aaron Eckhart as the President are both really flat characters. Morgan Freeman does a great job as the Speaker of the House, but isn’t in it that much. The bright spot of the movie is some cool action sequences with fighter jets and helicopters around Washington D.C.

I am really surprised that Olympus Has Fallen has had two sequels over the years and White House Down hasn’t. Maybe I’m the only one that didn’t like the flat characters and mindless action.

Monday, February 5, 2024

Interview about Fritz Leiber

 

Science Fiction Book Club

Interview with David Read (Jan. 2024)

Our expert is David Read who created and runs LANKHMAR The Fritz Leiber Home Page http://lankhmar.co.uk/

David Hipschman: Any background on how his story I think it was called “Gonna Roll Dem Bones” came about? It was about playing craps with the devil or god. I came across it about 50 years ago or more.

 

Leiber began to write this story in the early sixties before revising it for Ellison’s Dangerous Visions.  He was not the best place in his life, both he and Jonquil (his wife) were drinking and using barbiturates and were living with his ageing mother. The three of them, monstrously distorted, were the prototypes for Joe, his wife and his mother.

Fritz was well aware he was dicing with death given the mixture of sleeping tablets and alcohol he was consuming. The phrase ‘Gonna roll the bones with death’ was something that used to rattle around inside his skull (as the dice rattle in the skull in the story).

It’s a story Fritz was very happy with, and it’s worth looking on YouTube where you can hear a recording of Fritz reading the story, which was released on vinyl. It was well received and got him a Nebula and Hugo award.

Fritz never played craps, but the story gave him a love for dice in the form of backgammon.

 

Tom Portegys: A couple of years ago I ran across a quirky movie called "The Hill and the Hole", made in 2019. I was surprised later to find that it was based on a Leiber story from 1942 published in Unknown Worlds. Co-directed and co-written by Bill Darmon. So weird to have a movie pop up more than half a century later than the story. Do you know anything about that?

I’ve not seen the film, it seems to be a very low budget film, and knowing the story well, it would have to be stretched somewhat to fit 80 mins, though it obviously shares the starting point of the surveyor.

The story itself is a cracker, one of his earlier tales, did indeed appear in Unknown Worlds and his first collection,
Night’s Black Agents.  It very much fits into his early period of horror stories, in that it used a modern setting, albeit a farm as opposed to a city.  I wonder if Fritz had read of gravity hills, where cars appear to roll uphill as a seed for the story.

Michael Compton: His father, Fritz Leiber, Sr, was a great actor of stage and film. Fritz, Jr, also did some acting. Wondering how his theatrical background influenced his writing.

Shakespeare was hugely influential on his writing, most obvious in stories like
The Big Time, No Great Magic and Four Ghosts in Hamlet, where theatre, and Shakesperean theatre itself, takes center stage.  The Big Time is essentially a play. A Spectre is Haunting Texas‘ title character is an actor from the moon. The Snow Women sees a theatrical troupe arrived at Fafhrd’s cold waste.

As Fritz Points out in ‘
The Stage in My Stories’, later stories such as the Secret Songs, 237 Talking Statues, are written as plays, with stage directions.
 
Leiber himself cites Shakespeare as one of his main influences. He also writes about Shakespeare in the form of essays, such as a great article on King Lear in
The Book of Fritz Leiber, which has the great line on Lear “…A victim of exhaustion, grief, and too much character development too late in life.”

 

I think it does influence his writing more generally, I can’t help thinking his sublime tale Lean Times in Lankhmar, feels like a Shakespearean morality tale, full of humour and large characters.

He writes with affection on growing up the son of actors, the backstage excitement, born into
“A world where he could watch fantasy being created… where the need for make believe is never questioned” 1

Fritz only worked and toured with his parents company for a short while (as Francis Lathrop) but enjoyed the backstage camaraderie and the chance to travel and see new places.

His flirtation with Hollywood (
Camille and The Great Garrick) was less rewarding, and Bazaar of the Bizarre  (one of the more famous Fafhrd and Mouser stories, where a shop vendor sells trash to the hoodwinked citizens of Lankhmar) was written with his dislike of Hollywood in mind .”The Shittier the Junk, the Higher the Price…” 1

 

Also of importance was the effect of a successful, competitive, and somewhat egotistical father had on Fritz. He grew in in a house increasingly surrounded by sculptures and painting of his father, by his father.

Upon Fritz learning chess, his father proceeded to learn it and beat him, which also happened with golf and tennis. His father literally built the house they lived in by hand. When Fritz started to be published, his father began to write stories too
“I shudder to think how I would have felt if he had sold one” 1

By the fifties and sixties Fritz became increasingly experimental and weaved Jungian elements into his fiction.  The effect of his relationship with his father, his animus, is amusingly, and poignantly skewered in
‘237 Talking Statues etc. published in 1963.

 

Gerald Greg Lutkenhaus: Was he a chess player? I enjoyed the “64 Square Madhouse” and “Midnight by the Morphy Watch”. As a chess player myself, he seems to know the game pretty well!

 

Fritz took chess very seriously and effectively stopped playing it early in his life, so it didn’t interfere with his writing.  Only later, when he had recovered from a bout of alcoholism did he allow himself to really start playing, studying, and entering tournaments.

Fritz became a very good chess player, winning the Santa Monica open in 1958, and his USCF mark was over 2000, rating him as expert, or in the top 3 or 4% of the USA.  He played for most of his life, only really stopping in the late sixties. In January 1961, Samuel Reshevsky the USA Grandmaster, gave a simultaneous exhibition against 44 opponents at the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club. Reshevsky won 33, drew 10, and only lost one game — to Fritz Leiber.

Chess appearances in his tales are too numerous to mention, but he did write several stories where chess was a central theme.

 

The 64 Square Madhouse (1962) sees the introduction of a chess machine, but is it just a Mechanical Turk, or something genuine?  This story would have been relevant to Fritz as in 1957 IBM introduced a chess computer. The story is both amusing and still relevant as it shows the tics and idiosyncrasies of chess players.

The Moriarty Gambit sees a young Sherlock take on his nemesis as at chess tournament in London

Knight to Move, is one of his Changewar stories, but uses a chess tournament as it’s setting.

Worth seeking out is The Dreams of Albert Moreland, a more horror, or cosmic horror themed tale about a chess player in New York who simply HAS to play chess…

You mentioned Midnight by The Morphy Watch, which is a great story, weaving fact and fiction into an irresistible mixture.  He also has fun with the name, Stirf Ritter. This could be seen as a version of his own name Fritz Reuter (Leiber), but he makes it more fun when one realises Ritter is Knight in German.

Fritz had stopped playing chess by the late sixties, as he fell into alcoholism again (for the last time) following the death of his wife Jonquil. He had moved to San Francisco when he entered his last tournament, which he refers to as a rather slapdash affair.  It took place at Paoli’s on Commercial Street, and many of the characters in Midnight by the Morphy Watch are taken from this tournament. He didn’t win it! The obsession of chess which began to take over Fritz again gave us this great story though.

One other obvious point of the importance of chess is that the cover of Night’s Black Agents is a Knight…

 

John Grayshaw: Michael Swanwick said, “Leiber was one of those Olympians whose work I admired, studied, and assiduously tried to emulate.” Who are some other writers that credit him as an influence? Is Leiber as widely read today as he used to be, and why?

Fritz was influential, I suspect his influence on writers is larger than his popularity with readers, almost like a cult pop band all the other bands admire.

Amongst the Lovercraft circle, his first introduction to writing, he was very highly rated, Lovecraft thought Leiber was a very good writer indeed.

I had a lovely email from Michael Moorcock many years ago saying how important Fritz had been, and one from Terry Pratchett saying how he included Bravd and the Weasel in the
Colour of Magic as a nod to Leiber, as Lankhmar was an obvious progenitor for Ankh-Morpork.

Neil Gaiman has written wonderful introductions to the Lankhmar tales, his introduction in particular for Swords of Lankhmar shows the joy and esteem in which he held him.

Michael Chabon is fulsome in his praise, and authors such as
C.J. Cherryh, Tanith Lee, George R.R. Martin and Roger Zelazny mention him as an influence.  Looking at much modern fantasy, I feel a lot have more to do with Leiber and Vance than the more vaunted Tolkien despite their over arching

epic fantasy themes.

 

If you read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre from 1981, King asks Harlan Ellison “who are the important writers in the fantasy field” and he responds Fritz Leiber.

Ellison mentioned Leiber in several of his forewards and maintains if he was struggling, he would read some of
Our Lady of Darkness to remind him how to write well.

“Fritz was the shining light toward which one strode” Harlan Ellison 2

In the horror field he was hugely influential, and Ramsey Campbell (influenced by Leiber himself) always champions stories like Smoke Ghost as being seminal in the evolution of the ghost story in the 20th century.

 

Fritz was most crucial in showing me where I wanted to take the field into areas where urban psychology and the spectral meet and merge. 3

 

John Grayshaw: Was Leiber ahead of his time as far as his portrayal of women? Michael Swanwick said “I’d have to mention the strong and convincing women of Conjure Wife, written at a time when men by and large wrote women who were neither.”

 

Fritz was largely brought up by women, his two Aunts, as his parents were travelling with their theatre company. The women Fritz did come to know, often other writers, were clearly women of considerable intelligence (as was his wife Jonquil).

More generally Fritz was a liberal, his politics were by US standards, left, and in his own way, Fritz grappled with the place women have in men’s lives, and the emergence of feminism.

I think one key point people can see in Leiber’s fiction is how happy he is to undercut masculinity and male superiority, and while he is happy to eroticise the female in novels and short stories, he is also happy to poke fun at the shallowness of these attitudes.

His classic a
Deskfull of Girls is well worth reading, as is Dr. Adams Garden of Evil which both follow this line in different ways.

His two bedhopping heroes Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser are put through the wringer by all their ex-lovers in ‘
Under the Thumbs of the Gods’, a very funny story (much like Lean Time in Lankhmar, I cannot imagine happening to any other established fantasy heroes).

Strong female characters always appeared in his Lankhmar tales stories. Hisvet dominates much of
Swords of Lankhmar, and Ahura is a key character in Adepts Gambit, by the time we reach Rime Ilse, Fafhrd and the Mouser settle down with partners.

The strongly feminist Joanna Russ obviously found Leiber palatable, as Fafhrd appears as one of Alyx’s lovers in ‘
Bluestocking’, whilst Alyx appears in Fritz’s The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar (surprise.. it’s not Fafhrd and the Mouser) and the afore mentioned ‘Thumbs’.

The Big Time and No Great Magic feature a strong female central character in Greta Forzane (apparently inspired by Judith Merrill), as does The Green Millenium.

Conjure Wife is endlessly interesting from a feminist point of view, and I should add I am not really qualified to comment on this, the summary of Conjure Wife, as ‘Man discovers his wife and all women are witches’ hugely over simplifies the novel.

Our hero Norman Saylor is invariably undercut and shown to be in error at numerous points throughout the novel.  Only when he shakes off the arrogance, that only he alone could have risen to the position he has, can he finally accept the influence his wife has had on his career and life and more importantly her own intrinsic value and importance.

John Grayshaw: Michael Swanwick said, “He (Leiber) may or may not be as someone has claimed, the man who brought the reality of urban landscapes to three genres. And his NY Times obituary said “The most interesting side of Leiber’s fiction is his pre-occupation with the threat of modern urban horror, city life and its web of terrors gradually corrupting the psyche.” Why did Leiber see cities this way and why did it often feature in his writing?

I think it is widely regarded that Fritz was crucial in the development of urban horror.  Fritz was obviously influenced by Lovecraft (though he never wrote in the Cthulhu Mythos til much later in life, for a while he was unimpressed with Derleth and the rigid description of the mythos), he also read Machen, Blackwood and James, so was well aware of the structure of a good ghost story.

I think the key difference is that whereas writers before tended to have an intrusion from some other force (the elder gods, the past or nature) for Leiber it was the very environment we lived in, the city (in his seminal Smoke Ghost and Out Lady of Darkness, or even oil, in The Black Gondolier). It is difficult to put oneself in the mind of a 1941 reader, but I suspect Smoke Ghost would have had the charge of William Gibson in 1984.  The gothic trappings are gone, as are the somewhat scholarly wrappings of James and Lovecraft in their different ways. Leiber gives us a grey, grimy modern Chicago, that is very much our own, even today the journey the character takes on the overground train looking over the rooftops is remarkably effective due it’s very relatability.

After a long absence Fritz went back to his own brand of quiet horror when he moved to San Fransisco, giving us Our Lady of Darkness, which in some ways allows Fritz’s manifestations from the city join into a structure with more than a hint of James about it.

 Later, stories included more self-analysis and more autobiography, The Ghost Light, The Button Moulder and strange terrifying tales akin to a David Lynch film like Horrible Imaginings which really communicates the horror of being alone, and old and vulnerable, in an increasingly noisy and busy city.

 

John Grayshaw: David Hartwell said about Leiber, “Early on he chose the fantasy fiction field as his home, and proceeded to transform it by creating, first, a new form of sword and sorcery fiction; second, by assisting in creating contemporary urban horror fiction; and third, by writing pivotal science fiction stories in the sf revolution in the early 50s.” Did Leiber prefer one genre over the others? What did he like about each of them?

I think overall, like many writers following the trends of pulp magazines, he wrote what he could get published.  His horror output dried up for many years and he submitted mostly speculative fiction and fantasy only arriving back in horror in the seventies, when the market had returned.

I think Fritz mainly loved writing, and he loved his science fiction, fantasy, and horror.  It is probably one of his problems that he didn’t stick to a genre or style, it probably would have helped his career if he had!

 

John Grayshaw: Leiber said in a 1973 interview “My sf stories have tended to be of the warning, prophetic, ‘If this goes on…’ variety, rather than the problem-solving sort. My Change-War stories, such as ‘The Big Time’ and ‘No Great Magic’ are essentially pessimistic since they picture an apparently pointless cosmic war.” Why did Leiber tell these kinds of stories? 

 

Well Fritz was a lifelong pacifist and was also deeply cynical about the way our countries are run and the way we are advertised at and consume! I always felt Fritz liked people and places, and this comes over in his stories, but was far more pessimistic about the forces around them. He also tended to write in some way as an outsider, or at least an observer who sees things from a counter view. The protagonist of Our Lady of Darkness sees the world too clearly as he reconnects following alcoholism, America the Beautiful is just seen by a visitor, a British one at that. In You’re All Alone, being outside the norm has possibilities that are wonderful, but invariably it is that darker side that is seeming to dominate.

A Spectre is Haunting Texas, despite its satire and humour, is pretty grim towards the end, and paints a dark picture of Texan toxic masculinity and racism. The Silver Eggheads, whilst much lighter in tone, speaks of the standardization, and from that intellectual deadening of people through the wordmills.

The Green Millenium I find a rich novel, it clearly starts from a place of McCarthyism but inverts male and female stereotypes and really has a dig at the culture that abounded in fifties America.

Much of his fiction through the fifties and sixties was speculative fiction, he drifted at times into more traditional SF (and Fantasy of course) but mostly he speculated on people and society and where they might go. With the views he had, which I always felt were firmly on the side of counterculture (see Bread Overhead or The Beat Generation) it is not surprising many of his stories ended up with a less than optimistic view of the future.

That said, The Wanderer, despite its cataclysmic events and deaths, is an optimistic novel. It positively breezes along, maybe it took the near destruction of Earth for Fritz to see what he loved about it!

I remember saying to Fritz’s son that his Father’s last story (Thrice the Brinded Cat) seemed very melancholy, and Justin told me he remembered speaking to his Father on the phone just as he had finished the tale, and how excited and happy he was!

So whatever demons Fritz had fluttering around, maybe writing was his exorcism!

John Grayshaw: Leiber’s obituary in the Independent said, “The friendship of the gullible Nordic Fafhrd with the trickster like Mouser provided the field with a convincing model of [friendship] and their adventures, hilarious and secular and sly, influenced generations of imitators.” Another place talked about how the heroes were allowed to grow as characters, get married, and grow older. What made Leiber return to the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series so often?

I think he really loved the characters, and of course they started with his friend Harry Fischer at university, so they really were a lifelong companion.  Fritz had enjoyed Fantasy, Dunsany, Cabell and Eddison, and of course R.E Howard, hence his allocation of the words Swords and Sorcery.

“Howardian fantasy-adventure is … a field which I feel more certain that ever should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story — and (quite incidentally) from the cloak-and-dagger (international espionage) story, too! The word sorcery implies something more and other than historical human witchcraft, so even the element of an alien-yet-human world background is hinted at. … At any rate, I’ll use sword-and-sorcery as a good popular catchphrase for the field” 4

There was some commercial reason at work here, as Fritz emerged from a bout of alcoholism, he had a great opportunity as Michael Moorcock explains:

Cele Goldsmith (later Lalli) is one of the great editors of science fantasy and, with Judith Merril, godmother to the American sf New Wave of the 1960s. She published all the Young Turks, most of them for the first time, in the magazines she edited … Lalli had a liking for what one of her contributors had christened ‘Sword and Sorcery’ and she commissioned a young John Jakes to write her a series of Conan-like adventures, Brak the Barabarian. She published an early fantasy of mine called ‘Earl Aubec and the Golem’, which she retitled ‘Master of Chaos’. She published the first Roger Zelazny story — and published many more. She published Thomas M. Disch and J. G. Ballard and Samuel R. Delany and all the exciting talents which helped create that wonderful sea-change of the 1960s. She also liked Philip K. Dick and Keith Laumer, but I think her favourite writer, whose talent stood so far above the majority of his more financially successful peers, was Fritz Leiber. 5

The stories proved popular, and Fritz was then offered the chance by Ace books to consolidate and expand he stories into the Swords collections we know.

As in his other work, Fritz was able to use all of his styles in these stories, with the stories often combining adventure, horror and humour.  He also got to enjoy world building in the form of Nehwon, in particular it’s various gods and guilds were a huge influence on fantasy gaming, and on Pratchett’s Small Gods!

The other real pleasure is the stories evolve, from the very pulpy style of rich adventure such as The Jewels in the Forest and Thieves’ House, through to more humourous and complex tales Fritz took hold of the world and give Nehwon a real sense of being.

As you mentioned the marriage, Fritz was able to use the characters themselves to slyly comment on the genre and age, which in these stories, catches up with everyone!

 

John Grayshaw: “Gather Darkness” charted the social and political events in a theocracy in which the state uses science to instill fear in a peasant like populace and thus control them. I consider it a classic dystopian work on the level of “1984” and “Brave New World.” Why isn’t this novel better known?

I suspect the same reason so much of Fritz’s work is relatively unknown, as I mentioned earlier his wide spread of writing probably didn’t help.  I think it is probably a bit too early in the genesis of SF too and isn’t really marketed as such. It predates Harrison’s Captive Universe and Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky which mine some of the ideas Fritz uses here.

Fritz of course had a brief period training as an Episcopal Priest, which certainly would have given him pause to think about organized religion.  Fritz of course was concerned that his lack of belief in God may present a handicap, but was told ‘Think of it as a social service’ 1

I do agree that it’s surprising it is not better known, it is very readable, it still has the rich weird tales flavour of his early writing whilst raising and discussing some serious issues.

There is also the other level to the story that the people pulling the strings are not religious fundamentalists.. but nominally rational scientists.

John Grayshaw: “The Big Time” follows the idea of the spiders and the snakes battling across time (the Changewar) trying to subvert the future for their own ends. Was this the first example of a time war? Is this Leiber’s best-known work? And why?

 

I would suggest by some distance the Swords series is his best-known work, but I agree The Big Time often appears when Fritz is discussed.  One somewhat sad reason for its appearance, is it is often flagged up in the kind of ‘How on earth did this get as Hugo’ type discussions.

It is so far outside the norm of SF, and with its play structure, it is easy to dismiss compare to other weighty tomes.

I have always loved the book, I like Greta, I think the idea of time that Fritz explores (and continued to explore in several stories, including a favourite of mine, When the Change Winds Blow)  is very interesting.  I love the place, which let’s be honest, or more honest than Fritz could be in 1958, is a brothel.  It’s bawdy, it’s loud, it’s soaked in alcohol. The characters may be writ large, but running through it are so many subtleties.  When the place is cut off from the world, cut off from time, and more importantly cut off from the ongoing war, in which people seem unsure which side they are on, then people come alive and the action starts.  The change winds may blow and blow away your life, but then so may a bomb. As I said earlier, Fritz was an avowed pacifist, so for his contemplation on war, and the moral weariness that comes with it, he created this strange, wonderful little novel.  Like any good play, at the end, perceptions have changed, truths have been told, but the stage remains the same.

I genuinely understand why people don’t like it, it’s very unusual and doesn’t really fit any normal novel type, but it’s a shame to dismiss it.

But lastly, as with all his work, it is the language. He just knows how to draw you in!

“Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn’t seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts—not the story-book kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it’s hard to believe they’ll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you’ve had hints of the Change War.”

I should also add its coda so to speak, No Great Magic is a more traditional tale, but a very thoughtful one at that.

John Grayshaw: In “The Wanderer,” an artificial planet materializes from hyperspace within earth's orbit, its gravitational field captures the moon and shatters it. Meanwhile, on Earth, the Wanderer's gravity well triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and tidal phenomena. This novel won the Hugo for Best Novel in 1964 and yet I don’t often hear about it today. How was it received at the time and why isn’t it better remembered today?

The Wanderer (with the caveat that it has cats, and alien cat sex) is a very straightforward read, featuring some great characters. It also prefigures the disaster films of the 1970s with it’s multiple viewpoints and narratives stretching over the novel.

These days, like The Big Time, it is a sadly maligned award winner. It is probably about as straight as Fritz did SF, it bubbles with ideas, language, dialogue and very enjoyable characters. That said, as someone who has read so much of his work, perhaps I am akin to Rasputin and immune to finding his stories and style unusual! I suspect for a lot of people expecting something akin to a Niven / Pournelle Footfall or Lucifer’s Hammer would be very disappointed!

John Grayshaw: What makes Leiber interesting from a critical perspective? What first drew you to his work?

My discovery I tend to think of it as an accident, but I suspect it was an accident waiting to happen.  As a young teen I was reading the genre fiction of the time, Larry Niven, Stephen King, David Eddings, Stephen Donaldson, Harry Harrison etc.  Whatever I could find in the bookshop on the market.

For some reason, on our bookshelf at home, was a copy of Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘Lost Worlds Vol II’ with its stunning Bruce Pennington cover. It was electric for me, exotic language and places suddenly flooded into my mind, truth be told, the other tales I had read, seemed so normal in comparison.

There were various writers on the book saying how good the book was, so I eagerly sought out Ray Bradbury, H P Lovecraft and, Fritz Leiber.

Bradbury was easy to find, as was Lovecraft, and I devoured their work, but Leiber, he was a little trickier.

To be fair I grew up in a provincial town, and Leiber was always a little rarer in the UK, but I eventually found a battered copy of the original red Ace Swords Against Death, and I was hooked.  As I slowly discovered more and more of Fritz’ s writing, the more I came to enjoy his work. Fritz is a lovely writer, and reading a lot of his work can make other writing seem very vanilla at times. He is also so very varied.  Like many people, especially as one grows older, you get less Catholic about your reading. I still love horror, SF and fantasy, but also crime, spy, humour and what might be called literature.  But reading Fritz, you never quite know where you will be taken.  His Lankhmar tales, his most approachable and popular works can still take you to strange places you would not expect to find in the genre.

It is a passion which has never faltered, and one of my proudest moments was supplying some rarer stories for John Pelan to include in a couple of the lovely collections he produced for Midnight House. Having my name in the credits of a Fritz Leiber book was all I could ever hope for!

On the question of what makes Leiber interesting critically, I am not best placed to answer, but Tom Staircar, and in particular Bruce Byfield and Benjamin Szumskyj have written fascinating observations on Leiber, as has Ramsey Campbell. What I would say is that his impact on fantasy and horror in particular are huge, SF, probably less so, as he wrote what in the old days might be called science fantasy, and the space bound SF that came to dominate was not a place where Fritz ventured.

 

John Grayshaw: What do you feel are Leiber’s most significant works? Do you have personal favorites of his work? And why?

For me, I think one has to look to Smoke Ghost, such a great horror story and easily sits alongside Lovecraft and James as a key story in 20th century horror development, to that I would also add Conjure Wife and his later Our Lady of Darkness. Those things alone make him a seminal horror writer.

The influence of his Swords series is difficult to underestimate and its impact on the world of roleplaying and Dungeons and Dragons cannot be overstated.

The much maligned Big Time is a great tale, and as Aldiss notes in Trillion Year Spree, it prefigures the New Wave in its approach to SF, and Fritz continued to be championed by New Wave writers who dismissed my of Leiber’s contemporaries who made their name with more traditional space operas.

A personal favourite is You’re All Alone / The Sinful Ones.

It kind of bridges his work as he moves from pulps to his later more self-analytical style, but the underlying premise, which he examined in the Big Engine, and some of the strange unsettling imagery and suggestions in it are so memorable and engaging.  Think of it akin to The Adjustment Bureau, but a 1000 times better.

 

John Grayshaw: What are some of Leiber’s works that you feel should be better known than they are?

Obviously the answer is all of it!  I am saddened that Leiber’s fantasy tales have been crowded out by Lord of the Rings and it’s lingering influence on epic fantasy, here I agree with Moorcock

“J. R. R. Tolkien was ‘an obscure academic’ who ‘published a peculiar trilogy with a William Morris/Anglo-Saxon ring to it [that] became the core of a somewhat unhealthy cult’, Leiber was, simply, ‘the best living Fantasy writer’.”

It is well worth reading Moorcock’s essay “Epic Pooh”. One has to have some sympathy with Moorcock’s world view, which I have, but I think it is difficult to argue about the inherent conservatism and lack of women in Lord of the Rings.  I read the Hobbit as a young teen and thoroughly enjoyed it, but never LOTR. In all honesty, after reading Leiber’s Swords series, which being a series of unconnected tales might seem slight, Lord of the Rings seemed stodgy, slow and strangely unable to articulate the true horrors it was grappling with. But I realise here I am the outlier, it has outsold and out influenced Fritz a thousand times over, but it still strikes me as odd!  At the very least his tales of Lankhmar are just such great fun and easy to read (on the whole).

John Grayshaw: Who were some of the writers Leiber grew up reading? 

Fritz himself always cites Shakespeare and Lovecraft, but he was clearly influenced by Robert Graves (Adepts Gambit was originally set in Rome, as were the fragments that became Swords of Lankhmar) and Thomas Mann, who he went to visit.  Cabell and Eddison were a clear influence on his Lankhmar tales, and Leiber also sites Ibsen.

He was well read in horror, from Poe, through Machen, Blackwood and James and he devoured the pulps, reading Doc Smith, van Vogt and of course Lovecraft and particular Clark Ashton Smith who eventually took a ‘pilgrimage’ to meet.

 

John Grayshaw: H.P. Lovecraft was an early mentor and role model for Leiber. How did this mentorship, and Lovecraft’s writing in general, influence Leiber?

Luckily, we can see the influence in Fritz Leiber and H.P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark which came out in 2005 and 2014’s Adepts Gambit, the Original Version. Lovecraft gave so much time and advice to his aspiring acolyte and it was advice Fritz largely took.  Their correspondence was intense, if sadly curtailed by Lovecraft’s death.  I think it is difficult to underestimate how much these interactions helped Fritz in focusing on becoming a professional writer. Lovecraft picks apart any inconsistencies, but he is also fulsome in his praise, which for a young writer who only recently had been excitedly reading Mountain of Madness at university, must have been a huge boost to his confidence.  That said, Fritz never really went down the Lovecraft Mythos route, the only real exception being The Terror from the Depths, which having abandoned it in 1937 after Lovecraft’s death, he wrote in 1975. There is also To Arkham and the Stars, which is not really a mythos story, so much as a gentle look at its origins when someone visits Arkham.

John Grayshaw: Who are some writers that were Leiber’s contemporaries that he enjoyed/admired?

 

“Heinlein is my Favorite SF writer by several lengths, with real goodies like Wells, [Oswald] Herbert Best, Joanna Russ, Stapledon, Sturgeon, and Kornbluth trailing. At least, judging by the number of times I reread books, Heinlein is way in the lead. I even found ‘I Will Fear No Evil’ better than practically everyone else in SF-though it is surely his poorest book. ”  7

Fritz wrote SF reviews for various publications and it is the one area I would like to look at more as it is a rich vein to mine as Fritz wrote so very many words on other authors.

He clearly didn’t rate L Ron Hubbard (Fritz being present at ‘The monstrous birth of Dianetics’ 6) and as early as 1951 was having a pop at him with Poor Superman.

John Grayshaw: Did Leiber have favorites of his own works?

Fritz would comment on a favourite story here and there, but Fritz was always very critical of his own work, and happy to play up the value of others.  He would always champion Harry Fischer as the originator of the Lankhmar tales, but the stories are all Fritz’s creation.  Reading his thoughts on his writing it is much more about why and how he wrote it, rather than it’s final value, or not.

He was though, very disappointed with Destiny Times Three, which he had to gut to guarantee a pulp serialisation, this was something that always disappointed him.

 

John Grayshaw: Who are some of the science fiction writers he had correspondence/friendships with?

He corresponded with Bloch, DeCamp and Anderson, Sheckley and Russ. What Fritz does mention was attending a convention for the first time in the late 40s was important as he suddenly found a connection to this whole group of other likeminded writers and a number of friendships were formed.

 

John Grayshaw: L Sprague de Camp told a story that at Discon II in 1974 he and Leiber, pretended to quarrel furiously, and fought a make-believe duel with sabers. Are there other stories about Leiber at conventions or otherwise corresponding/meeting with fans?

From all the articles and commentary I have read over the years, mainly that Fritz was a kind and generous guest, who entertained and indeed tolerated the strangeness of SF fandom with great joy and charm.

 

John Grayshaw: What are some of the most interesting things you’ve found in your research of Leiber?

I cannot really claim to have done academic research on Leiber, and whilst I have expressed my opinion in these answers, I fear I am only standing on the shoulder of giants, and I mention these in a few notes at the end!

 

John Grayshaw: Are any of Leiber’s works under option for movies or TV?


I have no real idea, Lankhmar adaptations were dangled under Fritz’s nose, but they finally went nowhere, though of all his work, it’s episodic nature would make them the most likely adaption.

Conjure Wife was filmed twice and a couple of his short stories were adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, but given the theatricality of his work it has always surprised me we never saw any adaptations on film or TV.

 

John Grayshaw: Did Leiber have any particular writing habits or routines he stuck with?

Fritz worked very hard to develop a routine, with daybooks full of notes and ideas and routine that saw him to try to write at least 500 words every day.  Most of all, he always wanted to improve, and I believe he worked hard to develop an outline before he started any writing.

 

John Grayshaw: What were some of Leiber’s hobbies other than writing?

I think it’s safe to say, writing dominated his life.  He did at times try acting, he could fence and of course at times dedicated a great deal of time to chess.  Cats remain a constant, and toward the end of his life he became enthused about astronomy.  Sadly, the hobby that took over his life was alcohol.

 

John Grayshaw: I heard that in the 70s Leiber lived in a very tiny apartment in a bad neighborhood. Was money an issue for him at this time? How did this influence his writing at the time?

That is a tricky one to answer, Fritz was not well off, but he would have had money. His room in Geary Street where he recovered and wrote after Jonquil’s death was certainly, from my reading, pretty grim. He had to write sitting on the bed, with his typewriter propped on a chair. The neighbourhood was not great and his friends were worried about him, and did intervene. The intervention included Harlan Ellison, who in a three-way conversation with Leiber and Clarke at a convention is unusually modest about it 8, and in another interview is audibly unable to talk for a few seconds recalling Fritz’s life during a time in the 70s.2 So eventually Fritz was moved to a better apartment.  That said, Fritz enjoyed the area, the textures and people he saw, he was never bored and the range of lives he saw worked their way into his fiction, which as he recovered from his grief became very productive and produced some of his best work.  I am of the opinion, that when he went to San Francisco to escape the grief, and on some levels, guilt of Jonquils death. He lived, for a while at least, like a drunken monk, seeing his reduced standard of life as part of his penance so to speak, and only when he fully emerged from this period was he able to reengage fully and start to look after himself again.

John Grayshaw: I’ve heard that royalty checks from TSR, Inc (the makers of Dungeons and Dragons who had licensed the mythos of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series) were enough to ensure that Leiber lived comfortably in his later years. Was this a big change from his life in that tiny apartment? 

The TSR checks, and the Ace editions of Swords certainly made Fritz final years financially comfortable, especially given that Fritz was not an extravagant man. He could work, travel, eat out and enjoy his health while it lasted. He remained productive, despite his increasingly deteriorating eyesight, til the very end of his life.  Bruce Byfield writes movingly of how when Fritz lay dying in his hospital bed (which for a strange set of reasons Bruce was witness to), during moments of coherence, Fritz said he wanted to stay to ’Write more stories…’ 9

 

John Grayshaw: What is Leiber’s legacy? Why was his work significant at the time? And why is it still important today?

I think in horror, whilst not having the position of James or Lovecraft, most critical studies would reference Leiber in moving horror into the more modern era.

For Fantasy, his legacy is huge, but somewhat hidden by Tolkien, who is seen as the defining fantasy author. Many of the tropes we rely on in picaresque fantasy come from the pulp introduction of fantasy, for which Fritz (along with Robert E. Howard) was critical the development of, and as I mentioned before, these tropes are even more evident in D&D which has Leiber stamped all over it.

His SF legacy is slight, partly is that the kind of speculative fiction he was critically appreciated for is not in vogue, and hasn’t been for some time, much as the short story seems to have faded from relevance.

Fritz’s significance at the time, and remember that was from 1940 to 1990, was that he never stood still, never churned out the same thing.  He was happy to comment on the state of the USA and its societal mores.  I think his interest in psychology is relevant, because in his writing it was never a lazy ‘Freudian motivation’.  Fritz was interested in what made him, and others, feel the way they did, and that gives great depth to his writing.

It is important today for the simple reason it was important then. The fact so many of today’s important writers viewed his as an inspiration, or even hero, means looking at his work, is looking at some of the best and most forward-thinking fiction being produced.

As a last comment, the reality is that without a franchise like LOTR, Dune, Blade Runner or Cthulhu, lots of important writers do not cut though.  I have no doubt if a Lankhmar series appears on Netflix there will be quite a few people suddenly talking about his ‘legacy’, and many more experts for you to choose from John!


Final Notes.

I have a few sources here incase people wish to read more. I have absorbed so much Fritz information over the years, but I have tried to check and mention where I get the thoughts and information. But it goes without saying that anyone wishing to know more about Fritz should seek out Bruce Byfield, S T Joshi, Benjamin Szumskyj or Ramsey Campbell.

1.       “Not so Much Disorder and Not so Early Sex: an Autobiographical Essay” The Ghost Light, 1984

2.       TalkCast 36 – Fritz Leiber Retrospective with Guest Harlan Ellison

3.        Weird Fiction review

4.       Ancalagon 1961

5.       ‘Introduction’, Ill Met In Lanhkmar 1995

6.       The Book of Fritz Leiber

7.        Speaking of Science Fiction: The Paul Walker Interviews 1978

8.       SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW #40

9.       https://brucebyfield.com/2007/07/05/the-last-days-of-fritz/

 

 

Monday, December 18, 2023

Interview About Ray Bradbury 2...

 

Science Fiction Book Club

Interview with Phil Nichols (October 2023)

Phil Nichols is the editor of the New Ray Bradbury Review, a consultant to the Ray Bradbury Center at Indiana University, and produces the Bradbury 100 podcast.

Kevin Kuhn: Do you know if Bradbury was ultimately happy his with the Ray Bradbury Theater TV program? His stories are so reliant on theme, atmosphere, and nostalgia which are all so hard to translate to a short television program.

Yes, he was generally very happy with it, because he had a lot of input into it. He not only wrote the scripts, but he was consulted throughout the production process. There were some instances where things didn’t work out the way he would have liked, resulting in episodes which he referred to as “clunkers”. He specifically named “The Dwarf” as one he wasn’t happy with, and at first he wasn’t pleased with “Black Ferris” – but with Ray’s input there were some changes made to that episode, which improved it. None of the episodes were filmed in the US, so there were some frustrations over staying in touch with the production team in the early days. Everything changed substantially when Tom Cotter came on board as a producer. He became Ray’s eyes and ears, as he travelled with the productions as they shifted from Canada to France to New Zealand – and he made sure that each script was filmable in whichever country or studio was slated to produce it.

Where things went wrong, it was usually in the shooting, and Ray wouldn’t know about this until he received the first cut of each episode. This was before broadband, so videotapes had to be shipped to Ray, so there was an inevitable delay. Fixing anything at that point would be costly, so Ray was always mindful to suggest fixes that could be made just by re-editing. But in the worst cases, he would point out the need to re-shoot.

Bill Rogers: Phil, did Bradbury write other stage plays in addition to ‘Leviathan ‘99’ and if so, are they available in a single collection? Thanks!

Bradbury wrote a lot of stage plays, especially one-act plays based on his stories. If you want a single collection, the closest you’ll find is the book Ray Bradbury On Stage: A Chrestomathy Of His Plays. It’s essentially two of his earlier play collections merged into one.

If you’re interested in longer works, he did adaptations of The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. These can all be obtained from Dramatic Publishing, each one in a separate book (www.dramaticpublishing.com)

Fahrenheit is arguably the best play, but it’s different than the book (not a problem for me, but some people want the play to be the same as the book). Dandelion Wine also differs from the book, by introducing a visitor to Green Town which allows the stories to bind together better. Martian Chronicles is very similar to the book, but condensed. Something Wicked is almost identical to the book – it’s one of Ray’s later plays, and by the time he wrote it he had convinced himself that what people wanted was a straightforward translation to the stage.

Damo Mac Choiligh: Am I right in my recollection that Bradbury withdrew 'Way up in the Air', the story about racism in the US, from later editions of 'The Martian Chronicles'? If this is true, was it really because he thought it was no longer relevant? I hope it's not true, as it would mean that he missed one of the profound messages of his own story, that racism is more than just discrimination, preconceived ideas or plain dislike, but about entitlement, systematic or embedded systems and aggression or violence.

Yes, it is true that he withdrew “Way in the Middle of the Air” himself. And yes, it’s because he thought it was no longer relevant – but probably not in the way that you’re thinking. (I know you didn’t say this, but some people think he took it out because it has some racist characters and language in it. But this isn’t the reason.)

For anyone who isn’t familiar with it, “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950) has all of the Black folks in the US heading off to Mars to get away from bigotry. By the mid-1970s, Ray thought that real life had overtaken this story, as he believed that the CAR had actually enabled black people to move away from the most toxically racist areas, and to settle elsewhere – essentially to drive away from the southern states and head to Chicago, New York, etc.

The great irony here is that Ray was very anti-car, because of the sheer number of people who get killed in road traffic accidents. And yet here he is, recognizing that the car, historically speaking, was a great social liberator.

Of course, he was over-exaggerating the impact of cheap cars, and overlooking the fact that the poorest people couldn’t even afford a car. But he truly believed that his story of Black people escaping to Mars was rendered obsolete by technology.

Kev Smith: I've been to Epcot and I've riden the spaceship earth ride. What drove Bradbury to develop the storyline for this?

He was commissioned to do it! He became personal friends with Walt Disney – apparently after bumping into him one day while out shopping – and it became apparent that Ray believed that Disneyland was some kind of perfect model of how real towns should be built. So it was natural that Disney would get him involved in the designs for Epcot. Prior to this, in the early 1960s, Ray had contributed ideas and scripts to Worlds Fairs, so he had some experience of devising and scripting visitor attractions. And he carried on with this line of work, contributing scripts and ideas to a number of rides, including one for Disneyland Paris.

Kev Smith: Bradbury chose his own epitaph – “Author of Fahrenheit 451.” Of all his work, why chose this one in particular?

He thought it was his most significant book, and therefore the one which would survive into the future long after his other works had been forgotten. This was due to several factors. First, it was far and away his best-selling book, so his royalty payments would have shown him how popular it was. Second, it was widely taught in schools and colleges – so that when Ray lectured in colleges, he would frequently get into conversation with students about it. Third, it received more critical attention than his other books. To this day, if you do a Google Scholar search for papers written about Bradbury’s works, you will find F451 outnumbers the other books by about ten to one.

I don’t know precisely when he settled on this as his epitaph, but he had the gravemarker prepared and reserved for his graveyard plot at the time of his wife’s funeral. Many years earlier, in an interview in 1967, Ray said something different, but with his tongue in his cheek:

 









Ray Bradbury, interviewed by Frank Filosa in 1967. From Bill Strickland (ed.), On Being A Writer, Writers Digest Books, 1989.

Kev Smith: Did Bradbury feel his love of magic influenced his literary works?

Yes, he did. For him, magic and carnivals were interconnected, and he saw much of his writing as being either ABOUT magic or as being inspired by magic. His very first book was called Dark Carnival, and was full of fantasy and horror stories, dark magical tales. The Illustrated Man was mostly a collection of science fiction stories, and yet he used the carnival framing story to bind it together, the story of a man with magical tattoos. And Something Wicked This Way Comes is built around carnivals and sideshows, an illustrated man, a “Mister Electrico” act, a “bullet trick” act, etc.

And in various interviews, he referred to himself as a magician. Meaning that he knew how to do some magic tricks (he’d practiced a magic act as a child), but also that he considered his writing to be a form of sleight of hand. And don’t forget his introduction to Ray Bradbury Theatre, where he refers to his cluttered office as “my magician’s toyshop”!

Kev Smith: Given he spent best part of a decade writing for a film magazine (Script), how much of a voice did Bradbury have in the movie adaptations? And did Bradbury feel the experience working on Script helped in any of the film adaptations?

Although he appeared in Script quite a few times, he didn’t actually spend much time writing for it. After his first contribution was accepted, he sent the editor a handful of other pieces, and these were slotted in as and when there was space. For the most part, his contributions weren’t particularly to do with film. So I don’t think his writing for Script had much impact on his involvement with film.

But that still leaves the question of how much voice did he have in the movie adaptations of his work. And the answer is: it depends! There are two basic situations he found himself in, and he treated them very differently:

The first is when he was contracted to work on a script. In these situations, he was generally very protective of his script, and would fight for control where necessary – but he was generally very open to suggestions, and allowed his scripts to “breathe”. This is what happened with his work in the 1960s on a proposed film version of The Martian Chronicles, where his engagement with producer/directors Alan Pakula and Robert Mulligan led to some very creative variations in the plotting of MC.

The second situation was where he had simply sold the rights to one of his books/stories, and wasn’t contracted to write the script. In this situation, he believed that he shouldn’t interfere, but should let the filmmakers do what they wanted/needed to do. A classic example here is The Illustrated Man, which he had no involvement with. One day he just happened to be walking across a movie studio (Warners?) and got invited in to see Rod Steiger being made up as the film’s title character. Ray didn’t even know that the film was being made at that point. He wasn’t involved, and didn’t want to be. Because the studio had bought the book outright and were doing it their way.

Kev Smith: Whilst most of Bradbury’s movies had critical acclaim, even winning Emma's and Peabody awards, Illustrated Man significantly bucked the trend. How did Bradbury see this and did it effect his later work?

I believe that correspondence from the time shows that Ray was initially fairly impressed with The Illustrated Man, but that various friends told him he should take a second look, as they didn’t think it was as good as he thought it was. Once he’d begun studying it, he was of the view that the framing narrative with the tattooed man was fine, but that the short stories were nearly all compromised in some way. He always said that the script was written by a real estate agent, not a script writer – but I’ve never been able to find out if that is true, or just a Bradbury joke.

The Illustrated Man got mixed reviews, but I suspect the strong imagery – which did genuinely reflect the character of Ray’s book – helped solidify the viewing public’s idea of what this Bradbury fellow must be about. (Always bear in mind that more people will have seen the movie than ever read the book!)

I’m not sure that he was particularly concerned about the success or failure of the film, but if it could be said to have affected his later work in any way, it would be in his determination to do those same stories better. So a couple of them did get a re-do in Ray Bradbury Theatre (“The long Rains” and “The Veldt”). And he also wrote his own Illustrated Man screenplay later on, but it wasn’t filmed.

Kev Smith: I remember reading that Bradbury was an avid reader. Who was his favourite author and which authors did he feel influenced him the most?

He mentioned different authors at different times. He loved the works of Willa Cather and Eudora Welty. He always said that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was his favourite story. From at least the 1960s onwards he said that he admired George Bernard Shaw (he liked the plays and Shaw’s essays). And in terms of direct influences on his writing, he specifically cited Poe, Hemingway, Wells, Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs – and I think these are probably the influences we most often notice across his body of work.

He also admired Steinbeck (an influence on The Martian Chronicles), Sherwood Anderson (an influence on MC and Dandelion Wine). And he commended the short stories of John Collier and Nigel Kneale.

Kev Smith: Bradbury wrote sci-fi books and stories, some with a heavy emphasis on technology and yet he was reportedly unsure about the Internet and even was resistant to publishing his work as ebooks. How did he juxtapose these diametrically opposing positions?

I put it down mainly to his being a bit of a curmudgeon in his later years! He was never the most scientific or technological of writers, and tended to concentrate on consequences rather than on technologies themselves. So in a story like “The Veldt” (which essentially “invents” virtual reality), he does enough to convince you that the technology might be possible, but he then uses it to basically satirise television, in an era when parents were starting to use the TV as a babysitter.

He never owned a computer, so he didn’t really understand what they could do. He saw early computers (or word processors) as glorified typewriters, and he didn’t have a need for such a thing, as he was a very fast and adept typist. I suspect a wordprocessor would only have slowed him down, and he would have hated that, as he believed that he needed to get his ideas out of his head an onto the page with as rapid a flow as possible. And when the internet came along, he famously said in an interview that we had “too many internets”!

Like many authors in the 1990s, he was concerned about piracy. He knew a number of his friends had had their works illegally spread across the internet, so he wanted nothing to do with that. And that is why he had an aversion to e-books.

What changed his mind was a simple conversation with his publisher (or editor) who explained that it was time to allow his books to be sold as e-books. Publishers’ contracts were including e-book options as standard for all writers, and he probably shouldn’t hold out against this, or he would lose a potentially lucrative revenue stream.

Damo Mac Choiligh: For anyone who came to Bradbury via his SF from the so-called golden age (which he left in the dust in terms of quality and depth of vision) how would you advise them to re-acquaint themselves with his later work. In other words, where should they start with his middle and later career, if that isn't a contradiction?

What a great question. For some readers, I think this may be an impossible task, because the golden age stuff they love almost certainly isn’t the stuff he was writing in the later period. Someone who admires, say, F451 and The Martian Chronicles just isn’t going to find much to interest them in the murder mystery novel Death is a Lonely Business.

I think the answer would be to point such readers to very specific short stories. I’m a great advocate of Ray’s 1980s story “The Toynbee Convector”, which is a science fiction story about the power of storytelling (or of prophecy). In the same collection that that story is in (The Toynbee Convector, 1988) there is another great story called “A Touch of Petulance”, about a man who meets his younger self. Each of these tales is a story which has echoes of the “golden age” Bradbury. Once you’ve got someone interested in those two stories, they might be willing to read the rest of the book!

And once they’ve experienced this late-career Bradbury, then they might be amenable to Death is a Lonely Business and its two sequels (A Graveyard for Lunatics and Let’s All Kill Constance).

Ed Newsom: To what extent did his real workspace look like that portrayed in Ray Bradbury Theater?

100% - because that WAS his actual workspace. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Ray kept an office in an office building in LA’s Wilshire Boulevard. And that’s the actual office you see on screen in the introductions to Ray Bradbury Theatre. No doubt they tidied it up for filming, but if you look for photos of Ray’s office from around this time, you’ll find it’s identical.

Later on, Ray gave up this office and returned to the basement office of his own house. All of the stuff from Wilshire Boulevard was crammed into this basement, and so at this point his office was even more cluttered than you ever saw it on TV. By the way, most of the contents of his basement office were gifted to the Ray Bradbury Center in Indianapolis after he died, and the Center has re-constructed the office to give visitors a sense of Ray’s working environment. (But the reconstruction is much tidier than the actual office ever was!)

Nestor Enrique Ramos: Was he afraid of the implications of the discovery of nuclear power either for war or civilian use?

Yes. In a newspaper article he wrote a few years after Hiroshima, he talked about the two terrible “machineries” from science fiction, the rocket and the bomb, and how they had been combined. He pointed out that science fiction had got there first, but that real life had caught up.



 



Bradbury, Los Angeles Times, 20 Jan 1960

Two of his best books use the fear of nuclear war: in The Martian Chronicles, colonists on Mars watch in horror as they see the Earth destroyed in a colossal nuclear war; and in Fahrenheit 451, the threat of nuclear war is ever present, with bombers flying overhead periodically, and war breaking out in the final chapter. In both books, there are a handful of survivors, who are faced with somehow rebuilding civilization.

But Ray was well aware that any technology can be used for good or evil. In 1962, he wrote “The atomic power which can cure our cancer can also broil us up in cauliflower clouds of radioactive chaff. […] The rocket that can lift us to the greatest freedom since Creation can also blow us to kingdom come” (Bradbury, “Cry the Cosmos”, Life magazine, 1962).

My own sense is that the Ray Bradbury who had grown up with the joyous idea of space travel was determined to redeem the rocket, to wrest it away from military uses, and promote its use as a potential saviour of humankind.

Damo Mac Choiligh: I understand Bradbury is on school curricula in the US and some other countries, which may be a good or a bad thing in terms of how younger folks react to him. Do you think children or younger people still like Bradbury's work? Do they still find him, so to speak?

I don’t have anything evidence-based on this, only my own gut feelings. On the one hand, Bradbury has been read by a couple of generations of readers at this point, and he remains a popular author. But I’ve always felt that schoolkids dislike anything they are “forced” to read. So although it’s good to expose a new generation to Ray’s work, it can easily backfire.

I’m also acutely aware that the current Bradbury audience is an aging (or aged!) audience. When I do Bradbury events, whether in the UK or in the US, the audience sways older rather than younger. The same with my podcast audience, which is skewed to an older demographic.

Personally, I’d like to see more young people reading Ray, but I’d prefer a different approach: let’s have some new films or TV shows based on Ray’s work, and then put out new tie-in editions of his books.

Jan van den Berg: I read "Dandelion Wine" a long time ago and was wondering at the time where he got the inspiration for this book.

Dandelion Wine is nearly all inspired by Ray’s real childhood in Waukegan, Illinois. While he fictionalized all of the characters, he was writing very much about the things that scared him or excited him when he was a child. The geography of “Green Town” has a very direct correspondence with that of the real-life Waukegan, including things like the shortcut to town through the Ravine (see my blog post, here: https://bradburymedia.blogspot.com/2006/10/green-town-illinois.html). Even the frightening, barely-glimpsed character of “the Lonely One” is inspired by a real-life petty criminal in Waukegan who went by that nickname (https://bradburymedia.blogspot.com/2009/09/revealed-lonely-one.html).

SFBC Member: Did Bradbury have advanced discussions with his great friend Ray Harryhausen about collaborating on the making of a movie for which he would have written the screenplay while Harryhausen would have produced the special effects?

Alas, no. They always talked about it having been their ambition to work together, but I know of no evidence of them taking serious steps towards it once they had each established their professional careers. They did stay in touch for decades, and would occasionally share suggestions, but nothing ever developed. In any case, I think they were both too busy. Bradbury was attached to a number of film projects in the late 1950s and early 1960s (most of which didn’t end up getting made), while at the same time Harryhausen was busily establishing his working partnership with producer Charles H. Schneer.

The last (fairly casual) attempt to work together was when Bradbury wanted to adapt his story “Tyrannosaurus Rex” for the Ray Bradbury Theatre TV series, and he suggested to his producers that Harryhausen might be the man to animate the creature. But the budget of the show was so incredibly low, that they would never have been able to afford Harryhausen. (Instead the work was done by a French animator. And looked terrible!)

I go into more detail of the two Rays in this blog post: https://bradburymedia.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-two-rays.html

Stacie Lara: Did Bradbury write Science Fiction? Which of his works, if any, would you consider to be SF?

Bradbury saw himself as someone who wrote science fiction, and fantasy, and horror and mystery stories, and… Of his major books, he believed that only Fahrenheit 451 was true science fiction – and his reasoning was based on his personal definition of science fiction: science fiction is possible, whereas fantasy is impossible. By this definition, The Martian Chronicles is fantasy, but F451 is science fiction.

I take a broader view of what counts as science fiction. For me, if a work of fiction makes intelligent use of science fictional settings and tropes, it’s science fiction. (This is the “if it walks like a duck” approach to defining the genre.) Using this definition, The Martian Chronicles is most definitely science fiction. So is F451. So is much of The Illustrated Man. So is Leviathan ’99. And so are maybe 75-100 of his short stories.

In 1962, Ray wrote “Any society where the family structure has been fragmentized and dispersed, where morality has been given a severe shake and brought to a re-focus in drive-in theatres as the result of one idea in motion, the automobile, is a science-fiction society. Any society where natural man, the pedestrian, becomes the intruder and unnatural man, encased in a steel shell, becomes his molester is a civilisation of science-fiction nightmares” (“Cry the Cosmos”, Life magazine, 1962). He appears to be referencing his short story “The Pedestrian” here, as well as Fahrenheit 451. Even though, by 1962, he wasn’t writing much new science fiction, he was still proud to engage in the rhetoric of science fiction, and was happy to serve as a spokesman for the field.

John Grayshaw: Can you expand on Bradbury’s quote about his college being the library and how he educated himself. He said, “I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college….I discovered that the library is the real school.” Because as a librarian that’s our dream to make that kind of a difference in people’s lives.

It’s literally true that Ray never went to college. And it’s true he spent a lot of time in libraries, because he loved books, and he was intensely curious about all sorts of subjects – but he was also from a fairly poor family, and therefore couldn’t afford to buy many books.

Put those elements together, and you get Bradbury the autodidact.

You get the best sense of what the library means to Ray when you read Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is partly set in the library of Green Town. That fictional library is modelled on the real Carnegie Library of Ray’s hometown, Waukegan, Illinois. Ray mainly details that library through the eyes and ears of his child protagonists, Jim and Will. You get a sense of the books talking to the kids, making sounds as they walk through the aisles of books. There’s a scene where the boys have to hide themselves among the books, and another where they join with Will’s father to research the “Autumn People” who have come to town to do evil over many years. The library, here, isn’t just a place filled with books. It’s a whole other world you can lose yourself in, full of tomes you can defend yourself with.

There’s a beautiful short story set in a library (again based on the Waukegan Carnegie library) in Ray’s collection Quicker Than The Eye: “Exchange”.

Because of Ray’s firm belief in the value of public libraries, he did a lot of work with libraries in and around Los Angeles (and elsewhere).

John Grayshaw: Neil Gaiman said a friend told him that when he was 12 he met Bradbury and that when Bradbury found out he wanted to be a writer he invited him to his office and spoke to him for half a day about how to become a writer. What other acts of kindness/charity/ and mentorship is Bradbury known for?

Ray was very generous with his time and advice. He tried to answer every fan letter he received. Who knows, he might have written more books if he hadn’t “wasted” so much time on those letters!

There are quite a few writers who considered Ray to be their mentor, including William F. Nolan, Richard Matheson, Greg Bear. I did a podcast episode where I interviewed Gregory Miller, one of Ray’s last mentees. Worth checking out if you haven’t already heard it. (https://bradburymedia.blogspot.com/2020/11/bradbury-100-episode-16.html)

John Grayshaw: Bradbury said “Those writers who merely dwell on despair without offering solutions, are preying mantises without jaws. I’m busy making babies and they’re telling me everyone is dead.“ What do you think Bradbury meant here and how can an author make sure they don’t merely dwell on despair?

I think it’s fairly clear that Ray’s own stories underwent a shift around the time that he got married and became a family man. His earliest stories of note were published in Weird Tales magazine (and collected in his first book, Dark Carnival), and many of these were very dark fantasies. Ray himself said that a story like “The October Game” is something he couldn’t and wouldn’t have written once he became a parent.

I think the key part of your quote isn’t “dwell on despair”, it’s “dwell on despair without offering solutions”. Ray knew enough about drama to know that you might have to take your hero to a dark place – but the key is to then rescue them, or provide hope for them.

Fahrenheit 451 is bleak. It’s a dystopia, after all. A loss of literacy, followed by the destruction of cities in a global nuclear war. But the last page or so of the book has his book people stop fleeing the city, and turning round to go back and rebuild. Similarly, The Martian Chronicles ends with the destruction of Earth and the survival of just a handful of colonists on Mars. That’s pretty grim. But the last chapter has one of the last families realise that they are the Martians now: it’s time to start anew, and rebuild.

So from Ray’s works we can take the lesson that it’s okay to show despair, but it’s probably best to provide answers.

John Grayshaw: Bradbury said “A writer writes about those things that he can’t do. His hang ups. Now I was afraid of the dark until I was twenty-one, twenty-two years old. Perhaps some of that is still in me. So, my first books are excursions in darkness, trying to make do with my fears. And out of these weaknesses I made strengths.” How did Bradbury channel this negative energy into something positive? And how can other writers do the same?

See previous answer!

Also:

I think Ray was a bit harsh on his younger self. Those early stories, inspired by his fears, are among his best precisely because he is actually expressing universal fears. We’re all afraid of the dark, of dying, of loss. As he matured, I think he became afraid of going to those dark places, so he was in a sense overcome by (a different) fear.

On a practical level, one of the things Ray did was move the focus of his stories to younger protagonists. Think Dandelion Wine, with its twelve-year-old protagonist who discovers what death is. Or Something Wicked with its twelve-year-old pair or protagonists who have to confront pure evil. Or The Halloween Tree, with… There’s something of a pattern here. He’s still taking those characters to some dark places, but he’s bringing them back up to the light. Being the narrator of their stories, he takes a parental distance to the events shown. Maybe this makes these stories more comforting to read. (Compared to the early Weird Tales stories, where he is usually narrating a tale about an adult male very similar to himself.)

John Grayshaw: Bradbury said “If you’re fortunate, you can lose your innocence in one way, but still retain a childlike vision,” How did Bradbury keep a childlike aspect in his writing?

I think the most obvious way he did this was by recalling his own childhood. Many of the situations and events of Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer and Something Wicked are based on actual memories (but obviously enhanced for dramatic effect). It’s probably significant that most of his stories set in childhood feature characters between ten and thirteen. He rarely if ever writes about older teens. But he did once write a story about a murderous baby (“The Small Assassin”).

Other than stories with younger protagonists, he also kept a childlike aspect in many of his other stories. There seems to be an underlying optimism to much of his later work, and much of his poetry is full of bright-eyed optimism for where we (as a species) can go in the future. Maybe these stories are wish fulfilment for him as an author. But I think he had a strong belief that we can talk ourselves into (or out of) despair. This is best expressed in his short story “The Toynbee Convector”, which is about a man who claims to have visited the future and seen a gloriously wonderful future world. People believe him, and end up creating such a world. And then it turns out he was lying the whole time; he never was a time-traveller. But given a credible view of a glorious future, we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

John Grayshaw: Speaking of maintaining that childhood. I’ve always been amused by this Bradbury quote, “I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.” Is there a story behind this quote?

I don’t think there is a particular story behind this quote, but Ray did often talk about a time in his childhood where he tore up his old comics, because his friends or family had convinced him that they were childish nonsense, and he was too old for that stuff. It was an action he regretted, and he spent the rest of his life surrounding himself with comics and toys, to show that he was right to have treasured those childhood fantasies.

John Grayshaw: Bradbury was said to have a “pomegranate mind.” What does this mean? And how did it make Bradbury more unique?

Well of course a pomegranate is a fruit that looks a bit like an apple - until you peel your way into it, and find it is bursting with hundred of little juicy seeds. So there’s your pomegranate mind: bursting with hundreds of tiny ideas!

As far as I know, it was Bradbury himself who talked about having such a mind – but he may not be the only person to have one!

One of the writing techniques that Ray firmly believed in was free-writing. This is where you sit at the keyboard and just let the ideas flow. Sometimes this will generate nonsense, but other times it will surprise the writer with ideas they didn’t even know they had. I think this is probably where the pomegranate is most appropriate for describing Ray.

He also had a little sign on his typewriter, which said “don’t think!” Meaning: don’t let the intellect (or anything else) get in the way of that free-flow of ideas.

(Whenever I talk about this approach of Ray’s, I always feel compelled to add a vital corollary. He never took those first drafts of free-flow writing as finished compositions. He did firmly believe in applying the intellect to his writing – but he did this in a second stage, that of editing and re-writing.)

John Grayshaw: Did Bradbury have favorite episodes from the Bradbury Theater?

He had quite a few favourites. I know he was fond of “The Haunting of the New”, and of the Martian Chronicles stories that he re-did (“Mars is Heaven”, “And The Moon Be Still As Bright”, for example; the 1980 Martian Chronicles miniseries had disappointed him, so he desperately wanted to rescue the source material by showing how to adapt them correctly.)

John Grayshaw: Bradbury said “I’d like to come back every 50 years and see how we can use certain technological advantages to our advantage, say in education” What sort of technological improvements do you think he imagined/expected?

He was fascinated by the idea of robots, and probably inspired by the animatronic Abraham Lincoln at Disneyland, he foresaw a time where we would learn from robot versions of Plato and Aristotle! In his fiction, of course, the robots Ray wrote about were ultra-real: think of the short stories “Marionettes, Inc” and “I Sing The Body Electric”. He was never into Asimovian nuts&bolts robots; he was only interested in robots which were indistinguishable from real people. And let’s not forget the apparently ludicrous “mechanical hound” from Fahrenheit 451 – which is now rendered highly plausible by the real life robotic “dogs” made by Boston Dynamics!

Similarly, he imagined virtual reality to be a part of our future – see “The Veldt”.

And he very much believed in the Disney method of education: of producing educational but entertaining visitor attractions. When he worked on these, he concerned himself only with the story that he wanted to tell, and left it to engineers (or Disney’s “imagineers”) to find a way of executing them. Not many people know that he worked with Douglas Trumbull on a couple of ride concepts. Although these didn’t come to fruition, like all of Trumbull’s projects these would have been executed with cutting edge technology.

John Grayshaw: What did Bradbury mean by “It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars, if we’re stupid?” How did Bradbury believe we could protect future generations from stupidity?

This all goes back to his belief that everyone needs to educate themselves. Don’t just stop learning because you’ve finished school. He clearly believed that libraries – free, public ones – were key to this, as they take away barriers to learning and curiosity. He also believed that literacy was vital, for without the ability to read, you can’t educate yourself.

The bit about landing on Mars reflects his firm belief that we should (or must) move out from Earth into the Solar System.

John Grayshaw: Bradbury said in his Coda to Fahrenheit 451, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” Today there is a trend of so-called well-intentioned censorship where stories with “problematic language” are being edited? How would Bradbury have combatted this?

Ray would have resisted any attempt at censorship, I’m certain. When he discovered cases where his own books had been tampered with, he was livid, and insisted that the text be reinstated.

I think it’s clear from Fahrenheit 451 that the value of books lies not so much in their information content, but in the way they allow intellects to connect across vast gulfs of space and time. This is why Fahrenheit has so many quotations in it. I don’t think Ray ever said this, but if you went through the books from the past and removed the “problematic language”, you would sever that vital connection.

John Grayshaw: Did he have a particular favorite among his stories?

I don’t know that he had an absolute favourite, but he often referred to Something Wicked as the book that most moved him – because he discovered (many years after writing it) that he had been writing about his own father.

John Grayshaw: Were there any science fiction writers he had correspondence/friendships with?

Yes, lots. He knew all the major SF authors of his lifetime. Robert Heinlein was one of his early mentors, as were Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, and Catherine L. Moore. He in turn mentored Richard Matheson, William F Nolan, George Clayton Johnson, Greg Bear.  And he was good friends with Charles Beaumont, Harlan Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, Gene Roddenberry, … the list goes on and on. Just about the only writer he didn’t get on with was Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame, although they started out on good terms.

John Grayshaw: Are there any examples of Bradbury corresponding/meeting with fans?

Every single person I know who ever wrote Bradbury a fan letter got a reply. And rarely were these form letters. He usually wrote a personalized reply. There’s a beautiful correspondence between British writer Brian Sibley which has been quite widely published, where Sibley (who was just a 24-year-old fan at the time) innocently asked Ray about Disney’s animatronics, and Ray wrote back with a long letter. (Brian and Ray became good friends. That initial correspondence is detailed here: https://briansibleysblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/farewell-to-martian-chronicler.html)

John Grayshaw: What are some of the most interesting/surprising things you’ve learned about Bradbury over the years?

The main one has got to be the sheer number of famous people Ray interacted with. It’s a real joy to discover that he wrote film scripts for Carol Reed (director of The Third Man). And plays for Charles Laughton. And met the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and considered the actress Bo Derek among his best friends, and knew and corresponded with Fellini, Kurosawa, Christopher Lee, Katharine Hepburn, Carl Sagan,… the list goes on and on. This again relates to his “pomegranate mind”: he was interested in every subject under the sun. And it also relates to his love of receiving fan letters: because he was a person who wrote fan letters to famous people, and was overjoyed when he got replies from them.

The other is that Ray, indirectly, is responsible for the modern shopping mall! For a time in the 1980s, he worked with the famous architect Jon Jerde on conceptual designs for shopping malls. Bradbury’s ideas were presented in the form of essays, and Jerde then took those ideas and used them as the basis for the architectural designs. Among Ray’s key contributions were to put the food court at the heart of the mall, and to build in corridors where you can’t see what’s round the next corner, or build in dead-ends (Ray’s concept was “the aesthetic of lostness”, the idea that we like to get a bit lost and confused so we can retrace our steps.)

Visit any shopping mall built since about 1990, and you will find most of Bradbury’s concepts are implemented, because Jerde’s award-winning designs were copied around the world.

John Grayshaw: What were some of Bradbury’s hobbies other than writing?

He did a bit of painting. If you check out the book Ray Bradbury: An Illustrated Life (by Jerry Weist), you’ll find lots of examples of preliminary art designs he did for some of his own books. And in the early 1960s documentary “Portrait of Writer” (which you can usually find on YouTube), you’ll see him practicing this hobby, painting a picture of a Halloween Tree.

And I gather that he loved eating and drinking. He wasn’t a particularly sophisticated gourmet – he preferred what most people called junk food. It’s no coincidence that when he was working with Jon Jerde on designs for town centres, he said some thing like “people don’t go out to shop, they go out to eat; and while they’re out, they shop.”

John Grayshaw: Did Bradbury have a writing routine he stuck to?

It undoubtedly changed and evolved over the years, but the basic routine he always talked about was this:

In your first waking moments of the day (when you’re half asleep), you get your best ideas (what he called his “morning theatre”), so you need to capture those. Then spend the morning free-writing (getting the ideas down on the page with minimum intellectual tought). Then in the afternoon, take out something you drafted on the previous day and give it another draft. In a 1967 interview, he said that this re-drafting wasn’t him re-writing the story, it was him “re-living” the story.

When his daughters were young, he said he wrote Monday to Friday, but kept the weekends clear for family time. I imagine this is what motivated him to rent an office away from his house, so he could keep a clear separation between work and home.

Looking at his files from later in his life, alongside the typewritten pages you find many handwritten manuscript pages, usually written in large block capitals with something like a Sharpie. These come from when he was writing while travelling, either in the back of a car, or on a train, or on Concorde while flying to Paris. He was very busy with non-writing activities in the 1980s and 1990s, and fitted in the writing where he could.

John Grayshaw: What is Bradbury’s legacy? Why was his work significant at the time? And why is it still important today?

At the very least, Bradbury’s legacy is Fahrenheit 451 – a dystopian novel which is usually placed alongside Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Less tangibly, Bradbury’s legacy is in how he helped shape the fields of imaginative fiction: by showing that popular fiction could be poetic; by showing that the boundaries of genres are illusory; and by showing that good storytelling could transcend any given medium. Today there are many writers who operate across media and across genres, but Bradbury paved the way for them.

His work was significant at the time because it was so damned good, and he did it all so fast! He was writing for these cheap pulp magazines, but he was writing fine literature. Between 1941 and 1953, he had written most of the ground-breaking work of his career. As he slipped from horror stories to science fiction to fantasy to “mainstream”, he showed how permeable all the barriers to writing are. He was one of the first science fiction writers to appear in hardcover from a major publisher. He was one of the first pulp writers to break out into the so-called “slick” magazines. He led where others would follow.

The reason his work is so important today is that he pioneered so many things and influenced so many people. If you’re looking for the perfect example of a short story, look at his earliest ones collected in Dark Carnival (a book which is out of print, but which is being re-published in 2024). And while you marvel at the perfection of “The Crowd”, for example, tell me if you don’t see Stephen King (and any number of lesser writers) foreshadowed in that story’s tone, structure and pace. King himself has said “Without Ray Bradbury, there is no Stephen King” – and without King, there is no modern horror. You can extrapolate this to other areas of fantasy, science fiction, film and television.

At the same time, Bradbury is an important bridge between today’s imaginative literature and the writers who predated him. “The Crowd” (for example, once again) is clearly inspired by Poe. The Martian Chronicles is clearly inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs. There’s a long chain linking early literature of the fantastic to the present-day equivalents. Bradbury is, at the very least, a highly significant link in that chain. And at the very most, he is the writer who brought those earlier forms into our modern world.