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.