[SKRIVA] NYT-artikel om Bradbury
- From: "Ahrvid Engholm" <ahrvid@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "skriva@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <skriva@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 06:29:58 +0200
Från en annan lista. Artikeln skall också kunna nås via URL:en nedan. --AE
http://tinyurl.com/25hyhc
August 22, 2007
Vintage Bradbury, Packaged Anew
By DAVID SHAFTEL
LOS ANGELES — Though slowed by age, Ray Bradbury still speaks with
exuberance. Hobbled by a stroke in 1999, he now dictates his work
over the phone to his daughter in Arizona, who records and
transcribes it before faxing edits back. Mr. Bradbury works in an
overstuffed leather chair in a den lined by shelves of VHS tapes of
classic movies and history texts. The room is crowded with models of
dinosaurs, rocket ships and Jules Verne's Nautilus submarine, his own
dusty Emmy, a friend's tarnished Oscar and a 52-inch flat-screen
television not unlike the ones he presaged in "Fahrenheit 451."
"I'm surrounded by my metaphors," said Mr. Bradbury, who acknowledges
that the science in his books is often faulty and serves only as a
vehicle for his fiction. He'll provide the inspiration, he says, and
let the scientists worry about the particulars.
"The arts and sciences are connected," he continued. "Scientists have
to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination."
As Ray Bradbury turns 87 on Aug. 22, the celebrated science fiction
and fantasy writer is taking something of a victory lap, partly the
result of mining his extensive files for rare and unfinished work. He
will publish several long-forgotten works this summer, including
experimental drafts and his earliest writings.
In September William Morrow will release "Now and Forever," a
collection of the never-released novellas "Leviathan '99"
and "Somewhere a Band Is Playing," with an expanded, limited edition
of the latter to be simultaneously released by an independent
publisher. This caps a year in which Mr. Bradbury was awarded a
special distinguished-career citation from the Pulitzer Board.
"Leviathan '99," which Mr. Bradbury describes as " `Moby-Dick' in
outer space," was started in the '50s, and though he has revisited it
sporadically over the years, it was originally intended as a radio
script for Norman Corwin. It follows Ishmael Jones as he accompanies
a blind, maniacal captain of the "largest interstellar spaceship ever
built," tracking a great white comet.
Mr. Bradbury intended "Somewhere a Band Is Playing" as a starring
vehicle for Katharine Hepburn when he began it in 1956. In this
novella, a reporter hops off a moving train, landing in a bucolic
town where no one dies or grows old and where no children live.
"Somewhere a Band Is Playing" is vintage Bradbury, said Barry
Hoffman, publisher of Gauntlet Press, which is releasing the novella
accompanied by early drafts and fragments of a teleplay and
screenplay.
"This is something that Bradbury's been working on for more than 50
years, so we have a lot of variations that he played around with,"
Mr. Hoffman said. Some versions are "more pessimistic" than the final
draft, he said.
This summer Gauntlet released "Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths
to `Fahrenheit 451,' " containing the stories, drafts and
correspondence that culminated in what is perhaps Mr. Bradbury's most
enduring work.
Mr. Bradbury says he started "Somewhere a Band Is Playing" after
seeing Ms. Hepburn in "Summertime." "Over the years I kept working on
it because I knew Katharine Hepburn, and I hoped I could finish it
and give it to her, so that she could make a film of it," he said
during a recent interview in his home in the Cheviot Hills
neighborhood of Los Angeles. "But the years just went by."
Mr. Bradbury's literary journey started with the fanzine Futuria
Fantasia, which he self-published when he was 18 in 1939. The
fanzine's four issues were anthologized and reissued last month by
Graham Press. The fanzine was bankrolled by Forrest J. Ackerman, one
of science fiction's greatest fans and the man said to have coined
the term sci-fi; only 100 original copies were printed. They contain
early work by such future science fiction luminaries as Hannes Bok
and Robert Heinlein.
Mr. Bradbury concedes that his own stories in Futuria Fantasia — many
of them published under pseudonyms, to make his stable of writers
seem bigger — were crude. "I was still years away from writing my
first good short story," he said, "but I could see my future. I knew
where I wanted to go."
Mr. Bradbury's authorized biographer, Sam Weller, said: "Futuria
Fantasia has always been out of everybody's grasp. Except for the
very well-off fans who could afford to track copies down through
collection or auction houses, nobody has ever seen them, let alone
owned them."
Though Mr. Bradbury's critics have bristled at his comments
that "Fahrenheit 451" was not a novel about censorship — a statement
that the paper trail in "Match to Flame" seems to disprove — or
that "The Martian Chronicles," one of the most widely read science
fiction novels, is not science fiction because of its fudged science,
they agree on his contribution to the genre.
Mr. Bradbury's special Pulitzer citation was "an enormous nod of
respect from the mainstream media," said Lou Anders, editorial
director of the science fiction and fantasy imprint Pyr.
But Mr. Bradbury's early works should be understood in their
historical context, Mr. Anders said, not as representative of where
the field is today. "I hope that anyone who comes to science fiction
and fantasy cold — readers for whom `The Illustrated Man' or `I Sing
the Body Electric' are their doorway in — will be inspired to look
beyond these classic works to the new masters."
Mr. Bradbury, who stopped the regular reading of science fiction
decades ago, is comfortable in his outsider status, if a bit
cantankerous. "I don't need to be vindicated, and I don't want
attention," he said. "I never question. I never ask anyone else's
opinion. They don't count."
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