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. 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, and a 52-inch flat-screen television not unlike the ones he presaged in Fahrenheit 451. “I’m surrounded by my metaphors,” said Bradbury, “The arts and sciences are connected,” he continued. “Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.” Ray Bradbury turned 87 last week, and the science fiction and fantasy writer is taking something of a victory lap. 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. Leviathan ‘99, which Bradbury describes as “Moby-Dick in outer space,” was started in the ‘50s. It follows Ishmael Jones as he accompanies a blind, maniacal captain of the “largest interstellar spaceship ever built”, tracking a great white comet. 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. 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 Bradbury’s most enduring work. Bradbury says he started Somewhere a Band Is Playing after seeing Hepburn in Summertime. “Over the years, 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, “But the years just went by.” Bradbury’s literary journey started with the fanzine Futuria Fantasia, which he self-published when he was 18 in 1939. 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. Though Bradbury’s critics have bristled at his comments that Fahrenheit 451 was not a novel about censorship 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. But Bradbury’s early works should be understood in their historical context, said Lou Anders, editorial director of the science fiction and fantasy imprint Pyr, 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.” Bradbury 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.”- DAVID SHAFTEL (NYT)
