The science fiction, fantasy and horror genres have all embraced his works, claiming him as their own. The 86-year-old author has written more than 35 books. His works include such classics as
The Martian Chronicles,
The Illustrated Man,
Something Wicked This Way Comes,
The October Country and
Fahrenheit 451.
He adapted 65 of his stories for television's
The Ray Bradbury Theater and won an Emmy for his teleplay of "The Halloween Tree." In 2000, Bradbury was honored by the National Book Foundation with a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Among his recent books are the novels
From the Dust Returned and
Farewell Summer (William Morrow), the short-story collection
The Dragon Who Ate His Tail (Gauntlet Press) and
Bradbury Speaks (William Morrow), a collection of essays on the past, the future and everything in between. In 2007, Gauntlet Press will be releasing two new books:
Match To Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451 and
Somewhere a Band Is Playing. Bradbury lives in Los Angeles, and his Web site is
www.raybradbury.com.
What is the inspiration for the short story "The Crowd"?
Bradbury: "The Crowd" is a true story in many ways, because when I was 15 years old, I used to hang out down around Vermont and Washington Boulevard here in Los Angeles, near a graveyard. One night, when I was visiting a friend, I heard a car crash outside. We ran out and discovered there was this accident on the street in which five people dropped dead right in front of us. They were staggering around from the wreck, and they fell down and died. Within moments, a crowd gathered from nowhere, which was especially strange, because most of the surroundings were the graveyard. There was nowhere for the crowd to come from. The shock of that terrible event stayed with me for years. When I was in my 20s, I wrote it down and turned it into "The Crowd," which I sold to Weird Tales for 15 dollars. And that is how "The Crowd" occurred.What can you tell us about your upcoming Gauntlet Press book Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451, which is going to be published this year?
Bradbury: My friends at Gauntlet had come to me and told me I had written a lot of short stories before Fahrenheit 451 that pointed in that direction. I didn't think of it, but that is part of my subconscious; all these things are lodged between my ears and in my ganglion.
I wrote a story about a vampire coming out of the grave called "Pillar of Fire," which was in the magazine Planet Stories when I was in my early 20s. It had to do a lot with book burning. The character in the short story takes an attitude toward the people who had burned his and his friend's books.
And then I wrote a short story called "Usher Two," about a man who hates intellectuals, doesn't like fantasy books and hates the history of Edgar Allan Poe and similar authors. So he gets them together and burns them in "Usher Two." It has been a very popular story of mine. I did it as a play and as a film for my Ray Bradbury television series [The Ray Bradbury Theater]. People love that, because the lead character attacks the intellectuals who hate books, who hate Edgar Allan Poe and all the great writers in fantasy. I took arms against them, so you see I was preparing for Fahrenheit 451 without knowing it. The new book that will come out this year, Match to Flame, will be all about my unconsciously leading the way to Fahrenheit 451, which I wrote in the autumn of 1950. I wrote it in nine days at the library of UCLA. Down in the basement, I found a typing room where I could rent a typewriter for 10 cents a half-hour. I moved in with a bag of dimes and I spent $9.80, and nine days later I finished Fahrenheit 451 in its first version, which is 25,000 words.
Two years later, Ballantine Books came to me and said, "We love your story The Firemen [the original title]. If you find a new title for it and add words to it, we'll publish it." So I sat down, wrote an additional 25,000 words and changed the title from The Firemen to Fahrenheit 451. Farewell Summer is your first sequel to a novel. You have written sequels to your short stories in the past, but never a novel. Why did you decide to write a sequel to Dandelion Wine?
Bradbury: Farewell Summer is
Dandelion Wine: Part Two. They were both written at the same time, 55 years ago. Therefore, I didn't have to think about it. I saved the second half and published it 55 years later. It's a sequel, but I didn't have to think about it because it was part of the original story and the publishers decided that
Dandelion Wine was too long, so they wanted me to cut it in half, which I did. I published the first half as
Dandelion Wine, and
Dandelion Wine: Part Two was called
Farewell Summer.
In Farewell Summer there is an age-old conflict: the young against the elderly in Green Town. Whose side do you sympathize with the most?Bradbury: Both sides, because I am both of them. All the characters in the book are me. Douglas [Spaulding] is me as a youth, the Colonel [Calvin C. Quartermain] and all of his friends are me when I am old. So I am not on either side; I am on both sides, and that is what the whole book is about.
Themes that used to be the driving force of much science fiction of the Golden Age, like interstellar travel, seem to have lost some of their appeal. Agree or disagree?Bradbury: I agree, because they haven't had any appeal to me. If you look at all my science-fiction stories, you won't find anything there about interstellar travel. I wrote about other things, human things. People, real people moving on to create civilization on Mars [
The Martian Chronicles]. Mars isn't about interstellar travel, and all my other fantasy and science fiction in
The Illustrated Man or
Golden Apples of the Sun are about dinosaurs, things like that, instead of interstellar travel.
What do you think are the main preoccupations with science fiction reflected today? Bradbury: In my case, I hope they are interested in my stories and hopes for the future and going back to the moon and gathering our energies together and moving on out to Mars. We should have never left there, and if I can encourage people to back the government to build the rockets to go back to the moon, I hope to do that. And then, sometime in about 30 years, we'll move on to Mars. After Mars, we'll move out to the other planets moving around other suns, like Alpha Centauri. That gives us a chance to be immortal. We can't stay on Earth, because Earth isn't going to last forever, but we (mankind) want to last forever. Therefore, space travel is very important and there isn't enough of that being written about in science fiction today. I hope my fellow writers will write about that more often.
I will be doing a story, sometime in the future, about an entire church of priests who go out into the universe in their search for God, not realizing that God is buried in their hearts. You don't search for it [God] in other places. It is in your breast, in your psyche and in your soul—I hope to work on that more and publish it in about two years.
What is your favorite Universal Picture monster movie? And why?Bradbury: I have several. I was 3 years old when I saw
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and I figured on growing up and becoming a hunchback [laughs]. I saw Lon Chaney's
He Who Gets Slapped a year later, and I decided I'd like to be a clown. A year after that I saw
The Phantom of the Opera. I fell in love with the Phantom, Lon Chaney, even further. All of Lon Chaney's early films became my favorite monster movies, because he was brilliant. There was no one in the history of films like him, before or since.
You've written in an astounding variety of genres, yet you are renowned for your science fiction, fantasy and horror.Bradbury: I've only written one science-fiction book; that is
Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasies and horror.
What is it that science fiction and horror do that mainstream literature can't do? Bradbury: Science fiction and horror have to do with our dreams and our fears and our hopes, which you don't find in one hell of a lot of other literature. I love writers like Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck. They are not in the same business as I am, of dreaming and fearing and reacting to life and doing something about it. Science fiction and horror and fantasy provide what we all need: something to speak for our hopes, our dreams and our terrors.
