For those few that are unfamiliar with Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, and the Martian Chronicles are among his most famous books. I recently got to hear Mr. Bradbury speak to the Southwest Manuscripters, a local writing group. Bradbury emphasizes these for aspiring writers:
do your work, Bradbury writes every day
don’t tell anyone what you are writing about, but do share finished pieces.
write about what you love
For songwriting or other creative activities, the same methods might apply. For musicians, daily practice, don’t tell people what you are going to do, instead focus on the doing, and play music that you love. There is a power in the doing.
Bradbury also says that he often “tells people to go to h*ll.” Fortunately for him, that has always worked. That too applies to music. If someone else uses phrases such as “you need to,” or “you should do this or that,” or play a certain type of music, I can say the same thing.
When Bradbury talks about his writing and his inspirations, it is similar to how I describe my songwriting. That the inspiration comes from somewhere else. For me, it is as if I am tapping into the greater consciousness and streaming it out there. I know that other songwriters share this kind of description, this kind of experience. I also get this when performing for an audience, that sense of being plugged in. I know other musicians have had that too.
I’ll have to dig out my portrait of the Illustrated Man. The one with the video-skin.
Anyone met Lyle Tuttle? And is the Rose Tattoo café still open in SF?
One of my favorite quotes, I can’t remember whether it’s Edison or Ford: Don’t listen to people who say you can’t do this or you must do that. If Michelangelo had listened to them, he would have painted the floor of the Sistene Chapel and it would have worn away long ago.
Ray Bradbury is a ‘poet’ of Science Fiction.It alway’s amazes me that he as a writer of Science Fiction,in the ‘public eye’,the fiction of future gadgets and technology,this is a man that never learnt to drive a car.
Then again,what is ‘Science Fiction’ but a modern continuation of the myths that have been part of our collective psyche since we became human.
The film version of 'The illustratated man(1969) starring Rod Steiger,was given short shrift by the critics IMHO.
As well as Ray’s unforgettable S.F.,Who can forget his compelling screenplay of ‘Moby Dick’?
I think that Bradbury’s work will be read by future generations for his power to invoke atmosphere-he is a litarary descendant of Poe and Melville in that respect.
During his presentation, Mr. Bradbury tells the story of how he met John Houston, the producer for the movie, and he eventually landed the job. After a time, Mr. Bradbury asks Mr. Houston, paraphrasing: “Why did you choose me? I had only written four books and none of them were selling. I had never done a screenplay. I knew nothing about Moby Dick.”
Mr. Houston points to a short story published in “Golden Apples.” A story inspired by a walk on Venice beach where Bradbury lived with his wife. They see the ruins of the old rollercoaster, and hear the distant foghorn. After the walk, Bradbury goes home and streams forth his short story. With the rollercoaster as a dinosaur pining to meet its mate calling with the foghorn. When the “rollercoaster” finds out that the foghorn emanates from a lighthouse, and that the lighthouse has no feelings for it, it dies heartbroken.
Forgive me if I have some of the details of the story wrong. The gist of my telling is that one moment of inspiration, following through and writing the story, led to Mr. Bradbury’s first big monetary breakthrough, and resulted in huge changes in his life. The lesson to me, is that you never know what might lead to a life changing event.
But what makes a good SF writer? The same thing that makes a good writer of any other genre. What sets Heinlein, Bradbury, and any other great SF writer apart from pedestrian writers is their understanding of people. So what if Double Star takes place in the future. It’s about people and politics. Fahrenheit 451 may have firemen who start fires rather than putting them out and a robot dog to sedate people, but it’s about people and censorship, two topics that are common in mainstream books as well as the literature that’s taught on college campuses.
Should we talk about Bradbury or Heinlein in the same breath as Faulkner or Hemingway? Maybe not, but I honestly think that Roger Zelazny wrote some of the best literature of the 20th century (“A rose for Ecclesiastes,” for example). And while Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card) may not be high-class literature, it just may be the best book I’ve ever read. It’s about people, too.
Yes, some SF authors use funky futuristic ideas to get by, but there are others who just find the future intriguing and use it as a backbone for good writing.
Sci Fi writing… well, good sci fi writing, more often then not isnt about laser guns and space ships, but exactly what chas said, it’s about people. what it’s good for is taking something that could be dangerous, and taking it to the extremes in order to prove a point, like the MULTIVAC stories, and Fahrenheit 451, they try to prove apoint, that if you just went out and said it, wouldnt really say anything, because the things they talk about (censorship) isnt a big deal Now, but it’s showing that it could be if it’s allowed to go on the path its taking.
That’s what good science fiction does, points out problems in a way that you couldnt do if you didnt take them to the extremes like that.
Based on this, StarWars isnt science fiction… but a western set in space.
P.S. if any of you want a good sci fi movie that could be a bit controversial i would check out Equalibrium.
I was terribly sorry that no major motion picture
was made of The Martian Chronicles. There was
a TV thing with Rock Hudson, but
that book deserved something more. Best
I used to read a lot of S.F. from age ten to my mid twenties.I started off with H.G Wells,Jules Verne,Arthur C.Clarke,then on to the mainstram of the 40’s.50’s and 60’s.
As I got older,I discovered the ‘alternative’ S.F.,that steered away from the zap,Pow laser beams,mile long spaceships etc etc,this was ‘Speculative Fiction’,rather than ‘Science Fiction’,and in many ways it was closer to experimental ‘mainstream’ fiction-it’s not such a leap from Zelazny and Ellison to William Burroughs,for example.
This ‘new’ Science fiction was more character driven,and was just as likely to discuss psychology,sociology,religion and the effects of the media on society,as Martian invasions.
I drifted away from S.F. when I started to read more and more travel and Historical books.I found that there were plenty of ‘strange new worlds’ in our history and different cultures.
Bradbury is one of my greatest heroes–I’ve read him since high school in the 1960s and eagerly pounced upon every new paperback I could locate in north Alabama (which may explain why I didn’t fit in that well).
If you pick up a copy of Green Shadows, White Whale, you’ll get the gist of how it was to go to Ireland to write the Moby Dick screenplay. And, if you’re a long-time fan as I am, you’ll recognize some old stories from a new vantage point.
I don’t really want to hijack this thread and take it off into politics, but I think you’ll find that censorship is alive and kicking and doing very nicely in the US of A.
I was about to award points to this thread for actually talking about Fahrenheit 451 without mentioning the censored-by-Disney film by Michael Moore which – for good or ill – bases its name on the Bradbury book’s title.
Whilst I’m not an apologist for Moore, the fact is that Disney is currently preventing his film being shown in the US. That’s censorship of the highest order.
Censored? Um, when does refusal to give a distribution contract - last fall - on a film equate to censorship?
Moore has every right in the world to make a film. But it’s up to the distribution companies to decide if they think it’ll make money for them. He still owns his film, and he’s free to make any deal he chooses with anyone who’s interested in distributing it. But by the same token, no one’s OBLIGED to buy it, or to pay to go see it.
Am I “censoring” my local country music station if I turn to PBS or talk radio instead?
However, just as the film’s win at Cannes has nothing to do with it being a ‘documentary’ and everything to do with its political content, it is also naive to say that the witholding of distribution has nothing to do with Disney’s own political leanings. As Disney itself says: “Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore’s film…could alienate many.” Yeah, right. The company is within its rights to block the film, that I do not contest, but the question WHY it did is more interesting to me than this simple fact.
This film is a guaranteed cash cow, so what’s the deal here?
One of the best things on this that I have read was a comment to the NYT, which agrees with Disney’s own admission that “It’s not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle”, only to show this up as the kind of dumb-assed statement (coming from a major corporation) it is:
To the Editor:
As an owner of Disney stock, I believe that the company has no business being the arbiter of political correctness.
Its only question should be: Will Michael Moore’s film “Fahrenheit 9/11” make money for the company and the stockholders?
Given Mr. Moore’s track record, the answer is clearly “yes.”
I am working on my Isaac Asimov beard (complete neck and sideburns unshaven and shaven around the mouth area. The trouble is, that part is reddish-grey rather than white.
He was one of my favorites, but I considered Ray Bradbury, along with Robert Sheckley, Harry Ellison and some others one of my favorite “sort of nuts” SF authors unlike the "serious ones such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein (sort of repetitious and out of ideas late in life thouth), and Larry Nivin.
I have been sort of dissappointed in the recent spate of SF, so I got out of the habit of reading it.
It’s too much fun reading crazy posts from whistle junkies…
Asimov was one of the all-time greats. His non-fiction like “The Stars in the Courses” was also top-notch for literally astronomically hopeless cases like me.
Have you read Iain M. Banks? Very good, albeit nerdy, stuff.
Something Bradbury gets too little credit for is what I think is his best stuff – his short stories. People focus so much on novels as what a writer is all about, but he has the rare gift of being able to tell a complete tale, with character development and everything, in only a few pages. He’s written hundreds of them, and many are bound together in one large volume. Well worth reading.
In addition to short stories, Bradbury writes a poem a day. He recently published a collection of 500 poems. Bradbury has also done plays, mostly local productions, and the already mentioned movie screenplays and novels. Again, the admonition to “do your work,” which for a writer means to write, a musican it means to play, translates into a body of work at the end of the week/month/year/lifetime.
Bradbury points to his high school yearbook where he predicted “literary distinction” for himself. At that time he wrote all the time, but did not consider himself good, and his teachers and peers agreed with that assessment. He was in a writing class in school that put together a short story collection for their classmates. Bradbury’s story was not considered good enough to be included in the collection.
