BRADBURY BEYOND APOLLO

Eller, director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University-Purdue, creates an assured, meticulously researched narrative based on interviews, archival sources, and extensive knowledge of his subject’s oeuvre. Bradbury wrote his most famous works—such as Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles—from 1941 to 1962. By 1969, the year Bradbury designated as Apollo Year 1 in honor of the space mission, he “had become a cultural icon whose legacy would shine a light deep into the next century.” He also turned to other genres, including lectures, essays, poetry, plays, and orchestral pieces; collected past stories; and pushed for stage, TV, and film adaptations, efforts that sometimes failed because of his prickly relationships with producers and collaborators. Though hailed by many for his lyrical prose, Bradbury could exasperate the scientific community. The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, for example, complained of an “unbridgeable gulf between his cosmology and the established science of the day” that made his participation with the museum untenable. When he was invited as a speaker, he took assigned topics as nothing more than “an invitation to extemporaneous storytelling,” sometimes with regrettable results. As in his previous volumes, Eller traces Bradbury’s life in detail, noting every publication and project, and his views on a variety of topics: politics (he was a Reagan supporter, applauding the administration’s tax cuts and foreign policy), fear of flying (he “could not fly to Florida” to receive an Aviation Space Writers Association Award), and the Italian filmmaker Fellini (they shared “avoidance of revision and rational reflection in the midst of creation”). Assessing Bradbury’s legacy, Eller persuasively depicts him as “a visionary, asked over and over again to tell us why we desire to explore, why we should go to the stars, and what we might become when we get there.”

Thanks for reading.
Please Share, Comment, Like the post And Follow, Subscribe CTS Store.

fromSource