The Bradbury Chronicles

Abstract

“Ray Bradbury is science fiction’s ambassador to the outside world,” wrote Isaac Asimov in 1980. “People who didn’t read science fiction, and who were taken aback by its unfamiliar conventions and its rather specialized vocabulary, found that they could read and understand Bradbury.”¹ Now in his late eighties, Bradbury (1920-) eludes easy categorization. As an icon of today’s imaginative fiction, Bradbury is an author, poet, playwright, essayist, lecturer, and visionary.² His acclaimed novels and short story collections Dark Carnival (1946), The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) have changed the face of fantasy and science fiction; and Dandelion Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) have blended small town nostalgia with Gothic horror (both are set in “Green Town,” his fictional version of his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois). From 1985 to 1992, Bradbury hosted a syndicated anthology television series, The Ray Bradbury Theater, for which he adapted 65 of his stories. His numerous honors include the National Medal of Arts, a special Pulitzer Prize Citation, the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the First Fandom Award.

Space travel is an immense thing, not a technological feat or military wonder or political toy, but a religious endeavor to relate to the universe.

Ray Bradbury, Interview with John Tibbetts, St. Louis, 5 October 1996