New Ray Bradbury Review – serie

The New Ray Bradbury Review is designed principally to study the impact of Bradbury’s writings on American culture and is the chief publication of The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies—the archive of Bradbury’s writings located at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. Like its pioneering predecessor, the one- volume review published in 1952 by William F. Nolan, The New Ray Bradbury Review contains articles and reviews about Bradbury but has a much broader scope, including a thematic focus for each issue. While Bradbury’s effect on the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction is still being assessed, there is no doubt about his impact, and to judge from the testimony of his admirers, many of them now professional writers themselves, it is clear that he has affected the lives of five generations of readers.In this third number, the Center presents an all-archival issue devoted to Bradbury’s fragments. A prolific writer, Bradbury composed openings for stories that he never finished, together with pages of notes, sketches, and drafts that he kept in suspension for possible use in some form at some place in various narrative projects he was considering, as well as fragments of completed stories that are now lost. These pages are of great interest to anyone drawn to Bradbury’s creative mind, for they reveal his imagination at its most spontaneous. Readers will be excited to discover in this issue Bradbury’s sketches for “The Venusian Chronicles,” revealing a landscape and characters that, while clearly incomplete, carry on the themes of The Martian Chronicles. Included is a checklist of Bradbury’s extensive fragments, compiled by Donn Albright and Jonathan R. Eller.Fans and scholars alike will welcome The New Ray Bradbury Review , as it will add to the understanding of the life and work of this eminent author, whose work has received both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

Each previous The New Ray Bradbury Review, prepared and edited by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, examines the impact of Bradbury’s writings on American culture and his legacy as one of the master storytellers of his time. The late Ray Bradbury’s metaphor-rich imagination led to a prolific and highly influential career spanning seven decades, but it also left a decades-long field of deferred fragmentary fictions and story ideas that would remain unfulfilled creations. For Number 4, William F. Touponce, founding editor emeritus of the Review, has gathered and introduced fascinating examples of story ideas, brief story openings and endings, and extended story openings that will forever remain dreams deferred.The fragments presented in this issue illustrate Bradbury’s progressive stages of creativity during story composition, and to that end some of the physical elements of presentation are preserved in layout. The selections are followed by a list of recent discoveries that supplement the comprehensive checklist of known fragments included in previous editions of the Review. Number 4 concludes with Jonathan Eller’s “Fragmentary Futures,” a survey of Bradbury’s surviving preliminary outlines and projected timetables for future books—tenuous documents that convey a sense of the instability lurking beneath Bradbury’s solid and enduring achievements as a masterful teller of tales.Number 4 of the Review completes the all-archival presentation begun with Number 3, which focused on the thematic range of the surviving fragments. The story openings presented in Number 4 reveal the hidden tension between Bradbury’s subconscious inspirations and the stifling effects of his own self-conscious thoughts—the more logical thought patterns that he desperately tried to hold at bay during the few hours it would take him to complete an initial draft. Time and again, rational thought extinguished the initial subconscious upwelling of character and scene, causing him to set these fragments aside for a day that never came.The New Ray Bradbury Review and the multivolume Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury are the primary publications of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, the major archive of Bradbury’s writings located at Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).

As a highly visual writer, Ray Bradbury's works have frequently been adapted for film and television. One of the most stylized and haunting dramatizations is François Truffaut's 1966 film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. For this fifth volume of The New Ray Bradbury Review, guest editor Phil Nichols brings together essays and articles that reflect upon Bradbury's classic novel and Truffaut's enduring low- tech science fiction film, fifty years after its release.French film director and writer François Truffaut was a major force in world cinema. Beginning with his first days as a firebrand film critic and early years as a highly original director, Truffaut sustained a career that brought him numerous accolades, including an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film. Yet Fahrenheit 451—his only film in English and his only foray into science fiction—is often overshadowed by the considerable triumphs of his other works, like The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, and Day for Night. Similarly, while science fiction scholars often present the film as a significant work, they sometimes see it as a flawed adaptation, somehow less than its source, Ray Bradbury's classic 1953 novel of book-burning firemen.The articles in this volume represent the first scholarly investigation of Truffaut's film and Bradbury's novel together. They lay out the key critical issues in comparing book and film and novelist and filmmaker, discuss various aspects of Bradbury's and Truffaut's narrative strategies in creating a world where books are systematically burned, consider the film's screenplay and Bradbury's own creative reactions to Truffaut, and examine the reception of the film among various audiences and critics.The New Ray Bradbury Review and the multivolume Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury are the primary publications of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, the major archive of Bradbury's writings located at Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).