Quote of the Day (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Offering the First Glimpse of Her Monster)

“Last Monday (July 31st) we were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea-room in which she floated. Our situation was somewhat dangerous, especially as we were compassed round by a very thick fog. We accordingly lay to, hoping that some change would take place in the atmosphere and weather.

“About two o’clock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end. Some of my comrades groaned, and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious thoughts, when a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention and diverted our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveller with our telescopes until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice.” — English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

A few weeks ago I attended a lecture on Frankenstein that highlighted the opening section of the novel, from which this passage is taken—a set of letters from the explorer Robert Walton to his sister. His epic ambition—to discover the North Pole, in an age when ice and extreme cold posed mortal danger—anticipates that of Victor Frankenstein, a nearly frozen scientist he picks up in these barren arctic wastes.

In the grip of “the dark tyranny of despair,” Frankenstein warns against this quest for the glory accruing to scientific discovery: “You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.”

The “shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature” is the rejected creation who has brought Frankenstein untold misery. The glimpse that Walton’s crew has of him here is elusive, to be filled in by the extended account that Frankenstein is about to offer the explorer.

Walton’s “frame story” (or, to use a term from one of my college English classes some years ago about Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw,” an “envelope story”) was not included in the classic 1931 adaptation of the novel starring Boris Karloff as the monster. Despite its many faults, the 1994 remake (from which the accompanying image was taken), starring Robert DeNiro as the Creature and Kenneth Branagh as Victor, did include this narrative device.

It will be interesting to see if Guillermo del Toro’s version (in limited release next week) will do likewise. I hope so, because it reinforces a lesson relevant to our time: that heedless pursuit of scientific knowledge might produce unexpected and unwelcome consequences.

Flashback, October 1959: Serling’s ‘Twilight Zone’ Takes Viewers to ‘Another Dimension’

With three Emmy Awards for writing already to his credit, Rod Serling began to air in October 1959 the first episodes of the series that not only consolidated his status as one of the pioneers of quality television but also established him as a legend of the science fiction and fantasy genre: The Twilight Zone.

Even with endless imitations, parodies, and revivals at the hands of others, it’s easy to lose sight of just how different The Twilight Zone was from what might be termed “alternative futures” at that time.

Serling would have none of the little green men invading Earth, mad scientists, and assorted other creatures that reflected American paranoia about the Red Scare in the 1950s. The quotidian existence of his characters was one that his mass audience could relate to, only for these everyday figures to be launched, as one of the show’s famous intros put it, into “another dimension, a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.”

The themes that Serling consistently explored were alienation, prejudice, loneliness, colonialism, climate change, domestic abuse, and war—a subject that its creator knew all too much about, having seen action in the Pacific Theater in WWII. (This summer, a Serling short story believed to have been lost for 70 years and based on his wartime experiences, “First Squad, First Platoon,” was published in The Strand Magazine.)

The series first saw light as “The Time Element,” a Serling script deep-sixed by CBS until it was resurrected and run as an episode of “Desilu Playhouse.”

The network, realizing its mistake in burying the project, now gave the green light to what turned out to be the pilot proper for the show, “Where Is Everybody?”

The Twilight Zone arrived on TV in the heyday of the anthology series, a genre that also gave rise to such acclaimed shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Playhouse 90, The Naked City, and Thriller (which I discussed in this prior post).  

Serling wrote or adapted 92 of the 156 episodes of the original The Twilight Zone, but as time went on he also enlisted the services of Charles Beaumont (who wrote another 22), Richard Matheson (16) and the future creator of The Waltons, Earl Hamner Jr. (8).

So much of The Twilight Show has passed into legend: from the eerie theme composed by Marius Constant, twist endings a la O. Henry, and Serling’s onscreen lit cigarette (the product of a three-pack-a-day addiction dating back to his wartime experiences).

Serling’s deep voice and staccato delivery of the introductions and conclusions made him as indelible a narrator as Alfred Hitchcock. But he was nobody’s original idea as host.

According to Josh Weiss’ post from March of this year on the SyFi Wire blog, the services of Westbrook Van Voorhis, famous as the narrator of The March of Time radio program, were engaged—until hearing his voice on the pilot left network execs feeling he was too “pompous-sounding.”

The idea of Orson Welles was then floated, and though that voice was certainly memorable, it would have come at a cost that would have ballooned the show’s budget. Finally, Serling suggested that he try it. To everyone’s delight, it worked out wonderfully.

For years, the creepy nature of the show left me a bit leery about viewing it. In the last few years, however, I’ve relented, and have developed some favorites among the episodes:

·         “Nightmare at 20,000 Square Feet,” with William Shatner as the airplane passenger convinced that a monster only he can see is out to wreck his flight;

·         “The Jungle,” with John Dehner as an engineer back from a hydroelectric power project in Africa, increasingly discomfited by signs that a witch doctor’s curse may be coming home to roost;

·         “Eye of the Beholder,” about a young woman undergoing a surgical procedure meant to make her look “normal”;

·         “Time Enough at Last,” on a bookworm finding himself with no distractions from his reading after a nuclear attack; and

·         “What's in the Box,” with William Demarest and Joan Blondell as an unhappy couple feuding after his TV set shows him quarreling with and killing her.

If The Twilight Zone made Serling, it could also be said to have unmade him. The non-stop demands on his time as executive producer, host, and chief writer—and of battling the show’s advertisers (McCann-Erickson) and network censors over tone and content—left him running on empty in the fourth and fifth seasons. “You can't retain quality,” he lamented. “You start borrowing from yourself, making your own cliches.”

They also left him craving adulation from the public and critics he had achieved with his on-air presence, leading to short-lived lucrative but creatively unsatisfying 1960s ventures as a game-show host, documentary narrator, and commercial pitchman for Schlitz Beer and Famous Writer’s Correspondence School.

When he did return to his typewriter, he flailed in a new entertainment landscape where his ideas were downgraded, disregarded or sidelined.

His screenplay for Planet of the Apes, for instance, was revised by Michael Wilson (the famous ending, involving the Statue of Liberty, was his major surviving contribution), and on the early 1970s series Night Gallery, he possessed no creative control, leading to complaints that it was a low-grade knockoff of The Twilight Zone.

His constant smoking and stress caught up with him, and death came to Serling in 1975 at the age of 50 amid heart surgery. A decade after its cancellation, the series that he helmed—more of a success d’estime than a commercial hit in its original network run—was already a cult favorite in syndication.

Over the years it’s influenced the likes of Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, George Lucas, James Cameron, J.J. Abrams, M. Night Shyamalan, Guillermo Del Toro, and Jordan Peele (who would become the showrunner and host for a 2019-2020 remake of the series on CBS All Access.

This Day in Film History (Edward G. Robinson—Public Tough Guy, Private Softie—Dies)

January 26, 1973— Edward G. Robinson, who shot to fame in gangster roles in the Thirties that contrasted sharply with the cultured, thoughtful figure he was offscreen, died at age 79 in Hollywood of bladder cancer.
 
The actor’s death came two months before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was due to present him with an Oscar—albeit an honorary one, rather than in a competitive category—in recognition of more than four decades of diverse and compelling screen appearances, the latest for a sci-fi neo-noir he had only just finished shooting, Soylent Green.
 
Personal and professional challenges had filled Robinson’s entire career:

*a fellow Warner Brothers lead who shocked the entire crew by publicly cursing and shoving him on set (George Raft, in Manpower);

*another, more powerful entertainer whose fast pace meshed poorly with Robinson’s deliberate style of rehearsal and preparation (Frank Sinatra, in A Hole in the Head);

*“graylisting” in the McCarthy era for leftist associations that even an appearance as a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee could not mitigate;

*an expensive divorce that saw him lose a substantial portion of his prized art collection; and

*a son struggling with drink, depression and run-ins with the law.
 
But only a lifetime of professionalism—and precautions taken by caring, admiring on-set colleagues—got Robinson through the final scenes of his career, in Soylent Green. He had not said anything to his co-workers about his cancer diagnosis.
 
The film’s insurance company felt squeamish about the actor’s age and prior health issues (e.g., a cardiac condition that had forced him to withdraw as Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes), so his scenes were shot first and he was allowed to leave the set each day at five.
 
But now another health complication emerged: Robinson could barely hear, including when director Richard Fleischer yelled “cut.”
 
Robinson correctly saw that this supporting role, as father figure and mentor to Charlton Heston’s detective, was a great, scene-stealing part to play. So he worked relentlessly with other actors to get down the timing of the scene right—even though he could not hear the lines.
 
At the start of production, when Fleischer was introduced to Robinson, “The entire crew stared at him like a bunch of fans or tourists,” the director later recalled in an interview. That respect only grew during filming.
 
Heston brought Robinson a variety of wines and cheeses from all over the world each day the elderly actor was on set. In mid-December, the crew held a birthday party for him where their admiration was evident.
 
Heston concisely depicted Robinson’s heroic struggle—and the crew’s respect for it—in The Actor’s Life: Journal 1956–1976:
 
“He knew while we were shooting, though we did not, that he was terminally ill. He never missed an hour of work, nor was late to a call. He never was less than the consummate professional he had been all his life. I’m still haunted, though, by the knowledge that the very last scene he played in the picture, which he knew was the last day’s acting he would ever do, was his death scene. I know why I was so overwhelmingly moved playing it with him.”
 
As Rico Bandello in Little Caesar (1931), Robinson paved the way for James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in later Warner Brothers gangster roles. His small stature and a homely face often likened to a pug prevented him from taking on the romantic leads that later came to these younger actors.
 
Yet DVDs—not to mention prolonged exposure to his filmography on TCM—should be enough to convince anyone of the range that Robinson could display, even with his physical limitations. He could turn naturally to film noirs (The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street), biopics (Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet), Biblical epics (The Ten Commandments), westerns (Cheyenne Autumn), and even comedies (A Slight Case of Murder).
 
(The image accompanying this post shows Robinson in what I regard as his best performance: here with Fred MacMurray, as Barton Keyes, the dogged insurance investigator and moral center of Billy Wilder’s 1944 film noir classic, Double Indemnity.)

Quote of the Day (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, on How Invention Occurs)

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.”—English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

The wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley—and creator of the paradigmatic sci-fi/horror novel Frankenstein—was born 225 years ago today.

While staying at a villa by Lake Geneva in Switzerland with her husband, the teenage Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley engaged in a contest with him and his friends (including Lord Byron) for the best ghost story by relating her tale of a scientist and the creature he made in a lab. Obviously, posterity regards her as the winner of the contest.

But the “materials …[to] be afforded” to create her novel did not come from a “void,” but from her own intellectual research into what was happening in the world of science, including Sir Humphrey Davy’s experiments with electricity, according to this article from Mental Floss Magazine.

For a fascinating discussion of the circumstances behind this dramatic creation, I urge you to read Australian artist-writer Kirsten Mills’ blog post from four years ago.

Quote of the Day (Megan Amran, Imagining What Astronauts Might Find on Planet 'XJ9358')

“Dec. 16. We now understand why, throughout our history, we received no transmission from this planet: the inhabitants were extremely unsophisticated. They utilized fossil fuels and nuclear power, but wasted their solar energy and failed to employ methane dams to capture the nearly infinite power potential of flatulence. They apparently let the precious gases just dissipate into the air! Furthermore, they appeared to have many different languages and alphabets. The one in our current location uses twenty-six letters, except in a mysterious temple labelled ‘IKEA,’ where some of the letters have dots over them.”— American comedy writer, producer, and performer Megan Amran, “Shouts and Murmurs: Captain’s Log,” The New Yorker, Apr. 30, 2018

Appreciations: Ray Bradbury’s Tale of T-Rex, Environmentalism and Fascism

“It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like large, sharp knives. Its huge eyes rolled, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight. It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit arena warily, its beautifully reptilian hands feeling the air.”—Science-fiction writer and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), “A Sound of Thunder,” in The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman’s Library, 2010)

I picked this passage from Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi story “A Sound of Thunder” to illustrate his enormously vivid powers of physical description--something I don't think I adequately explored in my prior post in honor of his centennial earlier this year. But the story as a whole—about man’s foolish certainty that he can best Nature—also makes for a powerful admonition for our time.

Several months ago, a friend, a retired Florida schoolteacher, told me about this story. It is a great example of why one of my high school English teachers, Sister Margaret Bradley, preferred the phrase “Alternative Futures” to another by which this genre is better known: “Science Fiction.” “Alternative Futures” is concerned less with gadgets than with concerns likely to persist well beyond the present moment.

Bradbury set this tale in 2055, anticipating what life would be like a century roughly from when he was writing, in 1952—when the Cold War was already a decade old, when memories of Fascism were fresh, and when the Broadway hit Inherit the Wind had reminded Americans of the battle over evolution that had occurred in Dayton, Tenn., during the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” In cinema, time travel had begun to be treated by directors, most famously in George Pal’s adaptation of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine. All these elements—fascism, evolution and time travel—figure in Bradbury’s story.

The company at the heart of this story, “Time Travel Safari,” involves a plaything for the rich: returning to prehistoric times to hunt live dinosaurs. (Remarkably, the tale also foreshadowed by a year the development of Disneyland.)

This Great Misadventure is fraught with danger, but the hunter who signs up for it, Eckels, chafes at bureaucrats who potentially impede his problematic pursuit. So what if a billion mice cease to exist because of one of his actions? A member of the company, Travis, tries to explain what is at stake:

“Well, what about the foxes that’ll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes, a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar, or saber-toothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the caveman starves. And the caveman, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life.”

The company that runs Time Travel Safari is terrified that an infraction of the rules may lead to a bureaucratic crackdown of their operation—a fictional illustration of how business has feared the long arm of government for ages. But these seemingly draconian regulations may be viewed another way: that the state has been forced to take such stringent measures now because citizens refused to take voluntary mass action when it could have made a difference.

While Bradbury’s treatment of dinosaurs could be satirical in “Tyrannosaurous Red” (which explores the creatures’ use in cinema), in “A Sound of Thunder” it is prophetic, a warning that man’s weaponization of technology to tame nature, his seizure of godlike power even to tinker with the past, would be severely punished—and for generations.

As I started to read the following even more pointed explanation to Eckels, I couldn’t help but think of how it relates to climate change—but by the end, I heard an eerie premonition of COVID-19:

“A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a population disproportion later, a bad harvest further on, a depression, mass starvation, and, finally, a change in social temperament in far-flung countries. Something much more subtle, like that. Perhaps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn’t see it. Who knows? Who really can say he knows? We don’t know. We’re guessing. But until we do know for certain whether our messing around in Time can make a big roar or a little rustle in history, we’re being careful. This Machine, this Path, your clothing and bodies, were sterilized, as you know, before the journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can’t introduce our bacteria into an ancient atmosphere.”

This is not the only warning Eckels receives: he is given the chance to back out, and told bluntly that:

*The Thunder Lizard they are hunting is “the damnedest monster in history”;

*In the prior year, six safari leaders and a dozen hunters had been killed; and

*The company refuses to guarantee that he’ll come back alive;

*If Eckels does survive, he’ll incur a $10,000 fine and possible government action if he disobeys instructions.

But Eckels, not just oblivious to risk but maybe driven by it, blows off this advice as a challenge to his machismo (“Trying to scare me!”). His heedlessness is so enormous that he even uses a proprietary adjective about the hunt (“Shooting my dinosaur”).

The quotation that starts this post conveys dramatically what Eckels has let himself in for. Cascading images follows his discovery of the great beast, but Bradbury avoids a common mistake of other writers—mixed metaphors—because they all revolve around T-Rex’s barely concealed potential for extreme violence: its “arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys,” its “pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior,” its “fence of teeth like large, sharp knives” and its “death grin” mouth,

The story’s denouement—Eckels stepping on a single butterfly as he veers off the path and flees from the threatening dinosaur, with cataclysmic environmental consequences—anticipated by a decade “The Butterfly Effect,” decade MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s theory that the flap of a butterfly’s wings might ultimately cause a tornado. (See Peter Dizikes’s 2011 article for MIT Technology Review on this landmark contribution to chaos theory.)

But the ramifications of Eckels’ folly extend further. At the start of the tale, a Time Travel Safari employee agrees with him that it’s a good thing that a particular Presidential candidate had just lost:

“We’re lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in, we’d have the worst kind of dictatorship. There’s an anti-everything man for you, a militarist, antichrist, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they wanted to go live in 1492.”

Yet, upon returning to present time, Eckels discovers that the prospect he had dreaded—a Deutscher victory—has not only come to pass, but even been embraced by citizens. (The clerk behind the desk says, “We got an iron man now, a man with guts!")

The electoral reversal, Bradbury implies, is made possible by breakdowns in education and communication, signaled by a change in the sign greeting visitors to Time Travel Safari, with each word changed—misspelled—from what Eckels encountered before his trip.

It is not hard to imagine how Bradbury, were he alive today, might have viewed a President intent on degrading all rivals and critics as “weak.”

So prolific and varied was Bradbury’s career that a reader is bound to find something of value and interest in at least one of his works—and, in this centennial year of his birth, there can hardly be a more opportune time to introduce him to readers.

My schoolteacher friend admitted that, as much as she admired this particular story, it was not so easy to teach her former high school students, many of whom had only the dimmest concept of what concepts like evolution and the interdependence of species are all about.

Nevertheless, I hope that more teachers will try to teach this story—preferably in print form, but if not, then through playing for their classes a DVD of the 1985-1992 cable TV series Ray Bradbury Theater, in which the novelist adapted this short story for an episode starring Hill Street Blues actor Kiel Martin as the oblivious Eckels.

This Day in Literary History (Ray Bradbury, Lyrical, Starry-Eyed Futurist, Born)

Aug. 22, 1920—Ray Bradbury, who imagined the opportunities and terrors of a science-dominated future in approximately 600 short stories, novels, poems, screenplays, and teleplays of indelible vividness, was born in Waukegan, Ill.

Like other mid-20^th century writers in the sci-fi, horror, and crime genres such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Silberberg, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and Roald Dahl, Bradbury benefited from two vehicles: first, pulp magazines, and second, anthology TV series. These forums furnished the opportunity for these authors to be productive and to expose their work to mass audiences.

In high school one year, I spent an entire quarter on science fiction. The nun who taught the class, Sister Margaret Bradley, did not use the term “science fiction,” but rather “alternative futures,” because she did not want to emphasize gadgetry but speculation on the possibility of changing human nature. Bradbury, I think, was the author who best epitomized what she had in mind.

The best-known work in Bradbury’s seven-decade career is probably Fahrenheit 451 (1953). That warning on the dangers of censorship, coming after the collapse of Nazi Germany but at the height of the McCarthy Era in the U.S., became the basis for a “Read-a-Thon” this Saturday streaming over YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

The Library of Congress, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, along with other public and university libraries nationwide, joined together for this event.

Bradbury was concerned not just with what human beings might encounter in the future but with how their frailties might lead them to squander the possibilities of all the new vistas opened to them.

Such was the case, for instance, with The Martian Chronicles (1950), in which mankind repeatedly attempts to colonize the Red Planet, only unable to shed longtime prejudices in this new environment.

The fantastic visions of Bradbury’s fiction are manifested through a sensory, even lyrical style, marked by striking metaphors and similes. “Once you hear a metaphor of mine, you won't forget it,” he said in a 1990 interview with Starlog Magazine.  A dinosaur falling in love with a lighthouse, boom, there's your metaphor. Once you hear that, you say, ‘Gee, I gotta read that, I wonder what happened?’"

In the impressionistic opening paragraph of one of his most anthologized stories, “The April Witch” (1952), he conveyed the (literal) flight of fancy of a 17-year-old witch seriously thinking of giving up her extraordinary power if she can only experience human love:

“Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals when the breeze blew. She perched in a lime-green frog, cool as mint by a shining pool. She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns. She lived in new April grasses, in sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth.”

Movies started to shape Bradbury’s imagination during the silent-film era, and his education in the performing arts was even more thoroughly grounded in 1940, when he became active in amateur productions of actress Laraine Day’s Wilshire Players Guild for Mormon actors.

From early in his writing career, filmmakers were anxious to adapt his fiction, or even engage him in original work for the screen. But his experiences with Hollywood were frequently unstellar and often unhappy.

It took Bradbury years to see virtues in Francois Truffaut’s first English-language feature, a 1966 adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. The Martian Chronicles gave him a case of double agita: first, when a story from it inordinately influenced an early Twilight Zone episode and damaged Bradbury’s relationship with friend and series creator Rod Serling; and second, when NBC ran a 1980 miniseries based on it starring Rock Hudson that Bradbury dismissed as “just boring.”

But the experience that may have soured Bradbury most deeply on Hollywood was his assignment to adapt Moby Dick for the screen for John Huston. The legendary director, impressed with Bradbury’s short story “The Fog Horn,” asked that the sci-fi author work on adapting Herman Melville’s novel in Ireland, where the film would be shot on location off the coast of County Cork, Ireland.

The initial high regard that the two had for each other began to erode as they spent more than half a year revising the script. But Bradbury became particularly angry when the director pulled a maneuver that Orson Welles had originally tried out more than a decade before with Herman Mankiewicz on Citizen Kane: i.e., gaining co-screenwriting credit. Huston proved more successful than Welles in that effort, even managing to overturn the Screen Writers Guild’s decision to award sole credit to Bradbury.

Decades later, the two wrote accounts in which their initial admiration yielded to disgruntlement. In his 1980 memoir An Open Book, Huston confessed to bewilderment about an author terrified by airplanes and fast cars even though his fiction inspired authors, astronomers and astronauts to dream of the stars.

Bradbury responded first with the 1984 short story “The Banshee,” which depicted a screenwriter tormented by a womanizing, sadistic famous director on his remote Irish screen, then nearly a decade later with Green Shadows, White Whale (1992), whose title and quasi-fictional format recalled an earlier screenwriter’s account of working with Huston on location, Peter Viertel’s White Hunter, Black Heart.

Perhaps the most satisfaction that Bradbury derived from adaptations of his work came with The Ray Bradbury Theater, a Canadian-American anthology series that ran for six seasons on cable TV. The series was nominated 10 times and won six for the coveted ACE (Award for Cable Excellence) from 1985 to 1992.

As executive producer and chief contributor to the series, Bradbury took a page from Serling in hosting the show. Unlike his estranged friend, his introductions framed the fantasy elements of the show squarely within his own creative process:

"People ask, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Well, right here.  All this is my Martian landscape.  Somewhere in this room is an African veldt. Just beyond perhaps is a small Illinois town where I grew up. And I'm surrounded on every side by my magician’s toyshop. I'll never starve here. I just look around, find what I need, and begin. I'm Ray Bradbury, and this is The Ray Bradbury Theater. Well then, right now, what shall it be? Out of all this, what do I choose to make a story? I never know where the next one will take me. The trip, exactly one half exhilaration, exactly one half terror.”

Bradbury’s passing in 2012, at the age of 91, elicited an affectionate and admiring post about the author by Nina Munteanu on the Scribophile writing blog.

Quote of the Day (Ursula Le Guin, With Inspiration for the Day)

“Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.”— American sci-fi/fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), “Science Fiction and the Future,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (2017)

This Day in Literary History (Birth of Isaac Asimov, Sci-Fi Icon and Prolific Polymath)

Jan. 2, 1920— Isaac Asimov, who went beyond influencing generations of sci-fi readers by also pouring out a near-endless series of volumes on biochemistry, history and literature, was born in Petrovichi, Russia.

In science fiction, Asimov is considered one of the masters, with much of his fame resting on his Foundation Series. In this trilogy, he coined the term “robotics,” referring to the technology that robots (the machines originally described by Czech playwright Karel Capek) possess, and even expounded on “The Three Laws of Robotics.”

I have a confession to make here: My last immersion in literary science-fiction was during one quarter of a high school English class, where the genre was described in the phrase “Alternative Futures.” 

Since then, my exposure to the genre has come at the hands of TV and film. (Think of fare as basic as The Twilight Zone, The Invaders, Star Trek, and Star Wars.) I can’t weigh in, then, on Asimov’s ultimate place in this type of fiction, or how he rates compared to contemporaries such as Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison.

But that’s not to say I never read Asimov. In middle school and high school, I devoured his histories (The Egyptians) and literary analyses (Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare). It astonished me that he could range far beyond his chosen field of biochemistry while still writing works that consistently intrigued and educated readers.

So wide-ranging were his interests that it was hard to find a section in any library that did not feature one of his books. Altogether, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. A few friends have told me that I am a prolific blogger, but—Irish Puritan that I am—I continually reproach myself for sloth when I consider the lifetime achievement of Asimov.

Amazingly, he might have written considerably more works if death hadn’t claimed him. By 1979, he had already surpassed 200 books—meaning that in the last 13 years left him, when age and illness are usually slowing writers down, he had actually quickened his pace. 

What curtailed his output and his life simultaneously was a blood transfusion after a 1983 triple bypass operation which, nobody realized at the time, was infected with HIV, which later progressed to full-blown AIDS.  Only a decade after his death did his family confirm that the heart and kidney failure reported to have led to his demise had actually resulted from AIDS.

At times, it may have seemed like Asimov worked like a man with something to prove. If his immigrant background didn’t inspire that instinct, then it surely came from an uphill but necessary struggle to establish his academic credibility.

Astonishingly, this future distinguished man of literature was denied admission, at least initially, by virtually every school to which he applied:

*At the age of 15, his application to Columbia College was initially rejected because the school’s meager quota for Jews had already been filled up. 

*When he finally made it to the school, it was because he had already demonstrated his ability at Columbia-affiliated Seth Low Junior College, enabling him to transfer to the Ivy League institution when the junior college closed. 

*After earning his degree as an undergrad, he was rejected by each of the five New York medical schools to which he applied. 

Prejudice and detractors’ willfulness fueled Asimov’s desire for achievement, while also spurring him to write an essay increasingly cited in recent years. In a January 21, 1980 column for Newsweek, he complained bitterly about a “ A Cult of Ignorance” in the United States: 

"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’"

With biting irony, Asimov also observed about a worrisome new neologism: “People who are not members of the intellectual elite don’t know what an ‘elitist’ is or how to pronounce the word.”