The New Ray Bradbury Review

Vol. 1, No. 1 of The New Ray Bradbury Review, a forthcoming serial published by The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis) is scheduled to be released in Spring 2008.

The first issue will focus on “Ray Bradbury and Adaptation" and its cover and table of contents are posted on the Center’s website. We’re looking forward to reading the piece “Juvenilia: Bradbury’s Comic Adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

Meanwhile, here’s a couple of other Bradbury items worth reading. First, Graham Sleight's "Yesterday's Tomorrows" column from the October 2007 issue of Locus Magazine, which looks at classic works by Bradbury, including The Martian Chronicles (1950).

Second, a nostalgic passage from “Tarzan, John Carter, Mr. Burroughs, and the Long Mad Summer of 1930,” Bradbury’s introduction to Edgar Rice Burroughs: the Man Who Created Tarzan, a beast of a book by Irwin Porges (1975):

You see my problem was Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan and John Carter, Warlord of Mars.

Problem, you ask. That doesn’t sound like much of a problem.

Oh, but it was. You see, I couldn’t stop reading those books. I couldn’t stop memorizing them line by line and page by page. Worst of all, when I saw my friends, I couldn’t stop my mouth. The words just babbled out. Tarzan this and Jane that, John Carter here and Dejah Thoris there. And when it wasn’t those incredible people it was Tanar of Pellucidar or I was making noises like a tyrannosaurs rex and behaving like a Martian thoat, which, everyone knows, has eight legs.

Do you begin to understand why Waukegan, Illinois, in the summer of 1930 was so long, so excruciating, so unbearable for everyone?

Everyone, that is, save me. ...

Pictured above: The original Ray Bradbury Review, a collection of Bradbury material edited by William F. Nolan and published privately as a softcover chapbook in 1952. The book was reprinted as a hardcover by Graham Press in 1988.