Backlisted - The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

Episode Date: July 22, 2019

Ray Bradbury's uncanny tales are the subject of this episode of Backlisted. John and Andy are joined by author and literary editor of The Spectator Sam Leith and writer and radio presenter Jennifer Lucy Allan. Also under discussion are Jay Bernard's poetry collection Surge and On Chapel Sands, the new memoir by art critic Laura Cumming.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)5'44 - On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming11'48 Surge by Jay Bernard18'12 - The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. John, you're looking well Thank you I have been assaulted by insects this week, Andy. Bees.

I keep bees, as you know. Nature's worst. I was going to collect a swarm that was already hived up by this elderly rather marvellous man called Jim Wiggins who is one of those people who Jim's been keeping bees forever and, of course, never has any fail or anything just go little bees they'll be fine you just get that you know stuff it in grass in the front of the hive stip stip a bit of baling twine over the top and you can take it home but come in the evening he said don't come when they're out so i said no of course

i know bees well enough not to try and do anything with them when they're active so get there. And, of course, it was an evening, but it was warm, sultry, and the bees were still quite a few of them around the hive. So I had a sort of light linen shirt on, no veil, no gloves. So I just thought, oh, there can't be that many of them. Started stuffing. Immediately got stung on my hand and then more.

Got one caught in my beard, another one stung me on the cheek. I'm looking at your cheek and thinking it stung me on the cheek. So one side of my face swallowed, my hand was like a balloon. I mean, I'm looking a lot better than I looked yesterday. But the only problem was I found the antihistamine. You've had this. It makes you really sleepy. So I don't know. We're about to talk about a collection of stories.

I don't know whether the stories are... I've actually read all the stories. I read a lot of these stories this week and I'm not sure whether I'm actually remembering them correctly or they're sort of merged into dreams. But maybe that's the effect that the author wanted. And you? You've been sick as a dog this week.

I've been sick as a dog this week. There's not much to it. I'm read naturally. You can't see this, but Andy is looking... He's looking... Emaciated. Pale. Yeah.

Even my wife, who has encouraged me for many years to lose a bit of weight, was clicking her disapproving tongue and going, God's sake, eat a pizza. God's sake, look at you. You've overdone it now because of... Have you hit the target weight? I have.

I'm no longer dieting. But you might be dying. Yeah, sadly. The diet might be all too successful, straight to zero. You're only going to look this good for a very short period of time. What a way to go. You need a hearty weekend away in the countryside recording Backlisted at Port Elliot.

Oh, well, we're going on too long. We can't talk about that yet. Shall we start? Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us in Wisconsin at dusk in the early 1950s. A man walking towards us, his shirt removed and his body covered in what looked like coloured tattoos. But as we draw closer, we see that the images covering his skin, rockets, fountains, people, are moving. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.

Joining us today is Sam Leith. Hello, Sam. Hello, Andy. I have met you before. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. Sam is the literary editor of The Spectator and the host of their books podcast. Their excellent books podcast. It is very good. Thank you very much.

And his most recent book is Right to the Point. Right to the Point. W-R. I never choose my own titles. How to be clear, correct and persuasive on the page. And he's currently trying to write a month-by-month chronicle of 2019 in Rhyme Royal. What is Rhyme Royal? Forgive my ignorance. Rhyme Royal. Well, I realised that nobody was going to take 10,000 lines of heroic couplets.

You know, the appetite has gone. So I thought I'd think of a stanza instead. And the stanza that I wanted to do, I thought Alden's letter to Lord Byron. And so I went, what's he done that in? It must be the Byron stanza. But it wasn't. It's rhyme royal, which is A-B-A-B-B-C-C.

And I'm now really fucking sick. Trying to find rhymes for Farage. Oh, God, yes. And when do you deliver? Well, I deliver in the second week of November, which means that December might be slightly thin in terms of incident. Our second guest is Jennifer Lucy Allen. Hello.

Hello. Jen is a writer on sound and music who has just submitted a PhD. It's okay, you can laugh. Thank you. A PhD on foghorns. That is correct. And that is an instrumental part of why you've joined us today to talk about whoever we're going to talk about.

Yes, it is. We'll explain in due course. And she'll be turning the PhD into a book for Lee Braxton's new imprint at Orion. She runs the record label Arclight Editions, is an occasional presenter of BBC Radio 3's Lake Junction and writes regularly for The Wire, The Guardian, The Quietus and others. And the book that Sam and Jen are here to talk to us about

is The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, a collection of 18 stories first published by Doubleday in 1951. That's not what it says on your script, appropriately enough. It says first published by Doubleday in the year 1,009,521. Typing this at the last minute, surely not. First published by Doubleday in 1951, which was nominated for the International Fantasy Award in 1952. But before we plunge into interstellar freefall, Andy, what have you been reading?

I've been reading a book by Laura Cumming called On Chapel Sands, subtitled My Mother and Other Missing Persons. Laura has been our guest on Backlisted, so we must state that interest. She was here to talk about Jane Gardham's A Long Way from Verona, which is one of my favourite books that we have done on this podcast over the years. And we also talked about her last book, The Vanishing Man, about the Lathqueth. Yes. On episode five of Backlisted, way back when we did Christy Murray's own double entry with David Quantic. That book had just come out. Amazing.

That's how long we've been going. 90 episodes ago. had just come out. Amazing. That's how long we've been going. 90 episodes ago. So this book came out a couple of weeks ago, a bit more, maybe a month. I reviewed this for Sam at The Spectator and... It's getting very incestuous. Well, I was really blown away by it, you know. The book's been getting uniformly brilliant reviews. You don't have to trust me. You can trust Professor John Carey or you can trust Craig Brown or you can trust Blake Morrison, who have, I think, responded to a real culmination in what Laura Cumming has been doing in her writing up to this point.

That was certainly how I felt about the book. It seemed that she had found a way of marrying her skills as an art critic with a personal story that she had been waiting many years to write. It felt like the kind of book that somebody limbers up for by writing other books and then they get to do the one they really want to do. I don't want to give too much of it away. It starts on Chapel Sands, as the title suggests, with a young girl playing about 100 years ago away from her parents. When her parents look up, she isn't there anymore. her parents look up, she isn't there anymore. And she turns up several days later in a village. She's returned to her parents. Everybody knows what happened. Nobody will say anything about it. And it takes approximately 50 years for anyone to begin to tell the girl, who is Laura Cummings' mother,

what happened to her, not only in those three days, but why she was taken and why nobody would talk about it. So the book takes superficially that kind of mystery story and what Laura does is apply a kind of art critic's forensic eye to family photographs, to her mother's written accounts of what happened, and to history and local history and local archive, to build up a picture to try and find out what happened, who her mother is, and therefore who she is.

And she doesn't solve that mystery until the final page of the book. What I loved about it is it seemed like the work of someone who was extremely good at what they do. And every type of writing in the book is A grade. And the structure of the book is magnificent. It sounds like I present it as a gimmick there, the holding back the reveal till the very last page of the book, but it's the culmination of the book and the themes of the book more than the narrative of the book. It's absolutely wonderful. That's why I don't want to say too much about it. I'd just like to read a little bit

here about certain chapters are based around paintings and Bruegel's landscape with the fall of Icarus is a painting that was in the Cummings house the first image my mother ever owned it was cut out of an art book and stuck on a piece of cardboard and put on the wall. And there is a sentence here that I think is as brilliant and true and easy and profound as anything that I've read this year. So I'll just give you a taste. My parents had hundreds of images in the house,

photographs, scissor from newspapers, reproductions pinned to walls, postcards from distant galleries sent by their friends. Growing up, I collected these in a shoebox, beginning with the cave paintings of Lascaux and ending, I seem to think, with Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, sent by an American student of my father's all the way from Chicago. But the Bruegel was special, sacred, a world both light and dark and mesmerising, plainly a narrative that any child could follow and yet powerfully strange even to adults.

It hung in the hall and then in the kitchen and eventually in the small cottage in the Scottish borders where my parents later went to live. We looked at it by night and by day, by chance and on purpose, on the way to and from school, over meals, on our way upstairs to bed. And then she goes on to say, pictures in time and place and in the context of our own lives we cannot see them otherwise and then she goes on to say landscape with the fall of Icarus was an object as well as an image now that that is the phrase that for me I thought whoa that's such a simple such a simple idea such a deep idea, so profoundly expressed,

right at the heart of what the book is about. What is the book about? The book is how we interpret imagery of all kinds in our lives, our day-to-day lives, and in our histories of ourselves, our families, who we think we are, even if who we think we are isn't right because we're not interpreting the picture correctly. And that is published by Chateau and Windus for £18.99. John, what have you been reading this week?

Well, I've been reading a collection of poetry by J. Bernard called Surge, also, as it happens, published by Chateau and Windus, of poetry by Jay Bernard called Surge, also as it happens published by Chatter and Windus, which I first heard about or was made aware of on a start of the week with Kate Clanchy, whose book about teaching I raved about on a recent Backlisted. And Jay Bernard was on that programme and read a couple of pieces and talked about this collection. And it struck me very forcefully as something that I would love to read then went and bought it and read it and the background to it is an actual historical event Jay Bernard was researching at the George Padmore Institute looking into the events of 1981 the new

crossfire in which 12 young black teenagers were burnt to death. Not enough people know about the new crossfire. That's one of the reasons for the book. Not enough people know that it wasn't investigated well. Not enough people know that it led to a massive march across Blackfriars Bidge, which was apparently the journalists were leaning out of Fleet Street and spitting on them as they went past. That year was also the year shortly after that

that Brixton riots happened. So the book is on one level an act of investigation, of looking into the facts of the case, and indeed through the volume, the first-hand testimonies of people who were there, of the relatives of the teenagers who died. So there's a research element to it. But what Jay Bernard does brilliantly is link that with now, links it with Brexit, links it with the Grenfell Tower, links it with the Windrush scandal. So it's both an attempt to preserve and investigate the wrong that was done in 1981, but also links it in a way to the same

problems that are occurring now. So it's a very contemporary book. Out of the amazing kind of culture that we have of performance poetry and of poetry being read and discussed and shared far more than it's been, I think, in a generation. This volume seems to me to work as well. Listening to Start the Week and J. Bernard reading is extraordinary because there's a lot of music, there's a lot of patois, there's a lot of stuff that you would expect to come from somebody who's an accomplished performance poet. But these poems are also exquisite and precise and complex

and they kind of attempt to tell historical truth through kind of the refracted different experiences, different voices, different registers. They say about the difficulty of finding words that we are facing an adjectival crisis as much as anything else. How do we speak and from what position and how can we ensure that we are heard not only by those who oppose us but by our allies who are also lost for words. So the book is an attempt to give words back to the dead. They say I am haunted by this history but I also haunt it back. That sense of them going back into history and reconstructing it is, I'll read you one short

poem which gives you it gives you the flavor hiss going in when the firefighters left was like standing on a black beach with the sea suspended in the walls suit suds like a conglomerate of flies. You kick the weeds and try to piece it back. Fractured shell, a bone, bloated antennae, flesh-thigh spindle, gangrenous pet fish, an eye or a tiny glaring stone, a seal's tongue or the sour sinew yoking front and hind fin, vertebrae or fetters, bedsheet or slave skin. The black is coming in from the cold, rolling up the beach walls, looking for light. It will enter you if you stand there and spend the rest of its time inside you, asking what it was, what it was, what it was, in a vivid hiss heard only by your bones. I really love this book.

In my summer-long attempt to read all poetry ever written, ever written. I picked this up in Foyles in Stratford in Westfield. Hello. If you're the lovely booksellers there who said very nice things about Batlisted, hello if you're listening. I said I would say on air that you're the best bookshop in London and you are the best bookshop in London this week. Thank you very much.

This week. Don't interrogate it. So they had a copy of Surgeon's Stock. I picked it up. And actually, John, I totally agree with you. What you were saying about it bringing the best of both performance poetry and I don't know what term is not going to offend someone, authentic poetry. Well, I was a great row last year.

It seems to me that's exactly what this book does. It manages to do both those things brilliantly. Yeah, one of the glories of it, I think, is that it's beautiful on the page, the line breaks, knowing how to lay a poem out on the page, something I'm sure, Sam, you're in the middle of doing that right now. Writing a formal verse is kind of easy. Just keep going to the end of the line.

I've got 14 syllables, right? I haven't offended you, Sam, but surely it's you who are uniting the conditions of performance poetry and traditional verse. Precisely, yes. We'll put that on the front jacket. We're both also big fans of the perseverance by roman anthropos i think there is uh i do feel that there is a lot of extraordinary poetry being written and uh surge is i mean i think it was ali smith so there's an almost an

orden like simplicity to it yeah yes but you know that you know as we say simple is the hardest thing to do in anything, certainly in poetry. But, yeah, no, hugely recommended. We've talked about books enough. Now for some capitalism. I don't care if the writer can't write. I don't give a damn what the style is. Teachers and librarians forget the function of literature.

It's to pull us like taffy, to raise our souls, to make us want to live forever. Go! 600 short stories. Well. Or more. Or less. We just don't, nobody knows.

I think that's the answer. 27 novels? It's, again, there's a... Possibly. Yeah, possibly. It's a... Yeah, it's a... And one of the novels is really a kind of thinly veiled autobiography,

is it not? We're talking about Ray Bradbury. The great, I mean, I think we can call him the great Ray Bradbury. He would say. He would agree. He would definitely agree. I would agree, Dan. And we are talking about The Illustrated Man, which is just one collection of the many collections of stories that the great Ray Bradbury produced during his career. And this was the suggestion of Sam. Sam, when did you first read The Illustrated Man, or the stories in The Illustrated Man, or the stories in the British edition of The Illustrated Man, which are different from the stories in the American edition of The Illustrated Man? I mean,

from the stories in the American edition of the Illustrator. I mean, the thing about Ray Bradbury is even understanding what one book is is a challenge because the contents are quite slippery. They are. That was a very long question. Get used to it. I remember, I mean, exactly as you say, Ray Bradbury is a vast, swirling kind of ocean of bits and pieces of which each book is a kind of ladle full. And I started, I have a really clear memory.

I was sort of probably 11 or 12. It's my parents' old house. There was a playroom with a wooden floor and bookshelves all around the wall, which was where my parents had, you know, this huge collection of 1970s paperback books into which I delved. And that was where I discovered all those books that nobody reads anymore, like, you know, Harold Robbins, where I learnt about sex,

which was kind of helpful, I'm sure, coming up on backlisted. You know, people like Robertson Davis, lots of John Fowles, you know, essentially a kind of backlisted. Go on, let's have another one. You know, people like Robertson Davis. Coming up on backlisted. John Fowles. Coming up on backlisted. I mean, essentially a kind of backlisted archive. A pre-Korg archive, like Ray Bradbury. A pre-Korg archive. And one of the things I found, actually,

I think my dad directed me to, was this amazing two-volume collection, a kind of large double ladle full of Bradbury, which was, I don't, it was again, 70s paperback publisher. Was it kind of Corgi or was it Galanx or Fontana or, you know, Grafton, which we've got the Illustrated Man edition we've got here. You know, one of those sort of semi-forgotten paperback publishers

of the 70s and 80s. And it was a two-volume collected stories of Ray Bradbury. And I remember it so clearly because there was a... Volume one was red and yellow, and had a big yellow numeral one and red background, and volume two was green on yellow. And they were like nothing I'd read before at all. So I come, you know, to talk about Bradbury, not praise him with a sort of austere literary critical hat on, but as

a straightforward fan. I mean, what I loved about him was that each story, he didn't have a sort of Bradbury world or Bradbury universe in which a sort of self consistent mythos in which all these stories took place. Every story invented a world from scratch, and they shared lots of elements, they shared lots of elements they shared lots of themes but there were horror stories there were fantasy stories there were lots of stories about mars or space or dinosaurs that it was basically for a kind of geeky teenager like me like comics like stephen king suddenly this was a motherlode that was a justifiably long answer it was it was jen you said something when we were warming up about bradbury which i thought was brilliant in terms of it's kind of relating to what sam how sam was just defining

ray bradbury then i wonder if you could lead us into that by telling us how you first read ray bradbury or when when and why well i'm not sure if this is what you were thinking of but actually sam's answer there links to where i remember reading him first and i think i was a lot older because my first full-time job was in a huge retail park bookshop in stockport which in in south southeast manchester um appeal center um and it was a borders and it had a starbucks and it was the most exotic thing ever. And, you know, it stayed open till like 10pm. And anyway, I got a straight out of my A-levels. I have been in that very shop.

Have you? I used to work in the back. It does not exist anymore. Sadly. And I worked, my first full-time job after working in pubs and restaurants and stuff as an 18-year-old was working in the inventory department in the back there. And so we took the books off the pallets and put stickers on them and put them on the shelves but everyone in that back room when I was 18 was a bit older than me and had various specialisms and I took to borrowing things from people but actually what I really got

into was kind of plowing through the like classics of sci-fi but in terms of I was really going headfirst into HG Wells and I remember reading Fahrenheit 451 and John Wyndham and I still read a lot of sci-fi. That's my favourite leisure time reading. But while I was there, I also used to look after the children's section and people would come in and say, I also looked after the children's section in Islington Borders for a while. I hope you never brought

your children to my story time. I wish I could go back in time maybe I can. People would come in and say my child reads a lot and they've read all the things from their age they've read all the things from young adult what can I send them to and I used to send people straight to Ray Bradbury and John Wyndham and HG Wells because they were these stories that had so much going on but they have absolutely nothing x-rated in them ever they're very kind of puritanical and they're all about ideas and there's not actually that much complex psychology and they are often not clearly in that quantity not always but they are often either about children or they are or they are seen

through the eye of a child that's one of Bradbury's recurring themes so I can see and for the adolescents as well so I can see that that's a really good he's terrific booksellers recommendation children not at all I mean there's no more often yeah well. Well, normally I would give you a potted biography of Ray Bradbury, but I'm not going to do that. We have several clips from an early 60s interview with Bradbury conducted by a very specific interviewer. And, Nicky, could you play clip one so we could hear Ray's CV? Are you a Ray Bradbury?

Yes, sir. Where are you from, Ray? Waukegan, Illinois. Waukegan? How long ago? 35 years. 35. Well, Jack Benny was born in Waukegan about that time. Did you happen to know Jack? No, no. I don't know him, but my mother went to school with Jack. By that dirty crook. What kind of a job do you have, Ray? I'm a writer.

What kind of a writer? Pony Express? Motorcycle? Or what? Writer. W-R-I-T-E-R. Oh, that's very refreshing. A writer who can spell.

You say you can't be much of a writer. What have you written besides notes to the milkman? Well, a number of books, one called Fahrenheit 451, one called The Martian Chronicles,

another called The Golden Apples of the Sun, all from Doubleday. A lot of short stories for The New Yorker, The Post, Collier's, magazines of that sort well you're a real successful writer well have you done any other writing besides science fiction and

short stories yes i've done one screenplay the screenplay of moby dick for john houston really well that was a whale of a job wasn't it i think groucho marx's underrated talents as an interviewer there. Well, no, we learnt something, didn't we? We learnt that it's not Fahrenheit 451, it's Fahrenheit 451, according to the author. That was very disappointing to me. It's a massive error.

Everybody knows this, that the books do not... It should be Celsius 451 or 451. Fahrenheit 451 is not... Will it just make them warm? So it should be Celsius 451 or 451. Fahrenheit 451 is not. Will it just make them warm? So it should be 451 Celsius. Celsius, yeah. So let's do the rewrite. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, exactly.

The pedantically correct edition of Celsius 451, approximately. Do you think he did that just to, you know, put the Nazis off? The thing is, when it was put to Bradbury that it was incorrect, he went, sure. Yeah, he didn't mind. I made it up. I don't write fiction. So he likes science, but he likes to sort of play with it.

He's not bothered about being accurate. And, you know, if you think about the make-up of Mars and the people, he's not interested in making Martians a plausible race on Mars and their cities to be realistic or something. I mean, did what's so-called hard SF even exist when he was writing? I shouldn't have thought it did, really. I mean, you know, kind of later on you get people like Larry Niven who's really thinking hard about what the gravity of a neutron star

would do to a spaceship but you see Bradbury is just like He says though specifically that he doesn't consider himself a science fiction writer that he considered what he wrote as fantasy which is interesting that he makes that distinction I don't know whether that was just because sci-fi

SF whatever it was called at that point was seen as being a bit more down market or whether it was... There is a really interesting point. His story's kind of... I mean, we would now call fantasy things that have got wizards in it, but... The thing is, the place these stories come from

is more exotic and far away, I think, than we think it is. So we think of him as a writer of short stories. The short story is a form that will be collected in books. In fact, of course, his first short story is published in the mid-30s. Yeah. And it's published in a magazine called Imagination. And the big publishers of his stories from the mid-30s to the mid-50s are amazing stories and weird tales. Magazines like that.

Bradbury's fascinating because he's a bridge between several things. One of the things he's a bridge between is from H.P. Lovecraft to the era of cinema, for instance. No, that's not quite right, to the era of comic books. He is the guy who takes us from Cthulhu through to Spider-Man and clearly is a big influence. I think Bradbury's greatest influence is, I mean, maybe as a writer, but more as somebody who invents a lot of big popular culture tropes from the second half of the 20th century. You know, I can see several real primal myths here for things that become whole genres in their own right. It's true. I mean, somebody said, you know,

the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. I think Bradbury was, that was Bradbury's approach to stories, wasn't it? Just write lots and lots and lots of stories. I have to say, the choosing of this book, I'd never read this collection before, Sam, so I'm intrigued as to why this selection, which is, I have to say, brilliant. But it also has the weirdest frame of any collection of stories.

It does. Well, we should talk about the form, shouldn't we? Because it is what gets called a kind of fix-up, I think. Let me read the blurb. Yes, that's a good place to start. Yeah, and then we can try and explain the blurb. He was a big man, massive, and every inch of him was illustrated. Even that is terrible.

What was that word? When his flesh twitched, the colours burned in three dimensions and the people moved, the tiny mouths flickered and the voices rose, small and muted. 16 illustrations, 16 tales, brackets, in this edition. The first illustration quivered and came to life, dot, dot, dot. That's all it says. It sort of backs up what Sam was saying about being able to pull it

off the shelf with no knowledge of even the genre that it might be and be captivated by the idea you were going to get all this. It just spoke David Lynch to me, that kind of strange man of coming out of a landscape and then fuck. Yeah, and also he's kind of, you know, he's one bit of Bradbury, which is the carnival comes to town, the something wicked this way comes thing, the scary, you know, alien strange presence blowing into, you know,

the equivalent of walking in a noise. And yet the illustration man claims in the introduction that he's got his tattoos from a time traveller. So it's instantly this sort of SF thing intruding into it and it's mashed up right at the root of it. Yeah, there is that feeling that it is kind of a grab bag of stuff right from the outset. To the extent that I think the story,

the full story called The Illustrated Man doesn't appear in this edition of The Illustrated Man. It's not in The Illustrated Man. You're beginning to see the pattern. There is a story called The Illustrated Man doesn't appear in this edition of the Illustrated Man. It's not in the Illustrated Man. You're beginning to see the pattern. There is a story called the Illustrated Man that isn't in. Great. So, Jen, what were you saying earlier? You say a brilliant thing about Bradbury not so much being a writer as?

Because I don't think I've ever read so much in such a concentrated period. What you notice is that the ideas and the themes, like you were saying saying he's a writer with lots of ideas i feel like i'm in like a ray bradbury brainstorm meeting with ray bradbury talking to ray bradbury yeah and there's just lots of ray bradbury's all all just like whacking on a big whiteboard like being john malkovich it's very much like a network of stories that you can connect.

Like there's the sort of little amoeba of an idea for Fahrenheit 451 in Usher 2. In Usher 2, yes, absolutely. And there's other things, like the veld kind of crops up in various bits and pieces of stories, like this playroom, basically. And these things all connect together and he often does it better i was just thinking i was just reading of his marionette's

ink in that which is it which is a slightly better version of um i think of if you're going to do you know kind of ai humans humans being machines and the recent in McEwan novel, which I have a feeling McEwan must have read Marinette's Inc. Because getting the smells of the, he famously calls his, what have you called it, robot, so smells like the back of an old television. There is something that I'm really struck by reading it again is how much sensory information there is. So for me, like lots of the and what

makes it so easy to read like it was easy to cram all this actually because they're all the all the sort of um scene setting is often all this like really quite psychedelic visual sensory stuff it's not they're not psychodramas they're not really social or psychological actually especially in like the dinosaur stories there is there is some wonder they're all falling through space oh that's amazing great story and it's such a brilliant idea and then they're kind of having arguments and they're kind of making up as they as they confront their mortality i think that's actually got my favourite line in the whole book in it. The set-up is that the rocket has been flying through space,

a lot of rockets in these stories. Lots of rockets. It's been hit by a meteor, and it kind of explodes, and they're all in their spacesuits, and they're all flying off in different directions according to the basic rules of particle physics, but their communicators are still working. So one of them's heading for Mars, one of them's heading for Mars,

one of them's heading for deep space. And while they're still talking, they start arguing. And the captain, basically, they get a bit shirty with the captain, probably because he's crashed the spaceship. And the captain cut in, that's enough of that. We've got to figure out a way out of this. Captain, why don't you shut up, said Applegate. What?

You heard me, Captain. Don't pull your rank on me. You're 10,000 miles away by now, and let's not kid ourselves. As Stimson puts it, it's a long way down. See here, Applegate. Can it. This is a mutiny of one. I haven't a damn thing to lose. Your ship was a bad ship, and you were a bad captain.

And I hope you break when you hit the moon. I think there's as a writer, Bradbury has something of the quality of trollop about him, which is to say he didn't rewrite much. I very much get, well, this is one of the things I find fascinating about him. He is a very American kind of, he described, he liked to describe himself as a magician,

but he also in interviews described himself as a salesman in the terms that he would say, I'm selling you the idea. I'm really good at selling you the idea. And that is what he is. He's that hardworking guy. He works every day, wrote every day. It's all part of his myth. I get out there.

Without fail. Without fail. I work hard. I sell the story. But, you know, pitch, pitch, pitch. It's like that haunting thing about Trollope that he'd finish, he'd work for two hours every morning before he went to the post office for his day job.

And if he finished one book 15 minutes before the two hours, he'd simply turn over the page and start the next novel. It's terrifying. On that productivity, Michael Holroyd once told me the most terrifying thing about Bernard Shaw. He said Bernard Shaw, with his secretaries, because he was dictating, that productivity michael holroyd once told me the most terrifying thing about bernard shaw he said bernard shaw with his secretaries because he was dictating could actually write more words in a day than michael holroyd could read and he said if you if you were the biographer and you have to do you have to read everything he's just so you know it nearly broke i mean it was that is a kind of

bullheads problem isn't it? Jenny, we're talking about what kind of writer was Bradbury, right? When we read him now, what kind of writer is he? This is Bradbury from 1989. He's just been asked to talk about what kind of writer he is. I don't care if the writer can't write. I don't give a damn what the style is. Teachers and librarians forget the function of literature.

It's to pull us like taffy, to raise our souls, to make us want to live forever. Maybe I was born a freak. The more I see of life, the more I believe we are genetically set from the instant of birth to be what we are. But I believe I was born to be me. Do you ever think you were born out of time? No, just perfect, absolute perfection. I've had the greatest life I've ever known. I can't think of anyone I've ever known more fortunate than myself because I have two gifts.

Number one, the gift God gave me. Number two, having enough sense to use it. And I know a lot of people who have great gifts and don't use them, and that is a sin against God. Wow. He's a bit like listening to Willie Loman if he was an author. Successful. So, Gem, what was the story that particularly grabbed you in The Illustrated Man? Well, you know, it's possible to talk about lots of them,

but the one that actually struck out as something slightly different somehow to me was the city because it seemed to come from a lot more of a fantastical imaginary space and maybe that's because I'm more used to the tropes of space and aliens and the mystery tropes that I recognize you know from you know Poe or HG Wells, but the city seemed to have this kind of strange magic realism about it almost, or maybe just magic, I don't know. Pitch the listeners, the city. What is it? Well, it's a city that's been there for centuries, waiting to take revenge on men from Earth who decimated their planet. 20,000 years, isn't it?

Yeah, and the city is a living thing and it has complete sensory organs, but they are all operated in this kind of sort of like almost steam power. Everything's sprocketed and they're like aluminium and brass and it senses things. So I'll read a bit. The city waited with its windows and its black obsidian walls

and its sky towers and its unpenanted turrets with its untrod streets and its untouched doorknobs with not a scrap of paper or a fingerprint upon it. The city waited while the planet arced in space following its orbit about a blue-white sun and the seasons passed from ice to fire and back to ice while the planet arced in space, following its orbit about a blue-white sun. And the seasons passed from ice to fire and back to ice and then to green fields and yellow summer meadows. It was on a summer afternoon in the middle of the 20,000th year

that the city ceased waiting. In the sky, a rocket appeared. The rocket soared over, turned, came back and landed in the shale meadow 50 yards from the obsidian wall. There were booted footsteps in the thin grass and calling voices from men within the rocket to men without. Ready? All right men, careful, into the city. Jensen, you and Hutchinson patrol ahead. Keep a sharp eye. The city opened secret nostrils in its black walls and a steady suction vent deep in the body of the city drew storms of air back

through channels, through thistle filters and dust collectors, to a fine and tremblingly delicate series of coils and webs which glowed with silver light. Again and again the immense suctions occurred, again and again the odours from the meadow were borne upon warm winds into the city. Fire odour, the scent of a fallen meteor, hot metal, a ship has come from another world, the brass smell, the dusty fire smell of burned powder, sulphur and rocket brimstone. This information stamped on tapes which sprocketed into slots, slid down through yellow cogs into further machines. Click, chack, chack, chack. A calculator made the sound of a metronome. Five, six, seven, eight, nine. Nine men. An instantaneous typewriter inked this message on tape,

which slithered and vanished. Clickety, click, chack, chack. The city awaited the soft tread of their rubberoid boots. The great city nostrils dilated again. The smell of butter in the city air from the stalking men, faintly, the aura which wafted to the great nose, broke down into memories of milk, cheese, ice cream, butter, the effluvium of a dairy economy. Click, click. Careful, men. Jones, get your gun out.

Don't be a fool. The city's dead. Why worry? You can't tell. Now, at the barking talk, the ears awoke. After centuries of listening to winds that blew small and faint, of hearing leaves stripped from trees and grass grow softly in the time of melting snows, now the ears oiled themselves in a self-lubrication, drew taut, great drums upon which the heartbeat of the invaders might pummel and

thud delicately as the tremor of a gnat's wing the ears listened and the nose siphoned up great chambers of odor wow the effluvium of the dairy economy that's pure lovecraft actually that's the sort of uh slightly convoluted over phrase. You know, it's good writing, come on. He can really do it when he wants to. I think also he gets away sometimes with overdoing, you know, this amazing sexual description. You'll see a whole paragraph of

a really lyrical riff on something. And I think that's a perfect conjunction of a writer who's trying to get up to the word count because he's selling writing by the yard in this old pulp kind of pulp magazine format you know he's got to get 3 000 words so he'll do a paragraph description but he's good enough to get away with it and it can be over the top but you go actually this is kind of a good paragraph even though you don't need it

this is the story of um the inaccurately titled fahrenheit 45. He wrote it as a long short story as a 20,000 word short story, which he wrote in nine days. And a publisher after it came out in one of those magazines, a publisher approached him and says, Could you add 20,000 words to this? And we'll put it out as a novel. He said, Sure. And he took another nine days, and he wrote 20,000 words more. And he took another nine days and he wrote 20,000 words more. And actually, I don't know how recently any of you have read Fahrenheit 451. I read it a couple of, maybe last year. It's a brilliant, a fantastic example of a book,

the central idea of which is so strong, it's passed into history, allowing the actual problems with the book itself, which are that it was written in 18 days in two chunks, and you can really tell. It almost doesn't matter because the power of the myth in the 20th century is so strong, the cultural myth of it, that the book shouldn't be the secondary issue. And yet I'm wrong because millions of people have read it and love it. It was a set text, I think, wasn't it, for a while?

I'm sure it was a set text at some point. It's funny, it seems to be slightly, like lots of Bradbury, slightly in eclipse. I mean, you think of the kind of the dystopias that we like to talk about. You know, Handmaid's Tale has definitely come up on the inside as probably joint number one now with 1984. You know, Brave New World's a bit behind that. And of the great dystopias,

it feels like it's kind of lagging in fourth place. I think that's because... So, I watched for this the 2018 remake of Fahrenheit 451 with Michael Shannon and Michael B. Jordan, and I would have to say that it is terrible. It's not sorted. Thank you for your candour. Michael B. Jordan, and I would have to say that it is terrible. Thank you for your candour. I love a terrible sci-fi film, but the reason it doesn't stand up is because you realise watching it,

they try to build the internet into this script. At one point, Michael B. Jordan smashes a computer monitor that is uploading books to a sort of internet and actually that just doesn't make sense because you can't eliminate things so the idea of like taking books away and replacing them with tv and knowledge being outlawed like that you know is completely incomprehensible at the end of the film, they send the entire sort of body of published, you know, all of the e-books, basically, in a capsule in a bird, over to Canada.

And you're like, but Canada has a copyright library, I'm sure. How do they get it in the bird? Let's not talk about that. So data exists, and that kind of undermines the, when you kind of network information, like Fahrenheit 451 stops being as scary. And I read, it was actually, I really like reading terrible sort of comments on terrible films.

And I was reading the kind of user reviews of this film. And actually one of them made a really good point that Fahrenheit 451, the terror and actually one of them made a really good point that um fahrenheit 451 the terror and the horror of that dystopia is because you are reading a book and to read about a world where there are no books in a book is that is the like terror and once you put that in a film or try and add the internet it completely loses it's like that what's so compelling about it which in turn shows you that of course br Bradbury knew exactly what he was doing because he is interested, as you said, Jen, in the idea more than...

You know, the idea of Mars rather than the hard sci-fi approach of telling you, you know, what the... Who wrote the colour Mars novels? Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson. So they are the opposite. They are like that we have to nail everything down because what you want is world building.

Bradbury's not really interested in that. He's an amazing improviser. Didn't he say that my stories run up and bite me in the leg and I respond by writing them down, everything that goes on during the bite. And when I finish, the idea gets up and runs off. It does feel like that. It does feel like that.

He kind of, he's possessed by something. And there is that, reading the stories, it reminded me of having to do, you know, creative writing stories at school where you were given a, you get a theme and then you write something you try and put it there is that kind of really simple energy to it and i think he's sort of interested in archetypes as well as in in you know and he's quite explicit in some of the stories there's one in the golden apple of the sun where you know the people who

are going to mars are essentially doing what steinberg's characters did or what the great pioneers heading to the American West were doing. And he's really interested in these things. Mars becomes a sort of place of abandoned cities and he's very big and resonant, I think, on that kind of these untenanted spaces that sometimes get their revenge, like the city. Yeah, he's so such... I feel like all of those themes uh there's all this this like sort of um real skepticism about

colonial explorer practices however you want to characterize it like you know half of the martian chronicles is what failures to populate and the absolute human disasters that occur when people, new people, go to a place and try and take it over. And they suck it up. Yeah, I mean, he steals the H.G. Wells, you know, War of the Worlds device in the Martian Chronicles, doesn't he, where they turn up and they go, well, there's some people living here, Martians living here until quite recently,

but it seems they've all been wiped out by chickenpox. The other foot is a really good sort of reverse colonialism in this as well the white guy spaceship arriving and the martian chronicles is my is my absolute favorite and that's partly because i'm really fascinated by it as a book it's a brilliant example of what is it is it a collection of short stories? Is it a novel? One of these things is people are talking about right now in terms of collections of short stories. Are they novels? Are they short stories?

You know, The Martian Chronicles is clearly, on one level, a load of stories about Mars that he had lying around because he'd written them over ten years. But what he does is he puts them together in a specific order, he reworks some of the content so that there's a flow through which is incredibly satisfying and you really feel you go somewhere through the book as you read through the book the other reason i really love the martian chronicles and you both our guests are too young to remember and our producer i suspect are too young to remember this. But do you remember when television was so,

there were only three channels. Yes. One of which you weren't allowed to watch. The big season would start when the summer holidays were over in September. And I remember being on holiday with my mum and dad in Cornwall and having to sit in the TV lounge in the hotel because there weren't TVs in the rooms, because it was the premiere of BBC One's big Saturday night

American series for 1980, which was The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, starring Rock Hudson. Wow. That's how long ago it was. Amazing. And actually, it's not... I mean, looking at it now, there are issues with it.

But like the book, it's kind of charming now. There's a kind of retrofuturism about the TV as much as there is about the book. They're just bringing you different eras. There's an amazing, did you, so something I came across when doing research was that Borges wrote an introduction to a Spanish edition of the Martian Chronicles. And there's this incredible quote, which totally struck me.

And I'm just going to find it in my notes because it's relevant. So Borges says, what has this man from Illinois done, I ask myself when closing the pages of this book, that episodes from the conquest of another planet fill me with horror and loneliness. And to me, that is just like, absolutely an encapsulation of these, that such like, such loneliness in the Martian Chronicles. Sam, you were talking about Margaret Atwood. And Atwood's written several times about Ray Bradbury. And this is one of the great things about Margaret Atwood. I think when people would say to her, but The Handmaid's Tale is a sci-fi novel, she'd go, yeah.

Yeah, it is, yeah. I love sci-fi and I love Ray Bradbury. And she's written several essays about Bradbury and introductions to specific editions. She might even have written, I know you've got a story there, you've got a story called Skeleton there. Yeah. So why have you chosen this story?

Well, I mentioned Skeleton. Skeleton isn't actually in The Illustrated Man, but I had to go and find it on the internet because it was one of the stories when I originally read it that absolutely kind of freaked me the fuck out um and it's got quite a lot of bradbury's you know there is a sort of undercurrent of existential horror in some of the best of bradbury's stuff and this you know there's that elliot line about webster seeing the skull beneath the skin um and this is a story that really kind of literalizes that and it's this guy who goes to this is a story that really kind of literalises that.

And it's this guy who goes to his doctor because he's got kind of aches and pains and his doctor's not doing anything for him and says he's a hypochondriac. And he becomes convinced that his skeleton is somehow at war with the rest of his body. He's sort of noticed that his skeleton is in him and that people around him have skeletons.

And there's a set of, well well really a little bit of it um which you know he's in the process of freaking about out about his skeleton he's like does everyone else's kneecap move like this you know what's this thing encasing my lungs and he's and then he's trying to live his normal life at the same time so you know darling will you come in and meet the ladies, called his wife's sweet, clear voice. Mr. Harris stood upright. His skeleton, which is all in capital letters in this edition, was holding him upright. This thing inside him, this invader, this horror was supporting his arms, legs and head. It was like feeling someone just behind you who shouldn't be there. With every step he took, he realised how dependent he was on this other thing. Darling, I'll be with you in a moment, he called weakly. To himself, he said, come on now, brace up. You've got to go back to work tomorrow and Friday you've

got to make that trip to Phoenix. Quite a drive, over 600 miles. Got to be in shape for that trip or you won't get Mr. Crelton to put his money into your ceramics business. Chin up now. Five minutes later, he stood among the ladies being introduced to Mrs. Withers, Mrs. Abelmatt, and Miss Kirthy, all of whom had skeletons inside them, but took it very calmly, because nature had carefully clothed the bare nudity of clavicle, tibia, and femur with breasts, thighs, calves, with coiffure, and eyebrows satanic, with bee-stung lips, and coiffure and eyebrows satanic,

with bee-stung lips. And Lord, shouted Mr Harris inwardly, when they talk or eat part of their skeleton shows, their teeth. I never thought of that. Excuse me, he said, and ran from the room, only in time to drop his lunch among the petunias over the garden balustrade. You know, I was saying earlier about Bradbury inventing all sorts of things for which he doesn't get credit.

Now, there is a... I'm sure there are other examples. Edgar Allan Poe, we could find an example there, I'm sure. You know, that is body horror. That is the... Between Poe and Cronenberg. That's what that is. But it's also funny. It's also a comic short story at the same time.

Well, it's a bit of a spoiler, but this is what's completely haunted me is this slightly shonky doctor he bone specialist he finds you know he says i can treat you but you have to be ready and he's like i'm not ready then he comes because i'm ready i'm ready treat me and the guy reaches into his mouth and something kind of awful bone cracking happens it's quite unspecific but at the end his wife's coming back to the house and she walks in. Just as she's arriving at the house, she sees this sort of slightly sinister looking doctor leaving

and he's kind of nibbling on this white flute and sucking something out of the middle of it and then starts playing a tune on this bone flute as the wife goes in and starts screaming because there's a huge boneless jelly on the ground which greets her by name. Oh, yeah. And that bone flute has stuck with me.

My theory on this story, I hadn't read it until you sent it, is that Bradbury wrote this, the description of his discomfort reads exactly like a really bad hangover to me you know that feeling that oh my god I'm moving and this is sickening you know it's almost like it's almost like Sartre's nausea he's disgusted you're being and nothing's moving right the thing that I find that I found coming back to it older no longer being a like teenager and not noticing this stuff was how I don't know if anyone even

sleeps in the same bed in these stories. I feel like they're all in twin beds, like Morecambe and Wise. And the romances are kind of non-existent. And the only thing that is, like we talked about, he can imagine all these different things, but what he never ever imagines is any sort of evolution of the kind of 2.4 Midwest suburban family. One of the things I noticed is like, there are no women in any of the rockets. They're all just these squads of men. And I have never noticed that before. And obviously like the conversations about gender balance did not exist when I started reading noticed that before. And obviously, like, the conversations about gender balance

did not exist when I started reading Ray Bradbury. And now I notice, like, oh, like, I'm not a part of Ray Bradbury's world. I actually don't think I cared. Quite a few interfering wives, aren't they? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't care apart from the, like, also there's a proto-Pixie Dream Girl in 451.

She is a prototype of that character trope. But then you've got interfering wives that get turned into robots. I don't think this excludes anything about him. All these books were written in like the early 50s. That is so early for some of these ideas to be knocking around. 50s that is so early for some of these ideas to be knocking around and also i i think we should say because it's i it's the most fascinating thing about him as a writer for me is how the books kind of fit into genres and don't yeah and also bleed into one another but aren't copies of one another so the martian chronicles is sci-fi in a different way to Fahrenheit 451,

but this is by the same guy who within three years has written Dandelion Wine, which is a very lyrical Mark Twain-like American memoir. And then he kind of bashes those two books together and he gets Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is like Dandelion Wine but retold with a horror perspective. He strikes me in the best way as it's almost automatic writing. It's almost picking images that spoke to him, words that spoke to him. I think that's a bit why he links to early Ballard, actually.

He reminds me a bit of Ballard because he's got that thing of, he's got a set of images or ideas on which he obsesses and which he works variations on constantly to do with childhood, to do with a kind of mythical Illinois landscape, to do with the sort of untalented Mars, to do with rocket ships. There's a lovely line about in one of the stories that, you know, the rocket's hanging in the air like darning needles, which I don't think has anything to do with physics as we'd understand it,

but it's a hell of an image. And if you didn't like it, Ray's got another one for you coming right up. The thing about Bradbury, which he gets away with, I think, he can get deep really quickly. And the story I think we all love, which is no particular night or morning, but with the tortured man Hitchcock having a breakdown. I love this. Clemens is saying, you should get your mind off this stuff, Hitchcock.

And he says, I can't. All the gaps and spaces. And that's how I got to thinking about the stars. I thought how I'd like to be in a rocket ship in space, in nothing, in nothing, going on into nothing with just a thin something, a thin edge shell of metal holding me, going on away from all the somethings with gaps in them that couldn't prove themselves.

I knew then that the only happiness for me was space. And then he says, well, you should go and see a psychiatrist. Which is good advice. You love that evocation. It's like the pure horror of open space. Of the open space. Well, it seems ridiculous as we have a foghorn specialist here not to ask whether that has any connection with foghorns.

That's what you ask. I do think it does because lots of, like as we talked about, lots of Bradbury's work is about loneliness and that horror of the loneliness of space is exactly what this idea of these tropes the horror of loneliness is in the foghorn which is about a huge uh prehistoric beast that has been under the sea and it is awoken by the lighthouse in the foghorn which it mistakes for another of its kind and shall i read a tiny bit of it to end? We can close on the foghorn.

The foghorn blew and the monster answered. A cry came across a million years of water and mist, a cry so anguished and alone that it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The foghorn blew. The monster roared again. The foghorn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth

and the sound that came from it was the sound of the foghorn itself, lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound. Great. Brilliant. Right, I'm afraid that's it. The moon is up.

We can see a small town up ahead and we're not looking behind us. Thanks to Sam and Jen for accompanying us on this trip to the stars, to our stellar producer, Nicky Birch, and to Unbound, the mothership carrying us home. You can download all 95 examples of the effluvia of our dairy economy, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website backlisted.fm. And you can contact us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. And before you do

that, why not leave us a review on iTunes or whatever iTunes becomes. Thank you for listening. We'll be back in a fortnight. You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts. If you prefer to listen to it without adverts, you can join us on our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted, the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks