When my favorite author Robert Heinlein died, I was in college snapping up hardcover first releases, my biggest entertainment expense in those days. His widow Virginia published a collection of his letters over the years, and Grumbles from the Grave was a big hit. I remember enjoying his inner thoughts and watching how Heinlein’s mind progressed over the years.
Now Ray Bradbury’s biographer, Jonathan R. Eller, has collected a wide variety of letters both to and from another great science fiction author, in a collection entitled Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury. I downloaded it asap since I no longer collect hardbacks these days.
It’s a delight to read the private thoughts of awesome authors. For one, you can follow their growth and maturity levels. Remembrance opens with a letter from an enthusiastic 17-year-old Bradbury inviting Edgar Rice Burroughs to one of the weekly meetings of the Science Fiction League of Los Angeles, a fan club. Alas, Burroughs politely declined.
The remainder of the first section is devoted to Bradbury’s formative years during and after World War II. We watch as he charts success after success in the short story market, selling titles in third-tier pulps, then earning respectable money in the second tier before finally breaking through to the top magazines of his day.
He writes to Heinlein and other contemporaries, receiving considerable guidance from the prolific author Henry Kuttner, whose life was tragically cut short. Also enjoyable in this early section were the back and forth missives with Theodore Sturgeon. Both men had a way with words that was evident even in their private correspondence, and they expressed mutual respect.
Eller does a good job with footnotes, providing clues and context for modern readers, especially for pop culture references from 40-80 years ago, as well as other errata brought up as asides in these letters. Later sections explore correspondence of interest with fans and the famous. From an era before email and the ephemera of social media, Bradbury spent at least a portion of seemingly every day reading and writing personal notes to various people. And for that, we should all be grateful.
If you like Bradbury, if you like science fiction, this is a book worth reading.
This week, the first three selections in the Star League Assassins series are on sale for under a buck. Book 7, Time’s Thief, is available for preorder. It will be released the first week of February.
The series so far has Remington Rennison, an unlikely heroine from the previous series Agents of the Planetary Republic as the main focus. But it also has a wide-ranging cast including the assassin called Nightshade; Jorge Campo, AKA the Time Thief; and the humanesque droid known as Jade Thrall. All four story lines will eventually merge.
(Image courtesy Microsoft Designer.)
Thank you, Jaxon. Added it to my Want To Read list. I’ll save up to purchase it.
Since I read Letters to Van Gogh-I have a very old brownish paperback-I have become an aficionada of letters of prominent authors and artists. As you rightly said, it’s fulfilling and interesting to see how they evolve during all the years of correspondence.
Thank you for the recommendation, Jaxon. I didn’t know a book about his correspondence and notes had been published. Thanks!