The author of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 started a zine shortly after high school, an act which is now commonly met with derision, but was actually pretty popular for science fiction enthusiasts back in the day. It’s called Futuria Fantasia (really), and you can find all four issues free on Project Gutenberg.
Or, if you prefer, the first issue is available as an audiobook here.
Containing a milieu of the young Bradbury’s short fiction, poems, and essays, it was one of the first ways he really explored futurism, often under a pseudonym. Early Bradbury work tends to be focused on scientific discovery more than psychology, and is often highly metaphorical, so while I haven’t gotten a chance to read these issues yet, that’s the sort of thing I’d anticipate. And since Bradbury’s tragic death last year, it’s amazing that we now have access to more of his work.
Bradbury was once quoted as saying:
If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
How can you not want to read more?
(via OpenCulture via io9, image via Wikimedia)
- R.I.P. science fiction master Ray Bradbury
- Ray Bradbury allows Farenheit 451 to be published digitally
- Ray Bradbury: We’ve got too many internets.
