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Discover the artwork of Jon Gomez, Cartoon Brew's Artist of the Day!

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R.L. Stine wants to encourage all children to “Power Up & Read!” In the video embedded above, Stine talks about his love of comic books and Ray Bradbury novels.

Stine signed up as one of thirteen authors to write an original short story for Scholastic’s Summer Reading Challenge program. The organizers behind this venture hope to break the record of 304,749,681 minutes (spent reading) that was set last summer.

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The Blank on Blank organization has created an animated video starring Fahrenheit 451 author Ray Bradbury. The video embedded above features a long-lost interview between Bradbury and a student journalist that took place in 1972.

During this chat, Bradbury shared his thoughts on friendship, fear, and writing. In the past, the producers behind this YouTube channel have made pieces with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings memoirist Maya Angelou, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues author Tom Robbins, and Where the Wild Things Are creator Maurice Sendak.

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Vlogger Hank Green recently shared that 50 Shades of Grey has already sold more copies than the number of books Ray Bradbury sold in his lifetime. This doesn’t worry author Neil Gaiman.

In a Tumblr post, he responded to this by pointing out that this isn’t new. “Nothing’s changed,” he wrote. “Some books are, often inexplicably, bestsellers. That’s been the way of it for a hundred and fifty years or more.”

He pointed out that if you look at the annual bestseller lists for previous years,  you’ll see how trendy books do really well around publication but tend to fade out over time. Here is an excerpt from his post:

You’ll find a lot of books that sold an unbelievable number of copies when they were fashionable. I’m sure The Revolt of Mamie Stover also sold more books than Ray Bradbury will ever have sold in his whole life in its year. Have you read it? Heard of it?  Off the top of my head, Peyton Place in its year, orThe Gospel According to Peanuts, or The Ginger Man, or Jonathan Livingstone Seagull in their years undoubtedly outsold all of Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury, on the other hand, has sold a ton of books ever since he started writing and he continues to sell books. “…he found his readers for his books and his stories in every year,” wrote Gaiman. ” And I’ll wager a hundred years from now he’ll still be read…”

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Ray Bradbury’s former house has sold, but it sounds like the buyer is not a fan. The house, which fetched $1.76 million, is currently being torn down.

Bradbury lived in the charming three bedroom, single family home at 10265 Cheviot Drive in Los Angeles for more than 50 years.

John King Tarpinian visited the house and documented the teardown. “As I was taking pictures locals were walking their dogs. They’d stop to observe and we’d converse. One lady had no idea who had owned the house; she was new to the neighborhood,” he writes on the sci-fi site File 770.com.  “She walked away in tears. Another long time neighbor knew it was Ray’s home and we mutually agreed things like this are just wrong but money wins out. Another young couple had no idea who Ray was…the saddest encounter of all.”

(Via The Los Angeles Times).

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Ancillary Justice
Ann Leckie
science fiction

I am a closet-case sci-fi fan. Or, as multiple book reviews on this blog have probably revealed, maybe not so closet case. I looked forward to reading Ancillary Justice when I'd seen it won the Hugo and Nebula awards. I cut my sci-fi teeth on the likes of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and Frank Herbert's Dune in between installments of Little House on the Prairie. That is the seventies in a nutshell. And I figured, if Leckie could beat Andy Weir's The Martian, which I love, in the awards category, I was about to fall in love again.

Let's just say Ancillary Justice and I got off to a rocky start. It was not love at first sight. In fact, the novel frustrated me  (incidentally, it was the same when I first met my husband).

Basic plot - a space ship decides to take revenge on the leader of the culture that made - and ultimately attempts to destroy - it (Ancillary Justice, not my marriage; it's still happily intact).

It's fascinating stuff. AI taken to a whole new level. However, the AI can't decipher female from male and so refers to everyone as "she". Sometimes, gender is specified, but then the ship reverts to calling said characters "she". For me, it made connecting with characters really hard. And that made me wonder, why does gender matters in story? Or rather, does gender matter in story? Should it matter? What does Leckie gain by making her story more or less gender neutral?

I haven't finished figuring all of this out, but I have come to the conclusion that for the story, by making everyone gender neutral, characters become sentient beings. That's it. They have flaws and quirks, but in remaining gender neutral, they never became much deeper than that. This may, in part, have to do with the boundaries of my hermeneutics. I live in a world in which, for the most part, the gender of any person I interact with, is clear. With that comes mounds of unspoken data.  Without that, I have to rethink my world. That is what Leckie forced me, as a reader, to do in her novel. I had to see it through a different lens, a new lens, one I haven't completely finished sanding down yet, and won't, without further interaction.

The absence of gender imploded my hermeneutic structure of interpretation. It made me feel uneasy. And it's kept me feeling uneasy. And thinking. In other words, it's genius.

For more great reads, visit Barrie Summy's website. She's got a bushelful!

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Science fiction books supercharged my imagination as a kid. Everything from Star Wars storybooks to Ray Bradbury radio adaptations to The Black Hole – Read Along Book and Record inspired my childhood attempts at telling stories.

I want my 4-year-old daughter to have the same kind of experience, so I turned to the brilliant Goodreads “Science Fiction Picture Books List” for inspiration. It was created by Amanda R. Von Der Lohe who studied children’s literature at Hollins University—writing an entire thesis about science fiction picture books.

I caught up with Von Der Lohe recently, and she had a simple message for GalleyCat readers: “Authors, illustrators and publishers, please please please please please include more girls in science fiction picture books. Parents, read science fiction with your daughters.”

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Sci-fi fans with some money to spend will be excited to learn that legendary author Ray Bradbury's former house is for sale. The charming three bedroom, single family home at 10265 Cheviot Drive in Los Angeles is listed at $1,495,000. Here is more about the house from the listing: For more than half a century it was home to Ray Bradbury, one of the most celebrated, beloved authors of our time. This charming traditional features a grand living room with soaring vaulted ceilings, classic brick fireplace, large bay window allowing soft California light to flood in across original hardwood floors and custom built-ins; formal dining room for proper entertaining with detailed crown moldings, expertly crafted wainscoting and wood shuttered windows; 3 generously sized en-suite guest bedrooms; maid's quarters on the main floor; expansive grounds with a large front yard as well as backyard to retreat to the outdoors in a secluded environment and a surprisingly spacious basement where he chose to write daily. A beautiful property with an important cultural provenance, come see where so many great works of fiction were conceived." Bradbury passed away two years ago at the age of 91. (Via The Los Angeles Times).

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Writer Seth Grahame-Smith has been working on a sequel to the 2010 hit title, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Deadline reports that Grand Central Publishing, an imprint at Hachette Book Group USA, plans to publish the finished book in January 2015.

The first book served as the basis for a popular movie adaptation that came out in June 2012. For that film, Grahame-Smith (pictured, via) collaborated with X-Men movie screenwriter Simon Kinberg to pen the script.

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The title of a book is so important – and not many people have titles as consistently good as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (in my humble opinion) – and I suppose that is linked to the fact that not many people write as well as he does (again … in my humble opinion..)

Think of these:

Love in the time of Cholera

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World

No-one writes to the Colonel

Memories of my Melancholy Whores.

The General in his Labyrinth

Other titles I like, from other authors

Up in Honey’s Room – Elmore Leonard

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

Of Mice and Men – Steinbeck

And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street – Dr Seuss

Death is a lonely business – Ray Bradbury

Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe

Looking for Transwonderland – Noo Saro Wiwa

OK I’ll stop now … but it is a hard thing getting a title right, and it does matter!

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16 classic Ray Bradbury books are coming to digital booksellers for the very first time.

We’ve posted the complete release schedule below, but the list of new eBook releases includes beloved books like Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Illustrated Man.

William Morrow, the longtime publisher of the late, award-winning writer and cultural icon Ray Bradbury, announces the release of 16 of Bradbury’s classic backlist titles in ebook format for the very first time. An additional seven titles will be released in e-book format over the next several months. Alexandra Bradbury, the great author’s daughter, had this comment in the release:

The entire Bradbury family is excited to know that Dad’s work will finally be available to all readers: traditional print readers and the new generation of digital readers … We’re especially pleased that digital editions of Bradbury books will be available through libraries as well as e-retailers, as Ray Bradbury was an ardent supporter of our great public library system.

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Combining a matchbook and a classic novel, designer Elizabeth Perez created a thought-provoking edition of Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 for the Austin Creative Department.

Her design made the front page of Reddit, earning more than 400,000 views in a couple days. What do you think? Here’s more from the designer:

Fahrenheit 451 is a novel about a dystopian future where books are outlawed and firemen burn any house that contains them. The story is about supressing ideas, and about how television destroys interest in reading literature. I wanted to spread the book-burning message to the book itself. The book’s spine is screen-printed with a matchbook striking paper suface, so the book itself can be burned.

(Link via)

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To celebrate the upcoming 60th anniversary of Ray Bradbury’s iconic classic Fahrenheit 451, the public was invited to design a new cover, which will be featured on the first printing of the 60th anniversary edition. Matthew Owen won the  Fahrenheit 451 cover design contest from Simon & Schuster and the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. I love this idea and wish there were more contests for classic cover redesigns. Maybe then we wouldn’t have covers that leave people a little disgruntled and confused?

The winning cover was revealed at the ALA Midwinter Meeting. Owen’s cover beat out more than 360 submissions that were chronicled on this blog. It’s actually fun to scroll through the other entries and see the various interpretations of this classic piece of literature. Simon & Schuster and the Bradbury estate judged the entries.

What do you think? Do you like the new cover?

 

 

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Matthew Owen has won the  Fahrenheit 451 cover design contest from Simon & Schuster and the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

The winning cover (embedded above) was revealed at the ALA Midwinter Meeting.

Owen, who hails from Little Rock, AR, created a cover that beat out more than 360 submissions. Both the Simon & Schuster staff and the Bradbury estate participated in judging the entries.

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Have you ever written a scary story? In honor of the Halloween season, we are interviewing horror writers to learn about the craft of scaring readers. Recently, we spoke with author Jonathan Maberry.

Throughout Maberry’s career, he has won multiple Stoker Awards for his horror work. Last month, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers released the third installment of the Rot & Ruin series, Flesh & Bone.

He has written for Marvel Comics and published multiple novels for both adults and young-adults. As a nonfiction writer, Maberry has examined topics ranging from martial arts to zombie pop culture. Check out the highlights from our interview below…

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Today would have marked the 92nd birthday of beloved science-fiction author Ray Bradbury. To celebrate, we caught up with three writers who contributed pieces to Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury.

The trio of writers we spoke with include Hugo Award-winner Kelly Link, 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin and bestselling novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard. We’ve included their thoughts below.

If you are looking for more Bradbury birthday celebration, SiriusXM Book Radio host Kim Alexander will talk with biographer Sam Weller, author Mort Castle and novelist Margaret Atwood about the late science fiction author tonight at 7 p.m. ET.

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This morning at 6.31 am (British Summer Time), Johnny and Clara Mackintosh (and their Old English sheepdog, Bentley) made history: thanks to NASA and its Mars Curiosity rover, they became the first literary heroes to literally land on another world. And all broadcast live in Times Square – wow!

The descent was scary (I wrote a piece about it for Bookzone4Boys) – even NASA had described it as “seven minutes of terror”. Eventually the Mars Science Laboratory landed by “skycrane” in Gale Crater, a perfect location to examine millions of years of Martian geology in one go. Onboard was a microchip onto which had been etched the names of some of the people of Earth, the very first ambassadors to land on another planet. And among those names were:

• Johnny Mackintosh
• Clara Mackintosh
• Bentley Mackintosh

I confess I’m delighted to say “Keith Mansfield” was also included.

Some great fictional stories have been set on Mars, but the paper or celluloid that tells them remains firmly grounded here on our island Earth. John Carter may have disappointed in cinemas lately, but Edgar Rice Burroughs’ series of “Barsoom” books are classics. A film that brought the red planet properly to life saw the now-Governator of California star as Doug Quaid in Dutch director Paul Verhoeven’s 1990  masterpiece, Total Recall. Why anyone feels the need to remake a movie that was originally so stunning is a mystery, but I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve seen Len Wiseman’s remake.

As a child I grew up reading the late, great Ray Bradbury, whose thoughtful Martian Chronicles helped inspire the stories I’ve written. In the first two Johnny Mackintosh books there are mentions of Mars and Johnny and Clara always intend to go there, yet somehow they never quite get round to it. In Battle for Earth they finally make the trip (I won’t spoil it for future readers by saying whether or not they find Martians).

David Bowie famously sang “Is there life on Mars?” and in a fun Doctor Who tribute, Steven Moffat christened the first fictional human settlement “Bowie Base One”. I’ve written a few pieces on whether or not there’s life of some kind on the red planet over at my Keith Mansfield website.

We’ve always found Martian exploration difficult. On page 3 of Johnny Mackintosh: Battle for Earth we read:

“Johnny and Clara had been planing their first ever visit to Mars, with Johnny telling his sister about all the probes scientists had sent to the red planet, but which had mysteriously failed to arrive.”

and then, a little later on page 61:

“Early space probes had taken intriguing but inconclusive photographs of the Martian surface, showing what were called the Pyramids of Elysium, next to what appeared to be a gigantic human face gazing upward. Johnny had always meant to visit and see for himself. For his part, Alf was curious to hear about the probes that had gone missing, so Johnny repeated the conversation he’d had with Clara, in a little more detail. Given the great expense of space exploration, the failure rate for Mars was unusually high. It wasn’t only Beagle 2 that had bitten the dust as it neared the planet. Over the years, around half the missions launched had failed for one reason or another.”

Of course the “giant face” is no more than an optical illusion, but sometimes you can’t let details like that get in the way of a good story. I first came across the pyramids through Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and these don’t only feature in Johnny Mackintosh – Total Recall also centred around the mysterious “pyramid mine”.

Nowadays we know a huge amount about this near neighbour, not least because there are actually three satellites in permanent orbit around the red planet. In the 1970s we sent the twin Viking landers to search for life (you can see a third in the Smithsonain Air and Space Museum in Washington DC). These tantalized, but also frustrated. Given the track record of previous Mars missions, this one played it relatively safe so the spacecraft set down in what proved rather dull areas – and that’s where they remained. The great thing about Curiosity is that it’s mobile.

We’ve come a long way in a short space of time with Mars rovers. The first was Sojourner, a little add on to the Pathfinder mission that landed in 1997. It was the size of a remote-controlled child’s toy and could only travel a few metres from the main landing station, getting up close and personal with a few interesting nearby rocks. Sojourner started the ball rolling, and the momentum was magnificently maintained by another pair of twin landers, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which set down early in 2004.

Larger, more independent and mobile, it was hoped these two would function for around 90 days. Spirit lasted fully five years, becoming immobile on 2009 and finally ceasing communication in 2010. Opportunity is still going! These two have shown that we are more than capable, not just of landing on Mars, but traversing its surface.

Curiosity is in a different league altogether. Weighing nearly a tonne, it’s around the size of a small car. It doesn’t move quite as fast, travelling at what’s almost literally a snail’s pace, but wherever it goes, Johnny, Clara and Bentley will go with it. I hope they and I are able to move across the surface of this faraway world for many years to come.

Buy the first book in the series, Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London.

Buy the third book in the series, Johnny Mackintosh: Battle for Earth in which Johnny and Clara visit Mars.

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By Cindy R. Williams
(Also posted on ANWA Founder and Friends Blog)

One of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury passed away on June 5, at the transit of Venus. He was 91 years old.

If you are Ray Bradbuy fan, that will make sense to you.


If you don't know his books, you probably know the hit TV series based on his works - Star Trek.

Many I know are "Trekies" including myself.

I don't know too many facts about the man's personal life other than the only person he ever dated became his wife and they had four daughters. He won a Pulitzer. He wrote many, many books and seemed to be nice fellow.

I do know he said some inspiring things about writing.

Here are a few:

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