Bradbury Beyond Apollo

June 29, 2020
Eller (Ray Bradbury Unbound) finishes his three-part biography of Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) with this disappointing volume. In comprising the last four decades of Bradbury’s life, from 1971 to his death in 2012, the book’s time frame comes after Bradbury’s greatest period of literary productivity. Instead, his activities were typified by attempts to repackage earlier successes that either came to naught or delivered disappointing results. These included a long-gestating musical adaptation of the short story “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” eventually produced for regional theater and filmed for direct-to-video release, rather than the Broadway and big-screen versions originally envisioned. Meanwhile, Bradbury’s persistent wish to remake François Truffaut’s 1966 film of Fahrenheit 451 with his own script went unrealized. Eller gamely makes a pitch for the merits of the books Bradbury did write during this time, notably a cycle of semiautobiographical noir detective novels, but without quite showing that they deserve to stand along classics such as Fahrenheit or Something Wicked This Way Comes. The lackluster source content isn’t helped by the thin research treatment, which is too reliant on interviews with Bradbury himself. Bradbury’s superfans might enjoy getting into the minutiae of the projects covered, but general readers will likely find this tedious.