If there’s one thing I share with Ray Bradbury, it’s a love
of dinosaurs. In his introduction to Dinosaur Tales, he states that it’s his All Time Favorite
Subject. Bradbury admits he doesn’t know
why seeing “King Kong” in the cinema awakened a lifetime love of the
extinct creatures. But he credits
Dinosaurs with much of his later success as an author, and two stories in
particular helped make his name in both Science Fiction literature and Hollywood.
As Bradbury says, “I accept the fact, and
proclaim it quietly, that without dinosaurs my life would have been nothing at
all. Dinosaurs started me on the track
to becoming a writer. Dinosaurs helped
push me along that track to acceptance.
And a dinosaur who fell in love with the sound of a lighthouse foghorn
in a story called “The Fog Horn,” which I wrote and published in 1950, changed
my life, my income, and my way of writing forever.”
This seems rather a sweeping statement, and perhaps a little
inaccurate, as a quick review of Bradbury’s short fiction Bibliography shows
that he sold a great many stories before he wrote “The Fog Horn.” But then, in regard to the other great 1950s
Dinosaur story for which he is known, “A Sound of Thunder,” he describes the
process of writing it as an experiment.
“I simply sat down to my typewriter one
morning, with no idea where I would wind up, and hammered together a Time
Machine, and shot my hunters back a few million years to see what would
happen. Three hours later, after a
butterfly had been stepped on, making it one of the first, and unconscious,
ecology stories, the tale was done, the beast slain, and all political history
changed forever.”
So perhaps “A Sound of
Thunder” influenced the way he approached writing. Today, the latter story is regarded as one
of the All Time Great Time Travel Stories.
But it is the former, “The Fog Horn,” that influenced the 1953 movie “The Beast From 20,000
Fathoms,” and drew the interest of movie
director John Huston, who hired Bradbury to write the script for his 1956
adaptation of “Moby Dick.”
Ray Bradbury became a highly respected Science Fiction
author, with hundreds of stories published. He would go on to forge a significant career
in Hollywood. He's become a pop culture icon: most people recognize his name, and smile when they hear it. So
perhaps Bradbury’s statement isn’t so sweeping after all. Perhaps Dinosaurs were primarily responsible
for all his later successes as an author.
But it was only when he found a way to write about the subject he knew
and loved best that people recognized that love, that enthusiasm, and responded
to it. If only each of us, myself
included, could understand what we care about most of all, and find a way to channel
that love to make others’ lives better. But then, Bradbury began writing stories in
the late 1930s. His two career-changing
Dinosaur stories wouldn’t arrive until the early 1950s. His example suggests that the process of discovering one’s
true love, and unlocking the means of expressing it, is no easy task, or the work of a moment.
Dragon Dave
Dinosaur Tales includes those two classic stories, two
poems, two later stories, and wealth of Dinosaur illustrations.
Related Internet Links
Great Book!
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