The New Ray Bradbury Review Issue 8 (2024)

For the next issue of The New Ray Bradbury Review (NRBR), we invite articles which examine the theme of space, broadly construed.

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was a popular writer of short fiction, novels, essays, plays, screenplays and poetry. In the public mind, Bradbury is strongly associated with science fiction, with many of his stories set in outer space; see in particular his books The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), which have received much popular and academic coverage. But even as his authorship moved away from science fiction in the late 1950s onwards, Bradbury became closely connected to the real-life “space race”. During this time, he became a science communicator: he wrote popular essays on space for Life magazine and others; he was a frequent interviewee on television, including a national TV appearance responding to the Apollo 11 Moon landing; he contributed to multidisciplinary discussion panels on the exploration of Mars and other planets; and he was a frequent invited guest at facilities such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena. His experiences of interacting with astronauts, space scientists and NASA also informed some of his late career poetry, such as the melancholy “Abandon in Place”. Among Bradbury’s late career fiction was his quirky return to science fiction tropes in “Leviathan ‘99” (in the collection Now and Forever, 2007), his recasting of the Moby Dick mythology in outer space. With the exception of Jonathan R. Eller’s biographical Bradbury Beyond Apollo (Illinois UP, 2020), there has been little scholarship examining these later facets of Bradbury’s career.

Suggested topics for our space-themed issue include (but are not limited to):

• Ray Bradbury’s visions of space in fiction
• Bradbury’s advocacy for space in essays for Life magazine and others
• Bradbury’s contributions to space science symposia, such as Mars and the Mind of Man
• Bradbury’s interactions with astronauts and space scientists
• Bradbury’s use of space as metaphor
• Bradbury, space and chronotopes
• Bradbury’s inner space and outer space
• Other “space” authors, especially those who compare or contrast with Bradbury (e.g. contemporaries such as Clarke and Asimov who similarly engaged in science communication; or the next generation of science fiction authors/science communicators who developed Bradbury’s approach)
• The role(s) of science fiction in science communication and science popularisation
• The place of space science in science fiction

Other Bradbury- and space-related topics will also be considered. (But please note that, at present, we are not looking for articles on Fahrenheit 451, since this has been extensively covered in past issues of NRBR). 

Proposals (up to 300 words) should be submitted by September 30th 2023, accompanied by a brief biographical statement (up to 100 words). Authors of accepted proposals will be asked to submit a complete draft of their article (5000-7000 words) by December 15th 2023. Final drafts will be required by March 15th 2024. Article drafts should follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition.

Proposals should be sent to the editor, Dr Phil Nichols: nrbr@bradburymedia.co.uk

About The New Ray Bradbury Review

The New Ray Bradbury Review (NRBR) has, since 2008, served as the journal of the Ray Bradbury Center (formerly the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies), part of Indiana University’s School of Liberal Arts and home to Bradbury’s professional papers, correspondence files and personal and professional artefacts. NRBR was initiated by leading Bradbury scholars William F. Touponce and Jonathan R. Eller. It has now transitioned from a print journal into an online, “gold open access” journal. Our editorial approach is to continue to present scholarship on Bradbury, with multidisciplinary coverage encompassing four topic areas related to the values of Bradbury and the Bradbury Center:

• the importance of literacy
• the value of libraries
• the exploration of space
• freedom of the imagination

The New Ray Bradbury Review is an online, open access journal. All articles will be subject to the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Creative Commons Licence. This means that all content will be freely available without charge to the user or their institution. Users will be permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. For further detail on CC BY-NC 4.0, visit CC online: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Find The New Ray Bradbury Review at: https://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/nrbr/

Find the Ray Bradbury Center at: https://bradbury.iupui.edu/

Contact the editor Dr Phil Nichols at: nrbr@bradburymedia.co.uk