Bradbury Beyond Apollo

This book completes the biography trilogy begun in Becoming Ray Bradbury and continued in Ray Bradbury Unbound. Bradbury Beyond Apollo begins in the early 1970s, as Bradbury found himself fully established as a witness and celebrant of the Space Age. His storytelling powers were turning to stage, screen, and television adaptations of his classic midcentury titles, including The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Although he was no longer producing a high volume of masterful tales, Bradbury Beyond Apollo chronicles how the last four decades of his life produced the playful fantasies of The Halloween Tree, his award-winning television series The Ray Bradbury Theater, a collaboration with Disney Imagineers on EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth, and significant essays on the common ground between science and religion represented by humanity’s Space Age achievements. The book also documents how Bradbury’s influential lectures, interviews, and essays explored the history of ideas, the nature of creativity, and his own evolving work ethic of optimal behaviorism. Mid-book chapters analyze Bradbury’s significant late-life achievements in fictionalized autobiography and his completion of books that originated decades earlier, including Somewhere a Band Is Playing, perhaps his most significant late-life reflection on time and memory. The book’s overarching contention is that Bradbury’s wide range of ventures were largely sustained by his ever-increasing prominence as a Space Age visionary.