1) The Tom Swift Series

First appearing in 1920, Tom Swift, the teenage homeschooled genius inventor and protagonist of
over one hundred stories — ghostwritten by a bullpen of authors under the pseudonym "Victor
Appleton" –- inspired innumerable children to take an interest in science, including
futurist/writer/inventor Ray Kurzweil, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Steve Wozniak, who credits
the character directly for his becoming a scientist. Jack Cover, inventor of the Taser, was inspired to
create a less-lethal alternative to guns after reading about a similar device Swift had created, and then
decided to name it after the character: "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle".

2) Neuromancer
William Gibson's classic novel that popularized the cyberpunk subgenre is often cited as an indirect
influence in the development of the Internet – in the words of fellow SF writer Jack Womack, "What if
the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?" More concretely, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of
the World Wide Web, cites Arthur C. Clarke's short story Dial F. for Frankenstein, in which a network of
computers linked together learn to think autonomously, as a childhood influence.

3) Gladiator
Philip Wylie's 1930 novel, about the excellently named "Professor Abednego Danner", who invents an
"alkaline free radical" serum that imbues those who ingest it with insectile powers, served as the
inspiration for the modern superhero. In the story, Danner uses the serum on his unborn child, Hugo,
giving him the proportional strength of an ant, the leaping ability of a grasshopper, super speed, and
bulletproof skin. As Hugo grows up, his parents teach him to use his powers responsibly, causing him
to be bullied at school, but he finds relief by cutting loose in the wilderness surrounding his rural
hometown. Sound familiar? It doesn't end there – Hugo later becomes a star quarterback, but after
accidentally killing a football player, he quits in disgrace, joins the French Foreign Legion, and fights in
World War I. After the war, he returns home and gets a job as a bank teller, though is fired after
ripping off the vault door while rescuing a suffocating employee. He then continues on to two other
short-lived careers in politics and Mayan archeology before the story's tragic finale. Although Hugo
never dons a costume or sets out to fight crime, Wylie's brief novel managed to predict nearly every
classic superhero origin, impacting 20th Century pop culture like nothing else — and now, ninety years
later, real-world superheroes are taking the streets, and though none of them have super powers like
Hugo, Grant Morrison posits it's only a matter of time and expense until one does.

4) The War of the Worlds

The grandfather of the modern alien invasion story, H.G. Wells' novel has a cultural impact that's
staggering, but is also responsible for at least one planetary molding feat: Robert H. Goddard, inventor
of the liquid-fueled rocket, decided to dedicate his life to the subject after reading the story as a
teenager –- his research eventually culminated with the Apollo program, and man's landing on the
moon. It's also believed the Robertson Panel held the legendary fallout of Orson Welles 1938 radio
adaptation as evidence why the existence of UFOs should be downplayed, and extraterrestrial
evidence withheld from the public.

5) The World Set Free

Another, lesser-known H.G. Wells novel is also responsible for a cataclysmic development: the
invention of the H-Bomb. In the story, Wells predicts atomic energy, and the development of a new
kind of bomb based on a nuclear reaction, resulting in a "continuing explosive" that would detonate
repeatedly for days. Physicist Leo Szilard — another incredible name – read the story in 1932, and the
neutron was discovered later that year. In 1933, inspired by the story, Szilard developed the idea of a
neutron chain reaction, patented the idea in 1934, and eight years later, we saw the development of
the Manhattan Project.

6) Brave New World

Aldous Huxley's novel indirectly helped snuff out embryonic stem cell research in the United States –-
cabinet member Jay Lefkowitz dissuaded president G.W. Bush on the concept by reading him passages
from the novel describing humans born and bred in hatcheries. Bush, according to Lefkowitz in
Commentary Magazine, "got scared". When he had finished reading, Bush responded, "We're on the
edge of a cliff. And if we take a step off the cliff, there's no going back. Perhaps we should only take
one step at a time."

7) Shockwave Rider
John Brunner's 1975 novel about a man on the run from a networked society who uses a "worm
program" to rewrite his identity and escape, proved to be a remarkably prescient text, accurately
predicting
large-scale networks, hacking, phreaking, genetic engineering and the computer virus. The book's
description of a destructive, self-replicating program capable of eliminating secret bonds inspired
Xerox PARC researchers John F. Shoch and John A. Hupp to create their own version – a program
designed to seek idle network CPU cycles, but would expeditiously grow beyond the intentions of its
programmer. In
turn, Shoch and Hupp named their creation a "worm", and the modern virus was born, leaving untold
misery and Super Human Samurai Syber Squad in its wake.

8) Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson's popular novel and its virtual Metaverse inspired both the creation of the MMORPG
Second Life, and the popularization of the term "avatar", a Sanskrit word meaning "to cross over"
(though was actually first repurposed to mean "digital manifestation" in the 1986 video game
Habitat.) As in the Metaverse, Second Life allows users to interact through personal avatars and create
communities following agreed upon systems. (Former Microsoft VP J. Allard uses the name Hiro
Protagonist- the hero and protagonist- as his handle) Snow Crash's Earth program also presupposed
(and according to a cofounder, directly inspired) both Google Earth and Bing Map.

9) 1984
George Orwell's novel shaped forever the ways in which we view Totalitarianism as a system of
government. But it also changed the ways we think about institutional brainwashing and ubiquitous
surveillance. Orwell gave us a whole arsenal of new words to talk about oppressive systems, including
"Big Brother," "Room 101," "the Thought Police," "thoughtcrime," "unperson" "doublehink" and
"memory hole." Where would the blogosphere be without Orwell's lexicon? Whenever you end a
word with -speak, you're indirectly quoting Orwell.

10) Frankenstein
Mary Shelley's seminal 1817 novel about a mad scientist who creates artificial life has helped to
inspire the real-life science of synthetic biology. Scientist Craig Venter and other innovators have
created synthetic organisms in the lab, including a complete M. capricolum organism. People regularly
refer to the creation of synthetic life forms as the "Frankenstein moment" for biology. And it's easy to
see why — Shelley's novel gave us the first instance of the idea of creating artificial life forms.

A Brief History of the Crossover

For most of us, the crossover is an established part of the landscape of popular culture. We've seen it
all before, whether it's the Avengers, Eureka's Fargo visiting Warehouse 13, or members of Star Trek
meeting the Legion of Superheroes. But you'll be surprised to learn just how old the crossover really
is, and how many varieties of the crossover there have been — even Sherlock Holmes got in on the
action.

The crossover can be defined as a story in which characters or concepts from two or more discrete
texts or series of texts meet. Historically there have been eight major types of crossovers: the fusion of
myths; crossovers in which one author's characters are brought together by another author;
crossovers within one author's fictional universe; crossovers in which the characters from different
creators are brought together by another creator; the afterlife or Bangsian fantasy; the use of real
people as fictional characters; crossovers where characters from different creators are brought
together to form a team; and crossovers where a fictional world contains characters from numerous
authors.

The Argonauts and Cloudcuckooland

One possible first historical crossover is the Greek myths. They were a synthesis of legends from Indo-
European invaders and the local, pre-Hellenic religions. One of these syntheses was the myth of Jason
and the Argonauts. The myth, whose earliest form dates to the ninth or tenth century B.C., is about
the hero Jason, who sails to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece, accompanied by a band of fifty
notable heroes. Many of these heroes, including Castor, Polydeuces, and Hercules, were the subject of
myths of their own. The standard account of this myth is the Argonautica (3rd century B.C.E.) of
Appolonius of Rhodes, which combines earlier scattered versions of the myth into a connected story.
By bringing the heroes of various disparate myths together into one story Appolonius performed one
of the first crossovers in popular culture.

This type of crossover, in which characters from folklore and legend meet in new stories, would
appear in a variety of cultures over the next twenty centuries. Around 150 A.D. Lucian of Samosata
wrote The True History, a satire featuring one of the earliest trips into outer space. During the trip
Lucian and his companions fly past Cloudcuckooland, the floating fortress of the birds from
Aristophanes' The Birds (414 B.C.E.). In the Middle Ages the stories of King Arthur were synthesized by
the French author Chrétien de Troyes out of several pre-existing sources, including Celtic and Welsh
stories and various legends of the Holy Grail. In the 17th and 18th centuries the rise in widely-
distributed fiction in Great Britain and Europe, via chapbooks, penny novelettes, the canards of
France, and the volksbüchlein of Germany, led to an increase in crossovers, so that an anonymously-
penned c. 1760s volksbüchlein portrayed Dr. Faustus meeting German trickster figure Till Eulenspiegel.
Ongoing Universes

The second significant type of crossover began in 1834, when Honoré de Balzac began linking his
novels into a coherent, whole, individual fictional universe. Before that year Balzac's novels had
possessed an internal consistency, but it was only in 1834 that he systematically began making use of
recurring characters, with 23 of them appearing in the first edition of Le Père Goriot (1835). Almost
600 recurring characters appear in the nearly 90 books that make up Balzac's La Comédie Humaine
cycle of novels.

The idea of a universe of one author's characters was not new with Balzac. In the 18th century British
writers routinely invented sequels for their favorite characters. The 1709 Statute of Anne, the first
modern copyright law, shifted the rights of ownership of texts from companies to authors, but popular
sentiment went against the Statute, and a number of writers produced unauthorized but popular
"further adventures of." One notable sequel was George Sackville Carey's Shakespeare's Jubilee, A
Masque (1769), in which Falstaff is "charm-call'd from his quiet grave" to attend the 1769 Stratford
Jubilee. Falstaff is taunted by Oberon and Puck and kidnapped by the witches from Macbeth, but
eventually allowed to march in the Jubilee progression alongside Caliban, Pistol, and the rest of
Shakespeare's best characters. Shakespeare's Jubilee can be seen as an early form of fanfiction, but it
also functions as one of the first examples of one author's characters, from different fictional
universes, being stitched together into one fictional universe by another author.

But Balzac was the first 19th century author to create an ongoing fictional universe in an organized
and ambitious way. Several other French authors imitated Balzac, including Alexandre Dumas père,
detective writer Emile Gaboriau, pulp novelist Paul Féval, and Emile Zola. The most notable example of
this use of linked, reappearing characters occurs in the novels of Jules Verne, which are nearly all
interrelated, from Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) to The Ice Sphinx (1897).

The concept of the recurring character spanning different series became increasingly common in the
late 19th century. Crossovers in which an author had two of his or her series characters meet were no
longer unusual in either high or popular culture. Albert Aiken wrote stories about detective Joe Phenix
and highwayman Dick Talbot for two different dime novels, and brought them both together in
Beadle's New York Dime Library #419 (1886), in a story in which Phenix pursues Talbot but fails to
arrest him. Luis Senarens wrote Edisonade (proto-steampunk boy inventor) stories about Frank Reade
and Jack Wright in several different dime novels, and had the pair race around the world for a $10,000
prize in Happy Days #1 -8 (1894). This type of crossover continued into the 20th century in the
American pulps and British story papers.

Fiction as a Quilt: Stitched Together From Scraps

The first truly modern crossover, in which characters from different creators are brought together in a
story by another creator, was created in 1849, when Mary Cowden Clarke published Kit Bam's
Adventures; or, The Yarns of an Old Mariner. In the novel Kit Bam, a retired sailor, tells a brother and
sister about his adventures. Bam's shipmates are analogues for Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser,
Johann Paul Richter, and Shelley, and in his wanderings Bam encounters characters from Greek and
Arthurian myths, The Arabian Nights, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1794), William
Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1566-1575), Richter's Himmelsschlüssel (1796), Shakespeare's Othello
(1604) and The Tempest (1612), Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), and Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).

The idea of a character meeting other creators' characters while traveling was used by several authors
in the 19th and early 20th century. Henry Lee Boyle's Kennaquhair (1872) is about a Utopian city in
which various fictional characters live. The narrator is escorted through Kennaquhair by Yorick from
Shakespeare's Hamlet and meets a number of fictional characters, including Mrs. Sairey Gamp from
Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit. Another author to use traveling as the vehicle for a crossover was
Walter de la Mare, who in Henry Brocken (1904) had the titular character meet Shakespeare's Titania
and Bottom, Bronte's Jane Eyre and Rochester, Cervantes' Rosinante and Don Quixote, Poe's Annabel
Lee, and Swift's Houyhnhnms.

Ghosts in Hell

The next major crossover is the afterlife or "Bangsian" fantasy, about an afterlife in which the ghosts
of famous men and women come together and have various (usually genial) adventures. The afterlife
has been used for centuries as a meeting ground for characters from different creators. One early
example is Virgil's Aeneid (c. 29-19 B.C.E.), in which Aeneas sees a number of heroes and heroines
from earlier Greek epics. John Kendrick Bangs began a new vogue in afterlife fantasies with The
Houseboat on the River Styx (1895). In Houseboat most of the ghosts are of real people, including
Shakespeare and George Washington, but the ghosts of Hamlet, Yorick, Adam, Shem, Noah, and
Ophelia also appear. In Bangs' sequel, The Pursuit of the Houseboat (1897), the ghosts of fictional
characters appeared: Sherlock Holmes (Holmes had "died" in A. Conan Doyle's "The Final Problem"),
Shakespeare's Shylock, Emile Gaboriau's Lecoq, Tom Taylor's Hawkshaw, and Harlan P. Halsey's Old
Sleuth.

In Mexico in the 1950s the afterlife fantasy returned as a film sub-genre in which a number of ghosts
were shown to be haunting the same house or apartment. This sub-genre began with Adolfo
Fernandez Bustamente's La Rebelión de los Fantasmas (1949), in which an old house in Mexico City,
scheduled to be demolished, is inhabited by the ghosts of La Llorona, Samson, Don Quixote, Romeo &
Juliet, Chopin, Paganini, Tutankhaman, and The Wandering Jew, none of whom are inclined to take the
demolition lightly. La Rebelión de los Fantasmas was popular and spawned numerous imitators.

The Six Degrees of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes' appearance in The Pursuit of the Houseboat was his first appearance after his
"death" in 1893, and the first use of Holmes by a writer other than A. Conan Doyle. Holmes quickly
became the subject of pastiches and crossovers, far more so than any other single character. The first
crossover involving Holmes and another series character is in Maurice LeBlanc's "Arsène Lupin" story,
"Sherlock Holmes Arrive Trop Tard" in Je Sais Tout #17 (1906). (After pressure from A. Conan Doyle's
lawyers the title of the story was changed to "Herlock Sholmes Arrive Trop Tard").

Following LeBlanc's story Holmes was often used in crossovers, usually illegally (that is, not authorized
by Doyle). In Miss Boston, la Seule Détective-Femme du Monde Entier #1 (1908) Miss Boston is
inspired to fight crime by the murder of Holmes, which she solves, thus beginning her own career as a
detective. Holmes was not the only character to be illegally appropriated and used in crossovers in this
way.

Crossovers involving the use of fictionalized versions of real people became common in the last
decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. Celebrities have often been used
by authors in their stories, but before the rise of the news media in the 19th century these men and
women were the products of folklore, like British highwayman Dick Turpin (1705?-1739) rather than
reality. The growth of the newspaper in the 19th century allowed individuals other than heads of state
to become internationally known, and allowed them to be used by authors as supporting characters in
serial fiction. Thomas Byrnes (1842-1910) became a national celebrity for his transformation of the
N.Y.P.D. into a modern, professional police force. He was incorporated into at least eight different dime
novel detective serials in the 1890s as "Superintendent Byrnes" or "Inspector Byrnes" and the man
responsible for giving Nick Carter (or Broadway Billy or Dave Dotson or Gideon Gault) their orders.
During the years of his presidency Theodore Roosevelt was almost as popular a subject for
appearances in the dime novels, as were the internationally renowned strongman Eugen Sandow
(1867-1925) and the Russian double-agent Evno Azef (1869-1918).

Internationally the crossover became much more common than exceptional in the 1910s and 1920s.
The spread of American and British popular literature through Europe, Africa, and Asia in the late 19th
and early 20th century, and the international growth in the technology of the popular press, led to
European, African, and Asian authors imitating American and British authors and writing crossovers of
their own. In 1921 the Chinese writer Cheng Xiaoqing began a series of crossovers between his
character Huo Sang and Lu Ping, a series character created and written by Sun Liaohong. The joke of
the crossovers is that Huo Sang began life as a Sherlock Holmes copy and was deliberately written and
billed as "the Oriental Sherlock Holmes," while Sun Liaohong had created Lu Ping in imitation of
Maurice LeBlanc's Arsène Lupin (the similarity in names is deliberate). The first duel between Huo
Sang and Lu Ping was an homage to LeBlanc's first Holmes-Lupin crossover, "Herlock Sholmes Arrive
Trop Tard," and like LeBlanc's story the Huo Sang-Lu Ping duel took on a life of its own and was
repeated in several different stories.

The most notable crossovers in American pulps took place in the Street & Smith western Wild West
Weekly (1927-1943). Like many pulps, Wild West Weekly had a rotating cast of regularly-appearing
characters. Some of these characters, like Paul Powers' Johnny Forty-Five, appeared for nearly the
entire fourteen years of Wild West Weekly's existence. Wild West Weekly's two editors, Ronald
Oliphant and John Burr, encouraged their writers to have the series characters meet each other, so
that J. Allan Dunn's Whistlin' Kid met Paul Powers' Sonny Tabor, and Tabor met Ben Conlon's Pete Rice,
and Pete Rice met Cleve Endicott's Billy West, and so on. The cumulative effect was to create a shared
universe. This took place to a much greater degree in the German heftromans of the 1930s, when
numerous crossovers and team-ups between series characters were written. (In my next column I'll
describe how the German heftromans created the first Marvel/DC-like shared universe).

Teams and Societies

The next significant type of crossover, in which characters from different creators are brought
together as a team, appeared in a comic book in 1940 rather than in a book or pulp magazine. By 1940
the idea of a crossover featuring a team of characters from different creators was well known. The
Argonauts were such a team, as was the group of detectives in Pursuit of the Houseboat. In 1905
Carolyn Wells created such a team in the first of five "Society of Infallible Detectives" stories. Presided
over by Sherlock Holmes, the Society meet to solve crimes. Their membership is Jacques Futrelle's S.S.
"The Thinking Machine" Van Dusen, E.W. Hornung's Raffles, Maurice LeBlanc's Arsène Lupin, Edgar
Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, Emile Gaboriau's M. Lecoq, E.C. Bentley's Philip Trent, Anna Katherine
Green's Ebenezer Gryce, Francis Lynde's Calvin "Scientific" Sprague, William MacHarg and Edwin
Balmer's Luther Trant, E.C. Bentley's Philip Trent, Arthur Reeve's Craig Kennedy, Gaston Leroux's
Rouletabille, and M. Vidocq.

The comic book crossover in 1940 was the first team crossover specifically intended to be ongoing. In
All-Star Comics #3 (Winter 1940-1941) Sheldon Mayer and Gardner Fox, along with artists Everett
Hibbard and Sheldon Moldoff, brought together characters from several DC comics: Sandman and
Hourman from Adventure Comics, Flash and Hawkman from Flash Comics, Green Lantern and the
Atom from All-American Comics, and the Spectre and Dr. Fate from More Fun Comics. These
characters formed a team, the Justice Society of America, the first ongoing crossover team in popular
culture. The Justice Society appeared in All-Star Comics until 1951.

All-Star Comics #3 is particularly significant in the history of crossovers because it was the single
greatest vector for the concept of the crossover. During World War II, comic books had very high
circulation rates, with some selling over a million copies per issue. Comics were bought and read by
children, teenagers, and adults, and thanks to their distribution via the United States Armed Services
during the war comics were read by millions of servicemen and women. While crossovers had
proliferated before All-Star Comics #3, significantly more men and women were exposed to the
concept of the crossover through All-Star Comics #3 and other, similar comic book teams and
crossovers.

All-Star Comics #3 was also influential internationally. The Mexican reprints of American comics were
popular and helped propagate the idea of the crossover. In the 1950s films featuring the fictionalized
exploits of real-life luchadors (masked wrestlers) such as El Santo became popular. It was inevitable
that the writers and directors of the films would show the luchadors teaming up, and in 1961 El Santo
and fellow luchador Black Shadow were shown fighting a Haitian zombie master in Benito Alazraki's
Santo Contra los Zombies (1961). Santo Contra los Zombies was the first of the luchador crossover
movies, a trend that continues today and which has featured dozens of luchadors meeting in over two
hundred films.

Wold Newton, Anno Dracula, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

The penultimate in crossovers was not published until 1972, when Philip José Farmer published "An
Exclusive Interview with Lord Greystoke" (Esquire, April 1972) and Tarzan Alive, a "biography" of
Tarzan. In Tarzan Alive Farmer theorized that eighteen men and women had been present when a
radioactive meteor landed in Wold Newton, Britain. These eighteen men and women had been
irradiated, altering their genes so that their descendants were superhuman. Farmer went on to
theorize that the members of this "Wold Newton family" included Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Bulldog
Drummond, C. Auguste Dupin, Doc Savage, the Spider, Nero Wolfe, and many more. In the sequel to
Tarzan Alive, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973), Farmer added a number of other fictional heroes
and villains to the family tree. Farmer's idea, which eventually became known as the "Wold Newton
Universe," is a world in which dozens of fictional heroes and villains co-exist and are related to each
other.

The 1990s and 2000s have brought the ultimate in crossovers. Kim Newman's first novel, The Night
Mayor (1989), brought together a number of characters from noir films, but his Anno Dracula novels
and stories (1992-present) feature numerous characters from literature and film coexisting and
interacting. Egyptian playwright Hani Mutaweh, in The Last Whisper (1999), brought together an array
of figures from Egyptian culture and history, from King Farouk to actor Zaki Rostom to Naguib al-
Rihani's village headman Kishkish Bey, in a world in which any significant Egyptian person or character
can meet and express an opinion about each other. Finally, in the world of Alan Moore and Kevin
O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics (1999-present), as in the world of Anno Dracula,
any fictional character can co-exist with any other character-which is the ultimate in crossovers.

How science shaped the stories of Ray Bradbury

12:32 6 September 2011
Books

Jonathan R. Eller, contributor

(Image: Dan Tuffs/Getty)

Sci-fi and fantasy author Ray Bradbury's experiences of the Atomic and Space Ages are evident in his
curious stories of Earth's destruction and life on Mars, says biographer Jonathan R. Eller

RAY BRADBURY, the science fiction and fantasy author behind such classics as Fahrenheit 451,
infamously claims to remember the details of his own birth. In 1920, he was born into an era of rapid
scientific discovery - the advances of which inspired his long and fruitful writing career.

Bradbury's earliest encounters with science were at the tender age of 10, when he read all he could
understand of astronomer Percival Lowell's ideas on the existence of intelligent life on Mars. His high-
school astronomy class provided a basic understanding of the solar system and a context, of sorts, for
Lowell's Martian canals. These few grains of outdated speculation and chalkboard science laid the
groundwork for much to follow.

In time, the science of the mind intrigued Bradbury as much as the science of space and time, and
advances in the study of human nature sparked his initial successes with dark fantasy. After exploring
Freud and Jung's work in psychology he moved quickly onto Karen Horney's pioneering studies of
neuroses.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, he capped these readings with new studies of aggressive
behaviour, including psychologist Fredric Wertham's Dark Legend - an account of a 17-year-old boy
who killed his own mother - and later science historian Jacob Bronowski's The Face of Violence, a
discussion of violence in society.

From this core material Bradbury refined his writing about the passions and terrors of childhood that
linger in adult life - themes that are evident in his nostalgic novel Dandelion Wine, and the terrifying
Something Wicked This Way Comes.

The early years of the so-called atomic age that followed the first test of nuclear weapons soon
brought atomic science to the forefront of Bradbury's prose. The final stories in his 1950 work The
Martian Chronicles describe Earth's destruction as a result of atomic war, and the slim hope of a new
start on the Red Planet. The similar war that closes Fahrenheit 451 radiated out into some of his best
short stories, such as The Last Night of the World - a chilling portrayal of a couple's routine behaviour
on the day before Earth is set to be destroyed.

Yet Bradbury soon realised that technologies capable of ending life on Earth could also lead to space
flight, giving hope to his evolving belief that mankind's destiny was in the stars. The full flowering of
rocketry accompanying the space age led him to embrace a new genre of writing - the scientific essay -
to celebrate these milestones.

Bradbury was particularly inspired by anthropologist Loren Eiseley's ability to convey sensation in his
work through rhythmic and metaphor-rich prose, and he went on to craft his own writing style in
essays aimed at lay readers. These included two Life magazine articles in the 1960s: "Cry the Cosmos"
and "An Impatient Gulliver Above Our Roofs", which played a key role in maintaining public support
for NASA's Apollo space programme.

For all his fascination with technological progress, Bradbury remains wary of using it himself. He
avoided flying for decades, and never learned to drive after witnessing a fatal car crash. His concerns
are clear in Fahrenheit 451, in which a lead character is killed by a futuristic automobile.

The subject closest to Bradbury's heart, though, is cosmology. He followed astronomer George Ellery
Hale's dream of a 200-inch (5.1-metre) telescope on mount Palomar - the site of the California
Institute of Technology's observatory - with the same excitement he had once felt for Lowell's dreams
of Mars.

Yet the telescope's great advances in tracing the history of the universe back to the big bang failed to
shift his early views on the greatest question of all. Bradbury remains uncomfortable with the
beginnings and endings inherent in the big bang, holding instead that the universe has been here
forever. He remains certain that mankind will physically explore the galactic "island universes" that the
Hale telescope and its successors have revealed.

Bradbury summed up his own role in this exploration in a 1975 seminar: "That's my business - to find
the metaphor that explains the space age, and along the way write stories." And so he has, for more
than seven decades.

Jonathan R. Eller is a professor of English and co-founder of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. His new book, Becoming Ray Bradbury, is published
by University of Illinois Press
1) Swords Against Death by Fritz Leiber

"My 'single desert-island book for the aspiring fantasy author,' would probably be Swords Against
Death by Fritz Leiber. Tons to learn from there. The way Leiber counterbalanced Fafhrd and the Gray
Mouser's superhuman prowess with their flawed humanity; his mesmerizing evocation of the city of
Lankhmar; the sparkling beauty and wit of his description and dialogue — all this, plus the best
swordfights ever written!" — Saladin Ahmed, author of Throne of the Crescent Moon.

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2) The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber

"This and Thurber's other comic fairy tales, particularly The White Deer, were an enormous influence
on many of us. Thurber manages simultaneously to satirize mythic fiction, and to move us with its
truth and beauty. I don't know how he does it; it's really line by line. Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn,
which I adored, is in large part a Thurber homage that nonetheless soars and sings. It's as if they've
taken on the wizards' challenge to fight with one foot in water and the other on the shore . . . and
won." — Ellen Kushner, author of the Nebula-nominated The Privilege of the Sword.

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3) The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

"If any one book turned me toward fantasy - though I think the instinct was already there - it has to be
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, which was given to me by a beloved second/third-
grade teacher: a tall, skinny Irish lady who looked rather like Eleanor Roosevelt, and who seemed to
spot me for whatever I was early on. We remained friends until her death, and one my very proudest
moments remains the day I walked over to her house to give her one of the earliest copies of A Fine
and Private Place, my first novel. The Wind in the Willows remains, for me, absolutely sui generis, as
much of a one-shot miracle as The Lord of the Rings itself: no more explainable than Gollum.
Children's book or not, the bloody thing changed my life, that's all." — Peter S. Beagle, author of The
Last Unicorn

4) Little, Big by John Crowley

"It's a fairy tale in the truest sense of the term, but a fairy tale for adults; a beautifully written,
beautifully crafted circuitous narrative that doesn't reveal its innermost secrets until it comes around
full circle at the end. As a fantasy author, it reminds me of the heights to which the genre can aspire."
— Jacqueline Carey, author of the Kushiel novels and the recently released Saints Astray.

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5) The Structures of Everyday Life (Civilization & Capitalism: 15th - 18th century, Volume 1) by Fernand
Braudel

"If you're a fantasist writing about a pre-Industrial society — or even one writing about the axis
between that and mechanization — you need to know a lot about a world tremendously far from our
own experience; one in which, say, most people owned few clothes because it took hours of human
labor to make a few yards of cloth. Even if you're lucky enough to remember a mom or grandma
darning socks or patching a shirt's elbow . . . we've come too far already. Social historians like Braudel
unearth and analyse minutely what people ate and wore, where and how they lived, to give a sense of
the fabric of a lost world we can cherry-pick for verisimilitude, from a well-stocked larder. You don't
need to know everything, but you must feel it in your bones." — Kushner, who also won the World
Fantasy Award for Thomas The Rhymer.

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6) Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

"Hofstadter showed me — and he never stops reminding me — that reality is weird and marvelous
and complex. If you're going to write fantasy, you have to come prepared to keep up." — Lev
Grossman, author of The Magician King.

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7) Any Books of Mythology

"[Aspiring fantasy authors should read] lots of mythology — any mythology, really. I've enjoyed
surveying the myths of many cultures, but I can see the value in also going in-depth on any single
culture's myth structure. Fascinating to see the commonalities across cultures, and the cycles through
which myths flow over the course of history. So much of fantasy these days is derivative of other
fantasy; maybe by going back to the source, we'll at least see more work that's derivative in different
ways." — N.K. Jemisin, author of The Killing Moon, who also recommends spending lots of time on
TVTropes.org to see what's been done to death.

8) The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols by Jean Chevalier

"You'll find alternate and arcane meanings and ideas embedded in words you previously took for
granted. Use it like a standard dictionary or just open it at random and read. An entry on a single word
can generate story ideas." — Richard Kadrey, author of Aloha From Hell.

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9) The Once and Future King by T.H. White

"Fantasy writer or not, Camelot freak or not, no one should go without reading The Once and Future
King. My test for the ones who matter most to me is whether they can both make me laugh and cry. T.
H. White can do that; while Tolkien, undeniably magisterial as he is (whatever that word exactly
means) can't. The great Irishman James Stephens can do it in spades, sometimes almost
simultaneously, as can Ursula LeGuin and the man she called "the ancestor of us all" — Edward John
Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth Baron Dunsany. But they're all to be read, and there's no way you
can't learn from every one of them." — Beagle, whose latest book is Sleight of Hand.
"This is the book that showed me what it meant to write about magic as if it were actually real:
describing it specifically, precisely, in ordinary modern language, with the characters who observe it
reacting to it not with conventional expressions of wonder and surprise but in realistic, psychologically
plausible ways. " — Grossman, whose The Magicians is becoming a TV series.
10) Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn

" I think Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy should be required reading for anybody in this
genre. It might seem like dense academic language for some, but I actually found it clear and
accessible as it broke down all fantasy into four broad taxonomic categories, then examined the
commonalities — and exceptions — for each. For those writers who really want to understand the
literary footsteps they're walking, and who find our current marketing-driven genre structure
restrictive and confusing (e.g., is it URBAN fantasy or is it urban FANTASY?), this is helpful." — Jemisin,
who also wrote the Inheritance Trilogy, beginning with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

And we'll let Beagle have the last word: "You can learn a surprising amount from third and fourth-rate
writers, too - if only what not to do. As my old role model, Haff, the beggar-poet hero of the old
musical Kismet, says to — of all people, Omar Khayyam — 'Omar, my friend, there is always something
to be learned... even from fools.'"

1.) The Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973)

This trash classic stars an eight-foot-tall killer sheep that has been mutated by mysterious vapors from
an old mine. The film never explains why said creature is dubbed "the godmonster." I'm assuming the
giant sheep is some sort of intricate Jesus metaphor lost to the cutting room floor.

2.) Beginning of the End (1957)

In this schlocky drive-in flick, grasshoppers consume radioactive foods, grow to preposterous sizes,
and attack the citizens of Chicago. Aren't grasshoppers herbivores?

3.) The Killer Shrews (1959)

On a secluded island, a scientist tries to solve the world's food crisis by devising a method that will
make humans half-sized. Somehow, he inadvertently creates a species of giant, bloodthirsty shrews.
Let's table the fact that this scientist's plan is completely stupid and instead focus on how he
"accidentally" created killer shrews. How did he get from Point A to Point B? This whole situation is
like if I vowed to lose weight by chopping off my legs and, in the process, installed a grain thresher on
the hood of my car.

4.) Food of the Gods (1976)

Food of the Gods was loosely based on H.G. Wells' novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to
Earth. In this film, a strange "food" is found on an island in British Columbia. A number of small
animals, such as chickens, wasps, and rats feed upon it and subsequently become man-killing
monstrosities. Look at those deadly hens!

5.) Gnaw — Food of the Gods II (1989)

Barring its title, this sequel had nothing to do with the original Food of the Gods — heck, it didn't
even feature the titular vittles. No, this film was about an experimental growth serum which is tested
on rats and a little boy named Bobby, who turns into a psychotic, cussing ogre. The above scene is
unintentional comedy gold, and it's even funnier if you have no idea what the movie's about.
6.) Night of the Lepus (1972)
An experimental hormone designed to reduce a small town's rabbit population instead mutates them
into Buick-sized killing machines. The studio could have made a fortune if they just called the film 90
Minutes of Fluffy Bunnies Hopping Around Incongruously Small Dioramas. It also contains one of the
crappiest environmental messages in scifi history.

7.) Konga (1961)

An unworthy addition to the giant ape genre, Konga starred a massive chimpanzee who'd been
injected with experimental growth serum. In addition to being a fairly blatant rip-off of King Kong, the
giant chimp bore an uncanny resemblance to the animatronic gorilla from Showbiz Pizza. I like how
Konga's first attempt at destroying the lab is to wanly ruffle some research papers.

8.) Ticks (1993)

Oversized vectors for Lyme Disease harangue disaffected youth (and Clint Howard) at a summer
camp. And look, it's Seth Green before he could act!

9.) The White Buffalo (1977)

Charles Bronson versus a buffalo the size of a Sherman Tank. Nuff said.

10.) A*P*E (1976)

At first blush, A*P*E seems to be some sort of unholy mash-up of King Kong and M*A*S*H. In truth, it
was just a shameless cash grab designed to preempt the release of Dino De Laurentiis' King Kong. The
studios noticed, and posters for A*P*E were required to bear the disclaimer "Not to be confused with
King Kong."