Ray Bradbury in Planet Stories follows Ray’s first publications in Weird Tales. Where those stories would eventually lead to Dark Carnival (Arkham House, 1947), the tales of space from Planet Stories would find their way into Bradbury’s SF bestseller, The Martian Chronicles (Doubleday, 1950). Planet Stories offered Bradbury a place to work on his own brand of SF, poetic but still about aliens and strange worlds. (Readers weren’t always happy about it in the letter columns.) John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science-Fiction would never have published these kinds of tales.
The other bonus at Planet Stories was Ray’s good friend and mentor, Leigh Brackett. The two writers both lived in California. While Leigh was spinning her version of the solar system with its dead cities on Mars and Venusian swamps, all the writers of space opera gained a deeper feel for these settings. Bradbury was no exception. Ray and Leigh would collaborate on one story, not in a deliberate way but by happenstance. Brackett wrote half of “Lorelei of the Red Mists” then got called away for film work. Ray offered to finish the story without outline or suggestion. He knew Leigh’s work and wrote a perfectly fine ending.
Each entry below shows where Bradbury collected these stories in his own collection. Some stories, like “Lorelei of the Red Mists” was reprinted over and over but didn’t end up in an all-Bradbury book until much later. The earliest stories had to wait until the end of Bradbury’s life or after his death to be collected. I suppose this means Ray did not hold these tales in very high regard, being early and rougher than later material. Still many of these stories appeared the classic collections: The Illustrated Man, R is For Rocket, etc.
“The Monster Maker” (Planet Stories, Spring 1944) The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury 1 (2011)
“Morgue Ship” (Planet Stories, Summer 1944) The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury 1 (2011)
“Lazarus Comes Forth” (Planet Stories, Winter 1944) The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury 2 (2014)
“Defense Mech” (Planet Stories, Spring 1946) The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury 3 (2017)
“Lorelei of the Red Mist” with Leigh Brackett (Planet Stories, Summer 1946) The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury 3 (2017)
“The Million Year Picnic” (Planet Stories, Summer 1946) The Martian Chronicles (1950)
“The Creatures That Time Forgot” (aka “Frost and Fire) (Planet Stories, Fall 1946) R is For Rocket (1962)
“Rocket Summer” (Planet Stories, Spring 1947)Â The Martian Chronicles (1950)
“PS Flash Feature” (Planet Stories, Spring 1947) has Ray joking from the start that he doesn’t write his stories, Leigh Brackett does. He just collects the checks. He goes onto say that when Leigh doesn’t write them, Henry Kuttner does. Or Ross Rocklynne. Robert A. Heinlein, Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson also get a nod. In this humorous way, Ray highlights the writers who influenced him.
“Zero Hour” (Planet Stories, Fall 1947) The Illustrated Man (1951)
“Jonah of the Jove-Run” (Planet Stories, Spring 1948) The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury 2 (2014)
“Pillar of Fire” (Planet Stories, Summer 1948) S is For Space (1966)
“Mars Is Heaven!” (Planet Stories, Fall 1948)Â The Martian Chronicles (1950)
“Asleep in Armageddon” (aka “Perchance to Dream”) (Planet Stories, Winter 1948) The Day It Rained Forever (1959)
“Dwellers in Silence” (aka “The Long Years”) (Planet Stories, Spring 1949)Â The Martian Chronicles (1950)
“Forever and the Earth” (Planet Stories, Spring 1950) Long After Midnight (1976)
“Death-By-Rain” (aka “The Long Rain”) (Planet Stories, Summer 1950) The Illustrated Man (1951)
“Death-Wish” (aka “The Blue Bottle”) (Planet Stories, Fall 1950) Long After Midnight (1976)
“Dope on Bradbury” (Letter by William F. Nolan) (Planet Stories, May 1951) was the first commentary Nolan wrote on Ray. The Science Fiction writer in his own right, and friend, would go onto write several books about Ray including Nolan on Bradbury: Sixty Years of Writing About the Master (2013). In this letter Bill defends Bradbury’s use of repeated themes, his appearances in the Slicks and his “soft” Science. Nolan does a great job of defending Bradbury’s work. And as we all know, time will silence those critics.
“Bradbury Be Praised” (Letter by Marilyn Venable) (Planet Stories, January 1952) is another letter of defense, this time from Marilyn Venable. The letters in Planet Stories were not always positive, but Ray had his defenders.
“New Bradbury Mag!” (Letter by William F. Nolan) (Planet Stories, January 1952) has Nolan return for more defending and to announce his fanzine, The Ray Bradbury Magazine. This is a full circle moment, if you recall Ray had his own fanzine, Futuria Fantasia only fourteen years before.
“The Golden Apples of the Sun” (Planet Stories, November 1953) The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)
“A Sound of Thunder” (originally appeared in Collier’s, June 28, 1952) reprinted in Planet Stories, January 1954. The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)
Conclusion
By 1954, Ray Bradbury was selling to Collier’s, Esquire, Playboy, Argosy UK, The Saturday Evening Post. He had books that sold well to people who didn’t read Pulp magazines or Science Fiction. He could have walked away from Science Fiction in a way Kurt Vonnegut Jr. would later, and pretend like he never had been there. But Ray didn’t. He continued to appear in all the best SF magazines and anthologies.
The Pulps died off, including Planet Stories, with its final issue in 1955. But Ray Bradbury and his brand of thoughtful SF went on. Today more children have read The Martian Chronicles in High School than any other SF collection. (Who reads SF collections, anyway?) The legacy of Planet Stories lies partially behind that fact, though I doubt any teacher ever mentions it. It’s space opera, and who ever enjoys that these days? Everybody is too busy watching Star Wars on Disney+…
