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The Dragon Who Ate His Tail by Ray Bradbury
01/04/2007 . Source: Pauline Morgan 
pub: Gauntlet Press. 70 page limited edition enlarged paperback. Price: $14.99 (US), $20.99 (CAN). ISBN: 1-887368-91-4. Buy The Dragon Who Ate His Tail in the USA - or Buy The Dragon Who Ate His Tail in the UK  check out website: www.gauntletpress.com
Enquire - despite website message, copies of an unlimited edition are available.
Occasionally, a writer and his work will so catch the imagination of a reader that ownership of all they have written becomes an obsession. For the Ray Bradbury completists, this is a book they will have to possess. This edition is a chap book.
That is, it is a slim, limited edition volume. It has been complied with love and care by Donn Albright who has also produced the cover art. Well, most of it. His central panel is surrounded by idiosyncratic dragon drawings by Bradbury. More of these appear inside along with some other Bradbury illustrations.
The pieces in this volume are all very short but show how an idea can develop and change. The title story, 'The Dragon Who Ate His Tail' is a previously unpublished piece and is principally a discourse between a husband and wife who are about to embark on a new life in the past. Most of the population of the world have already gone back in time. Although it is not stated, by comparing it with the offerings in the volume, they suggest that this is probably an early draft.
The second story, 'To the Future' was published in Colliers magazine in May 1950 and broadcast on the radio about the same time. It tells of a couple who have gone into the past and have tried to remain there as they do not like the restrictions of the destroyed planet they were born to. However, they are being pursued by agents trying to make them go back. In the 1990s, there was a proposal to film this story. Included next are the last few pages of the screen play in which Bradbury has changed the ending to make it more positive.
Then follows another story, 'Sometime Before Dawn', which tells basically the same story but from the point of view of the man who boards in the next room from the couple who are trying to escape from the future. It is followed by a facsimile manuscript of the same story, dated 1950, with all the corrections.
If the two are compared, it shows how Bradbury has updated the story from its original setting of the 1928 to 2002 with very few textural alterations. While the first two stories have dated due to the mention of hydrogen bombs (a serious concern in the 1950s) this one has not and merely changing the date of the action serves to modernise it. This works partly because of the point of view and partly because of Bradbury's skill as a writer.
The book finishes with several fragments which appear to be versions of scenes in the same story and which show how a writer will try out different ideas until they find the approach that works.
This volume is expensive for what it is but will be an essential part of any Bradbury collection and an insight in to how Bradbury the writer evolves both his stories and his thinking over time. The only thing missing is a proper publishing history of the published pieces and a clue as to the chronology of the rest.
Pauline Morgan
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