Customer Reviews
The Human Side Of Science Fiction April 5, 2011by
M.Thomas
Traditionally, science fiction has been fascinated by technology and that which is alien. By contrast, Ray Bradbury's science fiction in this textbook portrays humanity in different and unusual settings. Whether he is telling us a story about a man's persistent love for a woman long dead, a winged man who can no longer fly as before, the encounter between the last man and woman on Mars after the human race is destroyed, or four shipwrecked men seeking shelter in a never ending downpour on Venus, he emphasizes that although each of us exists in a shell and as such must face our fears and doubts alone, the fact that we all have these feelings is what unites us. This refreshing perspective stands in contrast to the science fiction of fast ships, ray guns, and hostile aliens. It also makes Ray Bradbury a compelling author.
The Stories of Ray Bradbury:
5 out of
5
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1 user reviews.
Summary
This collection includes 100 of Ray Bradbury's remarkable stories which have, together with his classic novels, earned him an immense international audience.
Author Biography
Ray Bradbury has published more than five hundred works, including The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2004, and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2000. He lives in Los Angeles.
Christopher Buckley is the author of fourteen books, including Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir. He is editor-at-large of ForbesLife Magazine.
Table of Contents
The Night
Homecoming
Uncle Einar
The Traveler
The Lake
The Coffin
The Crowd
The Scythe
There Was an Old Woman
There Will Come Soft Rains
Mars Is Heaven
The Silent Towns
The Earth Men
The Off Season
The Million-Year Picnic
The Fox and the Forest
Kaleidoscope
The Rocket Man
Marionettes, Inc.
No Particular Night or Morning
The City
The Fire Balloons
The Last Night of the World
The Veldt
The Long Rain
The Great Fire
The Wilderness
A Sound of Thunder
The Murderer
The April Witch
Invisible Boy
The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind
The Fog Horn
The Big Black and White Game
Embroidery
The Golden Apples of the Sun
Powerhouse
Hail and Farewell
The Great Wide World Over There
The Playground
Skeleton
The Man Upstairs
Touched with Fire
The Emissary
The Jar
The Small Assassin
The Next in Line
Jack-in-the-Box
The Leave-Taking
Exorcism
The Happiness Machine
Calling Mexico
The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit
Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed
The Strawberry Window
A Scent of Sarsaparilla
The Picasso Summer
The Day It Rained Forever
A Medicine for Melancholy
The Shore at Sunset
Fever Dream
The Town Where No One Got Off
All Summer in a Day
Frost and Fire
The Anthem Sprinters
And So Died Riabouchinska
Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!
The Vacation
The Illustrated Woman
Some Live Like Lazarus
The Best of All Possible Worlds
The One Who Waits
Tyrannosaurus Rex
The Screaming Woman
The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place
Night Call, Collect
The Tombling Day
The Haunting of the New
Tomorrow’s Child
I Sing the Body Electric!
The Women
The Inspiried Chicken Motel
Yes, We’ll Gather at the River
Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!
A Story of Love
The Parrot Who Met Papa
The October Game
Punishment Without Crime
A Piece of Wood
The Blue Bottle
Long After Midnight
The Utterly Perfect Murder
The Better Part of Wisdom
Interval in Sunlight
The Black Ferris
Farewell Summer
McGillahee’s Brat
The Aqueduct
Gotcha!
The End of the Beginning
Excerpts
FROM THE INTRODUCTION
By Christopher Buckley
——
In an episode of the hi t TV showMad Men, set in 1962, one of the characters is skeptical about a planned business trip to the West Coast. He asks his boss in a smug, New York City way, ‘‘What’s in L.A., anyway?’’
The boss, Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm, smiles coolly. ‘‘The Jet Propulsion Lab? Ray Bradbury?’’
It’s a throwaway l ine, a fleeting tip of the hat byMad Men’s creator, Mat thew Weiner, to the ult imate Writer’s Writer: Ray Douglas Bradbury, who, as I type these words, is one day away from his eighty-ninth birthday here on Planet Earth. (His middle name derives from Douglas Fairbanks, an idol from another era.)
Ray Bradbury published his first short story in 1938, which means that he has been a working author for seventy-one years. He is a self-professed ‘‘sprinter’’ at the short story, rather than a ‘‘marathon runner’’ novelist. It is hard to think of a writer who has done more wi th the short story form than Ray Bradbury. According to his able biographer, Sam Weller,* he has written one every week since he started. By my math, that comes to 3,640. The ‘‘Also by’’ page of a recently published book of his essays,Bradbury Speaks, lists thirty-two titles.
Many writers are prolific. It is perhaps Ray’s influence on other writers – to say nothing of his readers – that sets him apart. It is profound. In the pages of Mr. Weller’s book, you’ll find the tributes and friendships of a diverse group: Bernard Berenson, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Stephen King, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut (who managed completely to screw up the film version ofFahrenheit 451), John Huston (for whom Ray wrote the screenplay to hisMoby-Dick), R.L. Stine, Buzz Aldrin (among dozens of astronauts), Walt Disney, John Steinbeck, Charles Laughton, Rod Steiger, legendary editor Bob Gottlieb (who helped to shape many of these stories), Sam Peckinpah, and Steve Martin. I’ll stop there, other than to say this is but a partial list of Ray Bradbury’s fan club.
Glittery names, to be sure, but Ray’s influence runs deeper. Literally, it occurs to me. Whenever I’m on a subway, I’m always curious to see what books – if any – kids are reading these days. And the two books that I routinely see the teenagers reading, intently, areAtlas ShruggedandFahrenheit 451. The next most-often-sighted book isDandeli on Wine(1957), which many Bradburians insist is his finest work.
Ray Bradbury has covered the world – indeed, universe – with his themes: small-town America, Mars, fantasy, horror, and science fiction. You could even go so far as to say that we live today in a world that was prefigured by Ray Bradbury.Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, anticipated an age dominated by television, wall-sized plasma-screen TV, and even Sony Walkman-like devices. One of the most chilling stories in this collection, ‘‘The Veldt,’’ published at the start of the TV era, today reads like an Elijah-like warning against surrendering ourselves to the false Edens of the vast wasteland and its bastard offspring, video games.
There are some ironies here in being warned against all this by one of the most famous writers of science fiction. (He prefers
to be known as a writer of fantasy.) But few writers have a crater on the moon named for one of their books (Dandelion Crater, so named by the crew of Apollo 15 ) or have consulted on the U.S. pavilion for a World’s Fair, or on an EPCOT exhibit at Disney World. You’ll learn in Weller’s book that Ray was also the inspiration for the design of a number of leading – br
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