The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The Martian Chronicles is a collection of Ray Bradbury’s stories about the human colonization of Mars which were previously published in the pulp magazines of the late 1940s. The stories are arranged in chronological order with the dates of the events at the beginning of each story. In the first edition of The Martian Chronicles, published in 1950, the events took place in a future 1999-2027, but a reprinted 1997 edition pushes all events forward to 2030-2057. Because it’s a story collection, The Martian Chronicles has an episodic feel which has been made more fluid by connecting the stories with short vignettes, similar to the structure of Bradbury’s collection The Illustrated Man.
In the first story, “Rocket Summer,” we visit a small town in Ohio while the first human explorator... Read More
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
The Illustrated Man is a collection of Ray Bradbury’s stories which are sandwiched between the account of the titular man whose tattoos come alive at night and set the scenes for the 18 tales in this collection. All of these stories are classic Ray Bradbury — full of spacemen, Earth-Mars conflict, psychiatrists, spoiled children, bad marriages, book burning, domestic work-saving technologies, and nervous breakdowns. They deal with the fear of atomic war, loneliness, prejudice, madness, and the dangers of automobiles, junk food, and media entertainment (but smoking is okay).
All of the tales are written in Bradbury’s incomparable prose and most of them are emotionally touching. But, not surprisingly, they’re almost all grim, making The Illustrated Man a book that you probably won’t want to read all at once unless you... Read More
For today’s Book Chat, we’re examining Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. Interestingly, it’s the only one of his novels that Bradbury considered to be “science fiction,” telling the story of Guy Montag, a fireman who starts fires rather than putting them out. In Montag’s world, books and intellectual curiosity are forbidden, with interesting and terrifying consequences.
Let’s begin!
Bill: Another day, another Bradbury classic. I’ve been a fan of Fahrenheit 451 since I read it the first time way back in late middle or early high school and have remained so through all those re-reads back when I used to teach it in high school as well (most student reactions were positive). This re-read was no different, though com... Read More
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Can you be nostalgic for a place you never lived in, for a time long gone before you were born? I certainly never lived in Waukegan, Illinois in the summer of 1928 as a 12-year old boy named Douglas Spalding, but Ray Bradbury has perfectly evoked a magical world of a long-lost Midwest small town as seen from the eyes of a bright, energetic young boy.
You would think small town life is fairly boring and uneventful, but in the lyrical hands of Bradbury, think again. The short vignettes he tells are always unexpected, and verge from wryly-amusing to heart-breaking to outright terrifying, all because of the skill and love with which Bradbury approaches these characters.
Strangely enough, I didn't like The Martian Chronicles much, because it merely used Mars as a stage to explo... Read More
This Book Chat we’re continuing with another classic Ray Bradbury title: Something Wicked This Way Comes, his 1962 novel that mixes fantasy, horror, and coming-of-age to tell the story of a sinister carnival that arrives in the town of two 13-year-old boys, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway.
Bill Capossere: I’ll start off by saying I loved this book when I read it the first time as a young teen, somewhere when I was probably just a year or two older than the two protagonists; I choked up and I think actually cried a bit when I read it to my own son about four or five years ago, and I loved it again on this re-read. Some of the reasons were the same, some of the reasons are different, and certainly I’m a bit more critical of the craftsmanship than my ... Read More
The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury
It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small part of a Midwest state. There wasn’t so much wilderness around you couldn’t see the town. But on the other hand there wasn’t so much town you couldn’t see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness.
So reads the charming first sentence of Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree. A perfectly gothic yarn that seeks, through the hop skip and jump adventure of a group of young boys and their sinister guide, to convey the true meaning of Halloween.
It is Halloween night and Tom Skelton and his group of boys are dressed up and ready for adventure. Leaving their poorly friend Pipkin behind, they run, as boys will, out of the town to a great ravine where they find the house of Carapace C... Read More
Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview and Other Conversations edited by Sam Weller
Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, edited by Sam Weller, is actually several interviews, conducted over the last two years of Bradbury’s life, plus a handful of rough essays dictated by Bradbury to Weller, his long-time biographer. Despite this, the book is relatively slim, coming in at about 90 pages, with a lot of white space. This is not meant, though, to be an in-depth look at (or listen to) Bradbury; for that you’ll want to turn to other sources, including Weller’s The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury and Read More
The owner, publisher and editor of Weird Tales have all changed since the last issue of the magazine, and it shows. No longer innovative, with cutting edge fiction, it is now filled with pastiches of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, a throwback to the early days of the magazine. The Hugo-Award-winning team of fiction editor Ann VanderMeer and editorial and creative director Stephen H. Segal are clearly no longer choosing the fiction or art that used to brighten each issue, and the intelligent nonfiction that completed the magazine is nearly gone, though Kenneth Hite’s exploration of Lovecraft’s work, “Lost in Lovecraft,” continues; the fourteenth entry in the series is in this issue. This change is not for the better.... Read More
SHORTS: In this week's column we review several of the Hugo-nominated short fiction works, including four of the Retro Hugo nominees.
"When We Were Starless" by Simone Heller (2018, free at Clarkesworld, $3.99 Kindle magazine issue). 2018 Hugo award nominee (novelette).
In a fallen, future version of our Earth, Mink’s tribe of nomadic, intelligent lizards wanders the land, living at a bare subsistence level and frequently threatened by physical dangers, like giant verminous creatures called rustbreed. One of the tribe’s treasures is their weavers, eight-legged technological artifacts from a prior time that can turn raw materials into useful items for the tribe, like pots and tents.
Mink is both a scout ... Read More
The Best of Planet Stories, #1: edited by Leigh Brackett
Beginning in 1937 and continuing on for a good dozen years, the pulp magazine Astounding Science-Fiction, under the editorship of John W. Campbell, was the most dominant and influential publication in its field. But that is hardly to say that it didn't have competition for readers' attention (and their 20 cents) at the newsstands. Planet Stories, which published its first issue in 1939 and folded in '55 after 71 issues, was one such, but whereas Campbell's magazine specialized in seemingly realistic tales with an emphasis on technology and hard science, Planet Stories' main stock in trade was unabashed space opera; melodramatic adventure stories of lost civilizations, stalwart heroes, beautiful princesses and suchlike. Not for nothing does The Science Fiction Encyclopedia Read More
Weird Tales: The Magazine that Never Dies edited by Marvin Kaye
Marvin Kaye's Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies anthology from 1988 takes a slightly different tack than its earlier sister volume, Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors. Whereas the editors of that earlier collection chose to select one story from each year of the magazine's celebrated 32-year run (1923-1954), Kaye has decided here to not just limit himself to the periodical's classic era of 279 issues, but to also include tales from each of the four latter-day incarnations of "The Unique Magazine" (from 1973-87). The result is 45 pieces of generally superb speculative fantasy and horror, including six "Weird Tales Reprints" by such luminaries as Dickens, Poe, Flaubert and Stoker, as well as Otis Adelbert Kline's "Why Weird Tales?," an article that clearly delineated the magazine's goals and intentions in its first anniversary issue, the one dated May/June/July... Read More
March 10th, 2014.
Sandy Ferber´s rating:
5 |
Arthur Machen,
Clark Ashton Smith,
Fritz Leiber,
H.G. Wells,
H.P. Lovecraft,
Ray Bradbury,
Richard Matheson,
Robert Bloch,
Robert E. Howard,
Tanith Lee,
Theodore Sturgeon,
William Hope Hodgson |
Horror,
Short Fiction |
SFF Reviews,
We Love This! |
no comments
Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury edited by Sam Weller & Mort Castle
Thanks to our recent book chats here, I’ve reread a bit of Ray Bradbury lately, so I was well primed to pick up the 2012 tribute anthology edited by Sam Weller and Mort Castle, entitled Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, which collects 26 contemporary authors who were asked to write a story inspired or informed by Bradbury. The task was sufficiently non-restrictive that the stories run a gamut of style and type: horror, fantasy, dystopia, science fiction, as well as several with no fantastical element whatsoever, which may surprise those who know Bradbury only through classic novels like Fahrenheit 451 or Something Wicked This Way Comes, or collections suc... Read More
I did not know Ray Bradbury. But he knew me. He knew me in the quickened response to that first crisp fall day, the smell of October. He knew me in the loving slap of sneakers against pavement and the softer thwap against dirt and the way that noise never stopped. He knew me in the push me-pull me fascination I had with the dark, with the unknown, the grotesque.
Ray Bradbury 1920-2012
He knew exactly how badly I wanted to go to Mars. See a dinosaur. Live forever. Fly.
He knew my love of dim libraries. Of movie theaters gone dark. Of foghorns.
He knew my love of monsters, my fear of monsters, my fear that we were the monsters, my wonder that so often we chose not to be. That sometimes we saved each other from the monsters. And sometime, even better, we saved the monster too.
He knew me in that so bittersweet intersection of past and future, that wonderf...
Read More
More speculative fiction by Ray Bradbury
Death Is a Lonely Business — (1985) Publisher: Ray Bradbury, the undisputed Dean of American storytelling, dips his accomplished pen into the cryptic inkwell of noir and creates a stylish and slightly fantastical tale of mayhem and murder set among the shadows and the murky canals of Venice, California, in the early 1950s. Toiling away amid the looming palm trees and decaying bungalows, a struggling young writer (who bears a resemblance to the author) spins fantastic stories from his fertile imagination upon his clacking typewriter. Trying not to miss his girlfriend (away studying in Mexico), the nameless writer steadily crafts his literary effort-until strange things begin happening around him. Starting with a series of peculiar phone calls, the writer then finds clumps of seaweed on his doorstep. But as the incidents escalate, his friends fall victim to a series of mysterious accidents-some of them fatal. Aided by Elmo Crumley, a savvy, street-smart detective, and a reclusive actress of yesteryear with an intense hunger for life, the wordsmith sets out to find the connection between the bizarre events, and in doing so, uncovers the truth about his own creative abilities.
A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities — (1990) Publisher: Halloween Night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous investigation leads from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery — and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.
Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines: A Fable — (1998) Publisher: Lost in the desert, young Ahmed awakens the ancient god Gonn-Ben-Allah with his cries of despair and is granted the gift of flight, which he uses to travel with the god on a series of adventures through time and space.
From the Dust Returned: A Family Remembrance — (1999) Publisher: In a strange old house, the Elliot family, which includes mind-readers, vampires and many others, gradually come together, mixing their arcane skills and life-styles, falling in and out of love and changing the world around them forever.
Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band Is Playing & Leviathan ’99 — (2007) Publisher: Two never-before-published novellas by one of America’s finest living writers, Ray Bradbury. A journalist bearing terrible news leaps from a still-moving train into a small town of wonderful, impossible secrets… The doomed crew of a starship follow their blind, mad captain on a quest into deepest space to joust with destiny, eternity, and God Himself… Now and Forever is a bold new work from an incomparable artist whose stories have reshaped America’s literary landscape; two bewitching novellas that have never before appeared in print — each distinctly different, yet uniquely Bradbury — demonstrating the breathtaking range of the master’s talent and the irrepressible vitality of his mind, spirit, and heart. In Somewhere a Band Is Playing, a writer is drawn by poetry and dreams to tiny Summerton, Arizona, a community hidden in plain view, where no small children play, and where the residents never seem to age. Enchanted by its powerful rural magic — and by a beautiful, enigmatic lady who bears the name of an Egyptian queen — the writer sets out to uncover Summerton’s mysteries before the inevitable arrival of a ruthless destruction. With Leviathan ’99, the author who once colonized Mars returns to the cosmos to brilliantly reimagine Herman Melville’s classic masterwork of obsession and the sea, transforming a great whale into a worlds-devouring comet. In the year 2099, fledgling astronaut Ishmael Hunnicut Jones boards the Cetus 7, placing his fate in the hands of a relentless madman who is blindly chasing the celestial monster’s tail. And in the merciless void, a crew of earthborn and alien star-travelers will face a divine judgment, and an “enemy” wielding the most fearsome weapon of all… Time. More than a half century into his remarkable career, Ray Bradbury continues to delight and astound with grand visions, lyrical prose, and provocative thought. Rich in poetry, wonder, imagination, and truth, here is proof positive that the words and stories of the inimitable Bradbury will live on… Now and Forever.
Summer Morning, Summer Night —(2008) Publisher: Green Town, Illinois stands at the very heart of Ray Bradbury Country. A lovingly re-imagined version of the author’s native Waukegan, it has served as the setting for such modern classics as Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Farewell Summer. In Summer Morning, Summer Night, Bradbury returns to this signature locale with a generous new collection of twenty-seven stories and vignettes, seventeen of which have never been published before. Together, they illuminate some of Green Town’s previously hidden corners, and reaffirm Bradbury’s position as the undisputed master of a unique fictional universe. In the course of this volume, readers will encounter a gallery of characters brought vividly to life by that indefinable Bradbury magic. Included among them are a pair of elderly sisters whose love potion carries an unexpected consequence; a lonely teacher who discovers love on Green Town’s nocturnal streets; a ten-year-old girl who literally unearths the intended victim of a vicious crime; and an aging man who recreates his past with the aid of a loaf of pumpernickel bread. Each of these stories is engaging, evocative, and deeply felt. Each reflects the characteristic virtues that have always marked the best of Bradbury’s fiction: optimism, unabashed nostalgia, openness to experience, and, most centrally, an abiding generosity of spirit. Summer Morning, Summer Night is both an unexpected gift and a treasure trove of Story. Its people, places, images, and events will linger in the reader’s mind for many years to come.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE STORY COLLECTIONS BY RAY BRADBURY.
(1920-2012)
