The Stories Of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury
These include well-known stories like “Sound of Thunder,” in which a party of time-travellers makes a mistake that has disastrous results, and “The Veldt,” in which two small children who appear to be innocent turn their nursery into a deadly trap. These Martian tales, with their fragile towns and double-moon sky, wonderfully inhabit the red planet. Here are several tales that express a particular fondness for Green Town, Illinois, the idyllic location for a childhood that seemed to be cloud-free save for the unknown dread that lurked in the ravine. Here are the Mexican and Irish tales that Bradbury has connected despite their different geographical locations. There are also tense, eerie tales here like “The Fog Horn” that are great for reading at night.
The Stories Of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury
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You should be aware that Bradbury tends to despise both technology and pleasant endings before reading this anthology.
In several of his pieces, he imagines a terrible future based on developing technology (in some cases, this is television). The others simply come up with another excuse for why the world is awful and the characters are miserable. The most depressing tale I can recall from my youth is All Summer in a Day. The universe of Ray Bradbury’s stories is desolate, pitiless, and frequently tyrannical, and more often than not, as the story progresses, things only become worse. I haven’t read a story of his where the characters get a happy ending.
They are also thought-provoking, and there is frequently another story hidden behind the main one. The Veldt is particularly intriguing since it can be read in two different ways. With no hardware to do so, without the creators or manufacturers being aware of its having that capability, and without the parents, who didn’t even look into screams in their own homes, knowing it has that capability, Peter and Wendy’s VR system (and that’s really what the nursery was) suddenly produced physical objects from nowhere. If you doubt the sanity of these parents and of a psychiatrist who claims to have never encountered a fact in his life, the story takes on another, even harsher tone.
The majority of Bradbury’s tales are depressing, highlighting some terrible traits of human nature. Only a handful continue on to a redeeming feature. The most intriguing aspect of Bradbury is his use of language and phraseology. Unfortunately, his writings on Mars are wholly out of date and lack any comprehension of the planet as we presently understand it as a result of satellites and landers. But he’s exactly right about how he feels about the end of the world as we know it.
He conveys the desire to preserve humanity by dispersing us throughout the stars in his final story. Now that we’ve seen it, we might speculate that we might spread to the Moon, Mars, and perhaps even locations like Enceladus, but not very likely to the stars.
