The October Country By Ray Bradbury

The October Country
By Ray Bradbury
Copyright 1953

The Dwarf
A dwarf comes to a carnival house of mirrors every night to stand before a mirror that makes him look tall. He inquires about purchasing such a mirror. The proprietor treats it like a joke and decides to play a joke on the dwarf. The consequences are dire.

This is relatively early Bradbury. He’s established, but still having to prove himself to the pulp editors. So, much of the whimsy that has come to characterize Bradbury’s writing is not there. However, it is a strong narrative and has two strong characters and a decent climax.

The Next in Line
A couple are stuck in a small Mexican village where their car broke down. While there, they tour a mausoleum of sorts where the dead whose families can not afford burial or grave maintenance are stored. The woman is haunted to the point of exhaustion and wants to leave. But those repairs are taking so long. . .

I didn’t think this story was very well written. Yes, Bradbury makes us aware of the woman’s creeping terror. But what is the reason? The mummies? The atmosphere of the strange little town? What? Why? And the twist, such as it was, was limp.

The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse
George Garvey is the world’s biggest boor, with a vanilla house, a vanilla job, and vanilla opinions on everything. He finds himself at the middle of an avant garde movement that worships the complete and totally mundane. When his popularity starts to wane, he finds sacrificing body parts and having them replaced with unusual prosthetics keeps him hip.

If there is a metaphor here, it is lost on me. The story itself wasn’t good, so Bradbury must have been striving to reveal some subtext. Perhaps it is lost on me or lost to the ages.

Skeleton
A man develops a horrible phobia of his own skeleton, regarding as a separate being living inside his body. He fears it, loathes it, and believes it seeks to betray him at every turn. He finally finds the right guy to help him.

This story displays Bradbury’s gift for using the English language for maximum impact. However, the maximum impact of this story was minimal because it just wasn’t a good story.

The Jar
A country bumpkin buys a jar with an oddity preserved in it from a carnival freak show. He buys it to be popular with his neighbors. His neighbors are quite curious and stop by night after night to ponder what it is in the jar. When his wife insults him by talking to the man from whom he purchased it, he puts a new item in the jar.

This is the typical Bradbury fare that so many of us fell in love with as children. It involves grotesqueries and murder. But Bradbury finds a G-rating way to present the material making it palatable, entertaining, and appropriate for children.

The Lake
A man recalls his childhood visits to a lake for vacation and one time when his 10 year old friend drowned. The body was never recovered. He returns, many years later, with his new wife to find that a lifeguard has discovered a long submerged body of a child.

This story was moody and sorrowful. Wonderfully crafted, the story exhibits Bradbury’s ability to eschew whimsy and embrace darkness and sorrow.

The Emissary
A young, disabled boy stays in touch with the world through his dog, with whom he has a psychic connection, and a neighbor woman who comes to visit him. The woman dies and his dog runs off, only to return later to gift his master.

Bradbury strived for the same moodiness as The Lake, but didn’t quite hit the mark here.

Touched with Fire
Two men make it their lives’ work to bring happiness to other people. After several test runs, they are finally ready to try their first real run. They find a woman who has an unhappy life at home and work. The men try to work their magic and fail. They are dismayed.

This was not a particularly strong story nor was it based on a strong premise. I could see that Stephen King had tapped elements of this story for his book, Insomnia.

The Small Assassin
As she is giving birth, a woman becomes convinced that her baby is trying to kill her. The new parents take their baby home and the baby keeps them up all night, leaving the wife exhausted. Then other events, such as toys left lying on stairs lead to new tragedies. The husband becomes concerned and consults the doctor.

This is the dark, Bradbury fare that belongs in a book called The October Country. This is straight forward horror the likes of a young Stephen King could have appreciated. Great stuff from one of the masters.

The Crowd
A man is injured in a car crash and marvels at how quickly the crowd develops at the accident scene. He becomes obsessed with gawkers at auto crashes and who they are. He eventually learns the truth and joins them.

This charming story was a favorite of preteens and teens. Simple and creepy, it works at that level and can be enjoyed by adults. It was made into one the absolute best episodes of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

Jack in the Box
A boy’s existence is confined to his house and he knows nothing of the world outside. He has a mother and a teacher who seems to live in his house. He sees the outside only through his windows. But one evening, his mother is killed in an accident and the boy goes outside to confront the world for the first time.

This story was incredibly dark without being violent or macabre. The creepiness of how this boy sees simple things such as grass and sky highlights the pervasive sensory deprivation of its main character. It felt like a haunted house story without the ghost. Simply one of the finest stories I’ve ever read.

The Scythe
A desperate farmer and his family come across a farm whose previous owner if found in bed, dead, holding a single stem of wheat. With him is a scythe. The family moves in and the farmer begins to harvest wheat, using the scythe. He finds that he wields no ordinary scythe, nor is he reaping any ordinary harvest.

Like Jack in the Box, this story had a dark feeling that Bradbury creates so well. The premise is unique and interesting. The plot clicks right along and the story wraps up fabulously.

Uncle Einar
Uncle Einar is a man born with wings. One day, while flying home to Europe from a party in Missouri, Uncle Einar hits some power lines and is knocked out. A woman finds him and they soon fall in love and settle on her farm. But afraid of being seen, Uncle Einar quits flying and becomes miserable. Then, one day, his children provide a solution.

This is a child’s tale. Were it not set in our time, place, and world, it would be a fairy tale. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the writing. But I was never a fan of fairy tales.

The Wind
A former adventurer is terrified by the wind. He believes that the weather is trying to kill him for having found the secret place from which all wind originates. He constantly calls his best friend with updates on his battle inside his home as the wind pursues him.

This is not the first story Bradbury has told about the weather being an intelligent, malevolent force. This one has a great sense of urgency and foreboding, making it an excellent read. It does not, however, measure up to the great short story, The Rainy Season from The Illustrated Man which makes one positively uncomfortable.

The Man Upstairs
A young boy watches his grandmother butcher chickens and becomes fascinated by what’s inside of animals. When a new border moves into the house who sleeps by day and works by night, he wonders if that man has the same stuff inside him that we all do. He finds out he doesn’t.

This one has the feel of the Greentown trilogy with the kid viewing older people as alien. The story is quite nondescript and the ending silly. A poor entry in this short story collection.

There Was an Old Woman
Death takes a stubborn old woman who refuses to die, leaving her soul behind to grouse about it. Determined to go on living, she goes to the funeral home to stop the mortician and reclaim her body.

I don’t mind Bradbury’s whimsy. I even enjoy it and embrace it. He tries whimsy in this story and just comes across as silly. I know this story is old. But this is a tired trope and Bradbury’s story is nothing new, original, or clever.

The Cistern
A pair of spinster sisters sit in a drab room. One sister works at her quilting. The other stares out into the rain and tells a chilling tale of a pair of dead lovers who reside in the storm sewers below the town.

This story had a somber and funereal narrative that created an appropriate mood for the reader. This and the next story, had they been more narrative and less dialogue driven, would have reminded me of H.P. Lovecraft in his Lord Dunsany phase.

Homecoming
Timothy is the oddball of the Elliott family (Uncle Einar’s family). He doesn’t like blood to drink, can’t fly or perform any other supernatural tricks. When his many generations of living family gather for a reunion, he wants to impress them with some ability to show he fits in. His telepathic sister plays a mean trick on him.

I’m not a fan of the Elliott family. Uncle Einar was not a particularly good story. This one had a little more emotion and a little less silliness. It worked much better than the earlier Elliott family tale.

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone
A fan of the writer, Dudley Stone travels to his home town to find out what happened to the great writer who suddenly disappeared from the writing scene twenty years prior. He finds Stone living a life of quiet and happy domesticity. Stone agrees to tell him of the incident that led him to quit riding and change his life.

There are a lot of stories like this about the reclusive writer everybody wants to talk to. King utilized it most recently in book 2 of his Bill Hodges trilogy, Finders Keepers. I once saw the trope employed on an episode of the sitcom, Frasier. Bradbury has no major twists or turns or anything sinister. The writer Stone just gained a new perspective on life.

Book to Movie: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Book to Movie: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
Based on the short story, The Foghorn by Ray Bradbury
Screenplay by Lou Moerheim and Fred Freiberger
Directed by Eugene Lourie
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In 1953, Ray Bradbury was starting to become a hot commodity as a writer. He was a young and up and coming writer who spent several years writing for the pulps. The Foghorn was published in the Saturday Evening Post and was given the Hollywood treatment. It would be the second Bradbury story on the big screen after It Came from Outer Space which was released that same year.

Apparently, Bradbury learned that the two screenwriters were working on a creature feature and reminded them that he had written a tale very similar to what they were working on. The credits say that the movie was based on Bradbury’s story. What is interesting is the movie bears no resemblance to Bradbury’s story. Well, a lighthouse gets destroyed. But that’s the only thing close to The Foghorn.

The beast, a Rhedosaurus, is awakened by atomic bomb tests at the North Pole. A scientist witnesses the creature’s awakening and, when he’s shipped back to the states, tries to tell people there is a massive lizard on the loose in the Arctic.

After a series of boat sinkings and reports of creature sightings slowly progressing south, Professor Tom Nesbitt finally convinces a scientist to dive in a diving bell and look for the creature. The creature finds the professor and eats him.

It then comes ashore in New York City and wreaks havoc, crushing cars, buildings and people in Manhattan. The Army attacks it with a bazooka and wounds it. But doctors treating the wounded learn that the blood carries pathogens causing horrible illness. He tells the military that they cannot burn the creature or spill its blood. Dr. Nesbitt determines the only way to kill it is with a rocket equipped with a radioactive isotope.

The creature comes ashore again in an amusement park. It attacks a roller coaster while Professor Nesbitt and an army sharpshooter ascend to the highest peak to fire the rocket. The shot is fired and the creature collapses. End of movie.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms has a really pedestrian plot that has been used countless times in creature features and horror movies past. One guy sees the monster and tries to warn others. His warnings go unheeded until the creature arrives.

In these movies, it is always the scientists and the military who are the heroes. The movie Them! which is probably the most highly regarded of the giant creature films utilizes this formula as well as Beginning of the End which is one of the silliest movies ever made. This played to the zeitgeist of the 1950s when the military and science were America’s strong suit and both institutions were held in high regard.

As shallow and linear as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is, it does hold the distinction of spawning a whole generation of giant creature features. While the plot left a lot to be desired, Ray Harryhausen’s special effects were top notch for the day and still look striking to us who loathe today’s CGI effects. Creatures like Godzilla, Mothra, the giant ants of Them!, and the Japanese children’s hero, Gamera, all appeared in the wake of this movie.

It’s not a Bradbury movie and the plot may put you to sleep. But, if you want to spend an hour and 20 minutes looking at a genuine trailblazing movie, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is worth the time.

R is for Rocket By Ray Bradbury

R is for Rocket
By Ray Bradbury
Copyright 1962

R is for Rocket
A young boy in Florida dreams of becoming an astronaut – a career one must be selected for. He and his best buddy discuss it and dream of it. Then, it comes true.

Bradbury writes syrupy sweet nostalgia better than anyone. Nobody captures the thoughts and emotions of the pre-adolescent boy with such remarkable accuracy as Ray Bradbury.

The End of the Beginning
A man and a woman watch anxiously as the first rocket into space to build the world’s first space station prepares to lift off. The man ponders the implications for how man divides his past from his present and what it means for man’s future.

This story is short on plot and long on philosophy and rumination. Today, it all seems trite and mundane. In the era it was written, I’m sure it was quite profound.

The Fog Horn
Two lighthouse keepers behold a giant, ancient sea creature drawn to the sound of a fog horn.

This story was a little long on reflection and a little short on plot for me.

The Fog Horn served as the basis for the movie The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

The Rocket
A junkyard operator living on a shoestring budget has saved enough money to send one of his family into space. When they can’t decide, he buys a derelict rocket to take his five children into space. His wife is angry at him for spending all of their money and risking the lives of his children. At the end of their “journey,” she comes to see the beauty of it.

Short, simple and sweet. An ideal story for young readers to enjoy this man’s simple but elegant prose.

The Rocket Man
A boy recounts a trip his father, a rocket man who travels to the far reaches of space, made home. His father only comes home a few times a year and they are always special for the boy. His father makes him a promise: just one more trip into space, and he’s home for good.

Like most Bradbury fiction, the sci-fi is just a setting for human drama. The main character could have been a clipper ship captain in the 19th century and the story would not change one iota.

The Golden Apples of the Sun
A captain and crew of a spaceship fly to the surface of the sun to harvest just a cupful of the stuff that makes the sun go.

Like a few of Bradbury’s tales, the story is bogged down in too much waxing philosophic. That is the case here. I love the original idea of harvesting the sun. I didn’t need all of the introspection of the captain which filled three quarters of the text.

A Sound of Thunder
A man hires a company to take him back in time on a safari to hunt a tyrannosaurus rex. He is instructed that he must not leave the path and shoot only where and what instructed. When the time comes to shoot the dinosaur, Eckels panics and jumps off the path. The consequences are felt millions of years in the future.

This is perhaps the most well known sci-fi story in history. It is the most widely printed after originally being published in Colliers in 1954. Some believe it was the genesis of the term “butterfly effect.” The story was spoofed on a Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons.

The Long Rain
A group of survivors of a rocket crash on Venus wander aimlessly in the endless rain, looking for a sun dome shelter to escape the rain. The constant rain drumming on their heads drives them crazy.

This is one of my all time favorite Bradbury stories, dating back to when I first read it in high school in The Illustrated Man. It takes something we all have in common – getting caught in the rain – and uses it relentlessly to build unremitting tension.

The Endless Rain was one of three segments adapted for the movie version of The Illustrated Man.

The Exiles
A crew of astronauts headed for Mars are beset with a series of problems. Unknown to them, a coven of witches on Mars are creating their problems. Also on Mars are the authors Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Arthur Machen, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, and William Shakespeare. They live on because people read their work. But, they are dying because back on earth, their books are being born as hard science triumphs over imagination and their books are burned.

This is another story I first encountered in The Illustrated Man. The themes were easily identifiable with those raised in Fahrenheit 451. It could have easily been worked into The Martian Chronicles.

Here there be Tygers
When a woman puts on her best face, her best clothes, and sets out to charm you, you’d better notice. More importantly, don’t scorn her. The same can be said for a planet.

This story combined the best of what Bradbury offers as a writer. There is a great story with a familiar plot – men in a rocket landing on a new planet. There is also a lyrical quality to the writing that is poetic.

Here there be Tygers was made into an episode of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

The Strawberry Window
A homebuilder on Mars laments that his wife is lonely and misses her house and possessions on Earth. So, he has them shipped to Mars.

This story was waaaay long on philosophy and short on plot, character development, and anything else that makes a story interesting.

The Dragon
Two knights await the arrival of a dragon. The dragon never attacks in town. It only strikes down the unsuspecting people walking between towns. They hear its horrendous roar and see its one lone eye approaching fast. They prepare to do battle.

Ray Bradbury played a little joke on his readers with this one. The descriptive passages in this story soared.

The Gift
A family traveling to Mars aboard a rocket are forced to abandon their Christmas tree and presents at customs. With the holiday approaching the father must find a way for his son to celebrate.

Obviously this was a Christmas seasonal story, meant to inspire the Christmas spirit in sci-fi fans. It’s not without its charm.

Frost and Fire
Sim lives in a world where humans are born, mature, grow old and die in just eight days. In this world, the nights are bitter cold and the days are too hot to survive in the sun. Sim’s people arrived on this planet in spaceships, but just one spaceship survives from that time 10,000 generations ago. It is too far for people to reach in their limited life span. But believing the ship offers salvation for his people, Sim devises a plan to get there.

One of Bradbury’s finer tales this was. Easily could have been a novella or perhaps a novel. The characters were rich and deep and the plot chugged along at a wonderful pace, starting slowly and developing momentum.

Frost and Fire was originally published in Planet Stories, Fall 1946.

Uncle Einar
Uncle Einar is a flying man who has lost his sensory perception that enables him to fly at night after crashing into some power lines. Unable to fly during the day for fear of being seen, he marries and fathers children. He is reduced to serving as an umbrella and fan for his children on hot days. Finally, his children come up with a solution that allows him to fly again.

This is one of the Elliot family stories. Several of them were incorporated into a 2001 Bradbury fixup novel titled From the Dust Returned.

The Time Machine
In a time of increasing technology and machinery, three boys visit an old man with the promise of seeing a real time machine. Instead, they just find an old man. But it turns out HE is a time machine.

This story has the same theme that runs through Bradbury’s Green Town trilogy of the symbiotic relationship between the old and the young.

The Sound of Summer Running
A young boy sets his sights on a new pair of tennis shoes to wear for the summer. His dad tells him to save up his money. Instead, he goes to the shoe store and pitches the salesman a barter.

Bradbury wrapped up his collection of short stories with another of his romanticized tales of boyhood. Bradbury could wax nostalgic about every facet of summer and did in his Green Town stories. Green Town is not specifically named in this story. But it is easy to imagine this story taking place there.

I Sing the Body Electric By Ray Bradbury

I Sing the Body Electric
By Ray Bradbury
Copyright 1969

The Kilimanjaro Device
A young man arrives in Sun Valley in a safari truck. His goal: to find the spirit of Ernest Hemingway and transport him to Africa circa 1954. He shares a drink in a local pub with a fellow Papa fan, then hits the road to find the spirit of Hemingway.

I’m decidedly not a Hemingway fan. But it’s easy enough to see Bradbury was and he shows us how much he treasured Hemmingway’s works. It’s not hard to see the unnamed main character as a psychopomp, delivering Hemingway’s soul to Heaven as he would know it.

The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place
Revolutionaries in Ireland set out to burn their lord’s manor house, but they forget the matches. When they arrive, the lord of the manor invites them in. They inform him of their intent, quite politely and he agrees to allow the burning. He asks the sackers if they will spirit away his art collection for safe keeping. They agree and take off with the paintings. A few hours later, they return.

There were echoes of Mark Twain in this story, but the end was wholly unsatisfying. While there was a fair amount of humorous irony in the story, the climax, as it was, completely lacked in humor or irony.

Tomorrow’s Child
The Horn’s have a baby and that baby is a blue pyramid with three eyes and six tentacles. Their baby, the doctor informs the Horns, was born into another dimension. This baby belongs in that dimension. While the doctors work feverishly for months to figure out how to get the babies back to their proper dimensions, the Horns raise the “child.” Finally, the day comes when the doctors have it all figured out.

The tale is so improbable that it is interesting. The opening paragraph is so matter of fact, much like Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis

The Women
A couple lounges on the beach on the final day of their vacation. The woman senses that a presence in the ocean beckons to her husband, trying to lure him into the water. She tries every delaying tactic she can think of to keep him out of the water. When it starts to rain, she thinks she’s won. But the lure of the blue water proves too much.

This was a story of atmosphere and stirring words more than plot. There was very little plot to it. It does demonstrate Bradbury’s ability to weave moods with the language. Beautiful.

The Inspired Chicken Motel
It’s 1932 and the Great Depression is raging. A family of four is traveling down Route 66 to look for a job and some prosperity. They stop at a fleabag motel where they find a chicken who lays eggs with inscriptions very much like fortune cookies. The family leaves the hotel with new found hope mixing with cynical skepticism.

This story was mildly entertaining. It would seem in this book that Bradbury is trying much harder for rye humor than any serious science fiction.

Downwind from Gettysburg
The manager of a theater is alarmed when someone puts a bullet into the head of his animatronic figure of Abraham Lincoln. The modern assassin is also named Booth, although he has a different first name. The theater manager confronts the assassin and listens to his lame excuse for destroying the robot. Then the manager tells Mr. Booth the real reason for the crime and ends his hopes for glory.

A writer on Huffington Post compared this story to the vainglorious father of the notorious “Balloon Boy” event several years ago when the father contrived to have his young son become ”trapped” in a hot air balloon with the hopes of getting a reality show out of the deal. My own thoughts went to Mark David Chapman who killed John Lennon for the sheer glory of doing it.

Downwind from Gettysburg was made into an episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater.

Yes, We’ll Gather at the River
The residents of a small California town are just a day away from a harsh reality. A new interstate highway is going to open tomorrow and with it take the traffic local merchants rely on for commerce. A cigar store owner ponders his bleak future and that of the town.

This story tells of an all but forgotten chapter in American history. When construction began on the interstate highway system in the 1950s, millions of motorists were moved away from secondary roads and the small towns where they bought gas, bought lunch, and sundry items. Many towns “missed” by the highways died. This beautiful and touching story brings that era to life very much reminiscent of Steinbeck.

Cold Wind and the Warm
A group of faerie people arrive in small town Ireland and make friends with the regulars of a small pub. They charm and entertain the pub patrons with songs and stories of how disparate people come together to become one people. One Irishmen gentleman discerns the faeries true nature and purpose.

I really struggled with this story and did not like it at all. It had the whimsy which was Bradbury’s signature style. But while beautifully written, I just loathed the story. I’m not much for Irish yarns.

Night Call, Collect
An old man is the last survivor on Mars after the rest of the population returns to earth on the eve of atomic war there. He starts receiving phone calls from himself. The first call is from his 20 year old self, then his 21 year old self, then 24, etc. The calls tease and torment him – each a transcription he made in his youth to keep busy. Then he gets a call that is not himself, but the captain of a rocket come to rescue him after 60 years. He rushes to New Chicago to meet the rocket, but all he finds are more phones.

This is a riff on a tale told earlier in The Martian Chronicles. This tale is much darker and quite entertaining. The first real hard sci-fi/horror story in the book.

The Haunting of the New
Grynwood, an old castle once host to the most lavish parties ever known in Ireland, shall host no more parties, for she has burned to the ground. Her owner had built in its place an exact replica. But it’s just not the same and the house, new, wants no old people in its midst.

This story is written very much in a literary style and I wanted to not like it. The flowery, over the top language usually turns me off. But Bradbury is able to evoke emotion with his prose that transcends my dislike of inflated language. This story is about the pain of transition and not being able to go home again when it is not home.

I Sing the Body Electric!
A widower with three children replaces his dead wife with a robot grandma. The grandma is delivered and the two boys immediately take to her. The girl, Abigail, does not and refused to treat the electric grandma like anything but a machine. When grandma meets with tragedy, the source of Abigail’s hostility is laid bare.

A riff on Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name that discusses what makes a human, human as opposed to a souless machine. This story explores the nature of grief, the relationship between generations, and is somewhat over celebratory of what machines are capable of – or will ever be capable of. It is one of Bradbury’s more heartwarming stories.

Ray Bradbury adapted this story for The Twilight Zone episode of the same name. Despite his personal fondness and close relationship with Twilight Zone writers Rod Serling, and Richard Matheson, it was the only original script Bradbury penned for the television series.

Tombling Day
An old woman attends the relocation of her old beau’s grave. She decides to have the body brought back to her house and the casket opened. She looks upon her beloved’s body, sixty years in the ground, and laments that he still looks young while she has grown old.

She is old, he is young. Bradbury says this over and over again without going anywhere. The end is just gibberish. This story was a real dud.

A Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine
A man arrives in Greentown, Illinois with the unlikely moniker of Charles Dickens and he is a writer. A young man is thrilled to have the famous writer in his mom’s boarding house and is quickly drawn to him. But he’s not so much a writer as a memorizer of tales.

I didn’t see where Bradbury was going with this one. I thought it was to inspire the frustrated writer to keep writing, but the unlikely Charles Dickens never writes anything original. He just rewrites Dickens’ novels. Nothing inspirational there.

Heavy Set
A mother laments her emotionally immature son who spends his days sculpting his body with weights. At 31 years old, he refuses to interact with anyone and takes out his frustration on weights and a punching bag.

On the surface, the story has no plot. But Bradbury’s writing makes the reader tense. You wonder if and when Heavy Set is going to explode. Will he hurt his mother? Will he hurt other people? It’s an emotionally taut story.

The Man in the Rorschach Shirt
A psychiatrist calls it quits when he finds out his senses of sight and hearing have been lying to him for years. Restored hearing and improved vision, he finds, hinders his imagination. He tells a former colleague how he spends his days treating people with his bizarre, multi-patterned shirts.

A Bradbury allegory on writing and imagination. Writers create and imagine, he points out. If all we rely on through our day is what we see and hear, we are left bereft of creativity. Lots of allegory, little story. An enjoyable read nonetheless.

Henry the Ninth
The last man to inhabit England talks with his old friend who is about to depart. The English and all northern Europeans have abandoned their homeland for warmer climes.

Bradbury dedicates several short stories to being alone. Not necessarily loneliness because often, Bradbury’s characters are not unhappy to be alone. There were a couple in The Martian Chronicles that were stellar in their telling. This one wasn’t.

The Lost City of Mars
Captain Wilder, the intrepid explorer from The Martian Chronicles, sets out with a millionaire and other illuminati aboard a yacht on the Martian canals. Their destination is a lost Martian city. They find the city and the city finds them. Each is offered by the city what he or she wants – or thinks he wants. Some reject the deal, some don’t.

Perhaps this was a story written for The Martian Chronicles and left out. If so, leaving it out was a good idea. It lacks the beautiful simplicity of the other stories in that collection.

Christus Apollo – Cantata Celebrating the Eight Day of Creation and the Promise of the Ninth
Christianity meets scientific speculation in this Christmas poem where Bradbury contemplates life on other worlds and whether or not they were created by and worship the same God as Christians on earth.

This is a poem and as I am wont to say when evaluating a poem – I don’t feel qualified. I don’t know good poetry from bad. But I know what I like and I liked this.

I Sing the Body Electric is one of the weaker Bradbury compilations for fans of his sci-fi work. Much of the book relies on playing with the ghosts of authors dead and other mildly fantastical tropes. The title story and the Lost City of Mars stand as the only real sci-fi tales.

Of course, there is more to Bradbury than science fiction and the whimsy that characterizes Bradbury’s Greentown can be found in almost every story in this volume.

While not nearly as interesting as The Martian Chronicles or The Illustrated Man, I Sing the Body Electric is worth the time to read to find a few Bradbury tales you won’t find anyplace else.

Book to Radio: The Martian Chronicles

Book to Radio: The Martian Chronicles
By Ray Bradbury
Dimension X radio broadcast
Radio play by Ernest Kinoy
Broadcast Date: August 18, 1950

This episode of Dimension X opens with Rocket Summer as a child watches in fascination as the first rocket takes off for Mars.

Ylla begins to have her dreams of men from the third planet coming to visit her. She begins to sing a song that she doesn’t know without knowing how or why. Ylla’s husband becomes increasingly disturbed with her prescience regarding the coming of the earthmen. He takes a weapon and waits for the earthmen. He deals with them. . .

The story then jumps to the fourth Martian expedition where astronaut Spender finds that Martians have all been dead about a week – dead of chicken pox. Spender eloquently quotes poem So, we’ll Go No More A-Roving as he predicts that men will defile Mars as they have defiled Earth with liquor and boorish behavior.

The men of Earth came to Mars for work, for adventure, for a fresh start – and they came in masses. We then revisit There Will Come Soft Rains. It is nearly identical to the earlier broadcast in the opening, but we get to meet the family. In this version, with atomic war inevitable, they decide to jump into their rocket and head for Mars. The house continues its duties in isolation. But instead of the family being dead in the war, they have evacuated to Mars.

The story then jumps to the Off Season as Sam Parker operates the only hot dog stand on Mars. Parker is looking forward to the new settlers filling their pockets when they observe the earth melt in a ball of atomic fire.

The people of Mars rush the Luggage Store and then head home, deserting the red planet. Shortly after they leave, our family who has evacuated their automated home arrive. They travel down the canal and arrive in a deserted Martian town. They proclaim themselves Martians.

In just 24 minutes, writer Ernest Kinoy introduced the masses to Ray Bradbury’s seminal work. It hardly scratches the surface and omits its most famous chapter – the doomed third voyage to Mars. Nonetheless, Kinoy uses his paltry 24 minutes to do a decent job in telling Bradbury’s story of the rise and fall of man’s civilization on Mars.

The Toynbee Convector by Ray Bradbury

The Toynbee Convector
By Ray Bradbury
Copyright 1988

The Toynbee Convector
A journalist is excited to be interviewing the world’s one and only time traveler on his 130th birthday and on the day in a future passed that he arrived in a distant time to find that man has conquered the demons of pollution, war, international strife, and bad economies. The journalist, confident he is getting the story of a lifetime, finds the story isn’t quite what he thought.

One could see the twist coming, but it was nonetheless an enjoyable morality tale told the way Bradbury tells them best. This was an episode of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

Trapdoor
A woman awakens to find a doorway to an attic that she’d never noticed before even though she’d lived in the house for ten years. She’s afraid to go into the attic because it seems to be inhabited by rodents. She calls an exterminator who finds the job to big for him. . .

This was a rather banal story. Not loathsome, but below par for Bradbury.

On the Orient North
A middle aged nurse has a chance meeting with a ghost – a corporeal ghost – as she travels north on the Orient Express. She pities him because he is dying a slow and miserable “death.” He is dying because, in the modern world, embracing the rational has squeezed out faith in what we cannot see. The nurse sets out with the ancient, stately being to find that faith and belief in ghosts that will sustain him.

This was a fantastic tale, worthy of being ranked among Bradbury’s best. The ghost as a sympathetic, lonely creature is nothing new. But Bradbury puts a delightfully refreshing twist on it by adding social commentary about the death of imagination in an increasingly secular world. This story was made into one of the finest episodes in the six year run of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

One Night in Your Life
A newly divorced man heads east from Los Angeles en route to New York to start his life over. As he contemplates the misery of his marriage that was, he finds a young woman wandering along the side of the road outside a small Iowa town. He stops and passes the day – just one day – with the woman of his dreams.

There are a couple themes here common in Bradbury stories. The man is miserable in Los Angeles with his wife who loves the big city. He enjoys driving his convertible along the open vistas of America. His wife hates it. Finding happiness in the openness of middle America is a common thread in Bradbury stories. The other is the pure happiness that is limited in its time by a supernatural force. This is a wistful and romantic story.

West of October
The matriarch of a farm family has the power to send her family member on adventures by transporting their souls into the bodies of others. She transports her two young nephews to explore the minds of inmates of a nearby insane asylum. While they are gone, their bodies are destroyed in a fire. The woman must deposit their souls into the head of their grandfather until new bodies can be located for them. The boys adolescent fantasies torture and embarrass their grandfather who is driven nearly mad.

Imagine being an old man with two adolescents living inside your brain! Bradbury weaves a fanciful tale that is humorous, a bit racy (at least for Bradbury), and original.

The Last Circus
Two boys hear that a circus is coming to town. As one of the boys talks excitedly of the circus at breakfast, the boy’s father laments the development of ever increasingly powerful atom bombs. The boys go to the circus and take in all of the acts. After the circus is over, they watch as the workers take down the tents, pack their gear, and head off for the next destination. As they walk home, one of the boys, perhaps pondering his father’s worry of the growing atomic menace, tells his buddy there will be no more circuses. This was the last.

I think we’re supposed to get from this story that atomic war is coming to wipe out the world, and therefore there will be no more circuses. The link between the father’s lamentations and the boy’s conclusion is tenuous, but it is there.

The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair
A slightly overweight man and a slightly undersized woman meet at a cocktail party and instantly fall in love. The call each other Stan and Ollie and we never learn their real names. For a year, they rejoice in their love and fondly embrace their repartee of the old movie duo. However, Stan decides she wants a commitment which Ollie is not willing to give, and she leaves, promising to come back to the steps where Laurel and Hardy performed their famous piano moving sequence once each year to see him. Ollie shows up at the appointed time for a couple years, but Stan doesn’t show. He skips a couple years, then goes back. He finds a bottle of champagne with a note from Stan saying she won’t be returning. Years later, they pass each other in a Parisian street by chance, each accompanied by their respective families. As they pass, Ollie says to Stan, “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into,” and keeps walking.

This is a romance story pure and simple and Bradbury writes a few of these which are always passable and sometimes good. He rewrote and retitled it for the Ray Bradbury Theater and injected a sinister supernatural element which made the screen version better.

I Suppose You Are Wondering Why We Are Here?
A man prepares a fine feast at a restaurant for his parents who reside just up the road – in a cemetery. They are coming back for a visit and to tell him something. They tell him that he bores them.

I love Ray Bradbury. I really do. But sometimes, there’s just no point. This is one of those instances.

Lafayette, Farewell
A World War I airman, getting on in years repeatedly walks into his next door neighbor’s home, mistaking it for his own. He often sits and reminisces fondly of his former comrades in arms like Eddie Rickenbacker. But on this night, as he nears the end of his life, he wants to honor his enemies, including Baron von Richtofen, who he says fought honorably and bravely.

This was a story that provided an interesting commentary on the nature of war and who actually does the fighting. Most soldiers in World War I didn’t know Kaiser Wilhelm from Hoyt Wilhelm (yes, I know it was before Hoyt Wilhelm’s time, but you get the idea). They had no political ideology – just a job to do. One can admire the honor and glory of a vanquished foe.

Banshee
A screenwriter reports to his director’s home deep in the moors of Ireland with his latest submission. The director is a boastful, arrogant man who talks constantly of his conquests over women. As the director and screenwriter talk, they can hear a plaintive wail out in the fog. The director says it’s the wail of a Banshee and invites the young screenwriter to investigate. The screenwriter finds the pitiful creature bemoaning being used and jilted by a resident of that home a century prior. She longs for revenge. The screenwriter convinces her that the current occupant is deserving of a little revenge on behalf of all women used by cads.

This was a taut, well paced story with sufficient character development in its scant pages to make the reader want to see a little vengeance dished out by the undead woman. The story served as an episode of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

Promises, Promises
A man shows up at his mistress’s door to tell her that his daughter has nearly died of a head injury sustained in a fall at home. Whilst she clung to live in the hospital, he prayed and promised God he’d give up the thing must precious to him in the world in exchange for his daughter’s life – his mistress.

This is purely mainstream fiction and a passable story. It is a commentary on one of the many ways people find their way to faith.

The Love Affair
One of the last Martians left after the chicken pox epidemic admires from afar a young earth woman who inhabits a lonely radio outpost on the surface of Mars. He revels in her beauty, but is certain that, if he makes his presence known or makes contact, he will fall prey to the same disease as did most of his people.

It’s always fun to revisit Mars with Ray Bradbury. This Martian is like Ylla from the first installment in The Martian Chronicles. He is attracted to humans.

One for His Lordship, and One for the Road
A British lord with the greatest wine cellar known to man dies. His will stipulates that he indeed will take it with him and the minister starts to pour the rare vintages over his casket in his grave. But a careful reading of the will by the patrons of a nearby bar reveals that it need not go with him in any precise form. They begin to partake of his stock, promising to leave it with him.

As the saying goes with beer and wine, you don’t own it, you rent it. A humorous innuendo here.

At Midnight, in the Month of June
A serial killer stalks and attacks his last victim. As he wraps up his crime, he thinks back to games of hide and seek he played as a child and how accomplished he was at hiding from the seeker. Now, he decides it’s time for all in free. He leaves clear clues at his last crime scene and toddles off to an all night diner for some milk and graham crackers – his favorite childhood treat.

This was a creepy story that was a delight to read. Serial killers of various kinds have been done to death by horror writers. Leave it to Bradbury to find the fresh take, linking the heinous deed to a childhood game.

Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned
A priest awakens in the middle of the night, certain that someone is coming to confess. He dresses and walks to the church. Sure enough, a penitent comes to the confessional and confesses a childhood sin. The priest finds this old man’s sin to be very much like his own from years past.

This was a Christmas story. And like all Christmas stories, it is about redemption and forgiveness. No one is ever going to compare it to A Christmas Carol, but it’s a well told tale nonetheless.

By the Numbers!
A man on a train sees a stranger who immediately reminds him of an incident years before at a hotel when he observed a hotel maintenance man who had a strange and methodical means of disciplining his son. The man learns that, in the end, that rigid discipline didn’t pay off for either the father or the son.

There’s nothing supernatural in this tale, but it is indeed strange. Perhaps a commentary on what can happen if excessive discipline is taught to a child.

A Touch of Petulance
A man on a train meets himself, 25 years older. His older self has come back to tell him that, 25 years from now, he’ll murder his wife. His wife will drive him insane with her petty whining. The younger man, newly married man, is incredulous, claiming he loves his wife dearly. He invites his older self home to see.

Was expecting a twist here that never came. But the last sentence makes the story work. This story was redrafted for an episode of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

Long Division
A man arrives at his former home to divide up the marital property as he and his wife finalize their divorce. When he arrives, she finds that she has already decided who gets what books. They argue over and trade books for hours. Finally, after hours of haggling, the man prepares to leave and reminds his wife that, at some point, they will have to discuss who gets the children.

Some people really love their books! Of course, I don’t love them as much as my children, but I do take very good care of my books and don’t lend them out easily. When I finally have to part with a volume, I worry it might go someplace where the owner will fold pages to mark places or worse yet, lay the book face down to mark a place.

Come, and Bring Constance
A man receives an invitation to attend a self help seminar. At the bottom is scrawled, “Come, and bring Constance.” Problem is, his wife’s name isn’t Constance. Sometimes he has trouble remembering his wife’s name, but he knows it isn’t Constance. The wife wants to know who Constance is. When Constance arrives on her doorstep, she finds out.

This story didn’t seem to have a point, a theme, or underlying message. A rare swing and a miss from Bradbury.

Junior
An elderly man awakens to find that he has the first erection he’s had in years. He calls three elderly women with whom he used to cavort in his salad days to come over and admire it.

Bradbury uses G-rated language to tell a PG-13 story just wonderfully! I don’t dig reading comedy, but Bradbury hits the mark here.

The Tombstone
A man and a woman are traveling and stop by a boarding house to spend the night. The room they have reserved has a tombstone in the middle of it. The proprietor explains that the room’s last tenant was a stonecutter who carved tombstones and had left this one behind because he misspelled the name. The woman is upset, convinced the room is haunted, but her husband makes her stay. In the middle of the night, the stonecutter returns to claim his stone. He has located a recently deceased for whom the stone will serve perfectly.

I don’t know if this was a story Bradbury wrote in the 1980s for this book or if it was an older one from the 1950s or 60s. It has a retro feel to it. The woman is hysterical like many women from 1950s literature. The couple is staying at a boarding house (who stayed at boarding houses in the 1980s?). Even the language was somewhat archaic. It was a story best enjoyed by a younger audience. This story was an episode in the final year of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

The Thing at the Top of the Stairs
A traveling man decides to stop by his old home town of Green Town, IL. While there, he visits the house in which he grew up. It now stands vacant. He goes inside to confront the not-quite disbelieved imaginary monster of his childhood.

This was an undertold story. There was a lot to work with here and Bradbury gives us the bare minimum to make it interesting. Stephen King once stated that Bradbury over wrote much of his work. The story and the monster had so much more room for development to make a truly terrifying tale. It's interesting that as I envisioned this story unfolding, I envisioned it in black and white, perhaps linking it in my own mind to The Twilight Zone for which it would have made an excellent episode.

Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy
A bored little boy appeals to an old man to help him make the final days of summer interesting and exciting. The old World War I veteran builds an fake mummy out of materials from around the house. The kid plants the mummy in a field. When it is discovered, excitement ensues.

This was not a terribly interesting tale, but it had a moral. Life’s excitement is not generated by the events around you, but what you make of those events. This story was rewritten and retitled for the Ray Bradbury Theater.

Of the Bradbury collections I've read, this one was the weakest. It had one truly great story and several good ones. Bradbury rarely produces a clunker, but there are a couple here.

One can't help but wonder if Bradbury wrote many of these stories with an eye on the television screen since, at the time this book went into publication, his television show was in full swing on HBO.

The Toynbee Convector is certainly not one of his best works. But it is worth reading -- especially for hardcore Bradbury fans.

Book to Radio: There Will Come Soft Rains

Book to Radio: There Will Come Soft Rains
By Ray Bradbury from his book, The Martian Chronicles
Adapted to radio by George Lefferts
Dimension X broadcast, June 17, 1950

In June of 1950, radio show Dimension X featured two stories by one of the “new young writers of science fiction, Ray Bradbury.” The first of these was There Will Come Soft Rains. The other was Zero Hour from The Illustrated Man which I will review later

There is no reference in the script to Mars. This empty house is on a post-atomic Earth.

The story opens with the real estate agent pitching the house and all its features in the futuristic year of 1980. The house came equipped with self warming blankets, beds that make themselves, talking book recordings, "mouse things" that take away all the dust. Set the menu on the oven for the week and it will prepare all of your meals.

The automated house goes about its day, preparing breakfast. The writer of the script and the director demonstrate real talent in the presentation with the discordant rhymes the house chants, backed with discordant music as the house announces the time and the tasks to be performed.

Narrator Norman Rose goes on to describe the dark shadows scorched onto the walls of the house – remnants of the bodies scorched into the surface by atomic energy.

The narrator’s voice picks up speed. The house performs its tasks ever faster until evening arrives when the home finally asks which poem the residents would like to hear. Not hearing a response, it selects Sarah Teasdale’s There Will Come Soft Rains. The pace slows as Teasdale's soothing prose unfolds.

However, a tree falls outside and spills solvent onto the stove. The house catches fire. The house begs for help. It begins to maniacally carry out its tasks before the wiring burns. It eventually crashes into dust and rubble.

The story ends as Teasdale poem ends – with no one mourning the passing of mankind.

Norman Rose is a gifted radio voice talent and his narration, growing more frantic with the discordance going on behind him makes this absolutely creepy. It deviates far from Bradbury’s text, but writer, George Lefferts shows his genius in taking this chapter from Bradbury’s book and making it into something disturbing.

Book to Radio: Mars is Heaven

Book to Radio: Mars is Heaven
by Ray Bradbury from his book, The Martian Chronicles
Adapted for radio by David Friedken
Escape! radio broadcast
Original Broadcast: June 2, 1950

Escape was the first radio show to adapt Ray Bradbury’s tale of the third mission to Mars to radio. To do so, they completely rewrote Bradbury’s story, changing it a great deal, but keeping the essential story intact.

The show was adapted for Escape by David Friedkin and starred Ben Wright.

The Escape broadcast opens with the news of the launch of the first manned mission to Mars (as opposed to the third). People of all faiths and creeds have come together to pray for the success of the mission and the astronauts aboard the rocket.

The characters from the crew are limited to the ship’s captain and the doctor who are the only two allowed to leave the ship. It is they who quickly discover that Mars bears a striking resemblance to their homes on earth. A resident tells them they are in Green Lake, Ohio.

The doctor finds his grandmother living in the house she lived in when he was a kid. She explains that Mars is a “second chance.” They soon hear a parade, complete with a brass band, leading the crew away from the ship. The Captain sees his old girlfriend among the crowd and decides to join her in an emotional reunion.

The Captain is sitting on the porch swing on a quiet summer evening when he starts to develop a hypothesis. He tells her, if the Martians wanted to manipulate the crew, they would use their memories and fondest desires to entrap them. The girlfriend tries to dissuade him. But when the Captain decides he’s got to talk to the doctor about his hypothesis, Phyllis turns on him and kills him.

After the astronauts have all been dispatched, the Martians hold a town meeting to analyze and discuss what has transpired.

This broadcast was the first of this Bradbury story (and perhaps the first of any Bradbury story), but it is also the weakest. The Dimension X and X Minus One broadcasts are far superior, relying on larger casts and sticking closer to the Bradbury story.

Book to Movie: The Illustrated Man (1969)

Book to Movie: The Illustrated Man (1969)
Screenplay by Howard B. Kreitsek
Directed by Jack Smight

Movie Trailer

In 1969, three stories from Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man were adapted to the big screen by screen writer Howard B. Kreitsek. The stories were, The Veldt, The Long Rain, and the Last Night of the World.

The movie starts just as the book, with the young vagabond encountering the wandering stranger with all the “skin illustrations.” (Calling them tattoos makes him very angry). He’s looking for the house where the woman who drew the illustrations lives so he can kill her, he explains.

Just as in the book, he explains that the illustrations come to life and people can see tales of horror in them. The blank spot is reserved for the person to see visions of their own death.

In the book, the two pass the time fairly amicably before the Illustrated Man falls asleep and the tales unfold for the viewer. The opening sequence in the movie is a bit longer. Rod Steiger’s portrayal of the Illustrated Man is more menacing than Bradbury’s character, and he starts recounting his visit to the strange woman he theorizes is from the future. The first sequence opens with her tattooing a rose into the palm of his hand, then melts into The Veldt.

The plot of The Veldt unfolds much as it did in the short story with the spoiled children unhappy that their father vows to shut down, lest they become too attached to it.

What is fundamentally different is the attitudes of the parents; their attitudes toward each other and toward the society in which they live.

As I noted in my review of the story, many of Bradbury’s stories featured homes or devices that rendered mundane domestic tasks performed by humans to be obsolete. In Bradbury’s world of the 1950s, this was a good thing. In the 1950s, Americans avidly pursued modern conveniences, having been deprived of them during the war years. By 1969, society was much more cynical. The two bemoan the emptiness of their lives, with all of the chores being done for them – including the raising of their children.

In the story, the tension between the parents arose from disagreements over how to reign in their children’s fascination with the playroom. In the movie, there were obvious marital problems. Early on, the woman blurts out, “make love to me!” The husband responds with “Why?” She says, “Maybe this time it will be different.” Obviously, this was not a happy marriage. Later that night, as they lie in bed, he reaches out for her hand and she pulls it away.

The parents meet their end when their family therapist, who had recommended the nursery as part of some psychological program for raising children (shades of Dr. Spock) finds the tattered remains of their clothing in the veldt, with well fed lions lying nearby.

There is more flashback to the Illustrated Man’s visit to the illustrator which bear not on the next story which is The Long Rain. When Bradbury penned the story in the late 1940s, we had no idea what lied beneath the clouds of Venus. By 1969, we knew whatever there was not hospitable. Therefore, the planet in the movie’s story is not named.

This story unfolded almost exactly as it was told in the book. The chief weakness of the film version was, the story did not translate well to the big screen. Bradbury’s prose did an excellent job building the tension between the astronauts as they go slowly insane in the constant driving rain. Despite decent performances by the cast, the segment was dull. They couldn’t build the tension without overacting. Had the segment been longer, the rain would have driven the audience insane, but we really felt no sympathy for the characters, for who hasn’t had to spend time in the rain?

In the third segment, Kreitsek tries to upstage Bradbury by twisting the ending of Bradbury’s short tale of the end of humanity. The story, The Last Night of the World, was a short character study that’s tone was melancholy, but not gloomy and certainly not tragic. I’ll not spoil the ending for those who have not seen it, but Kreitsek gives it a twist to make the story an ironic tragedy. It’s not so bad as to make one groan in anguish, but Bradbury is a better writer than Kreitsek and Kreitsek should have known it. This story, like The Long Rain, just wasn’t a good candidate for the big screen.

Frankly, few of the tales in The Illustrated Man would have made for good movie or television. Unlike The Martian Chronicles that had a combination of philosophy and action driving the plot, most of what is in The Illustrated Man were observations of people in fantastic situations. There was a great deal of character study and sociological reflection in the book which Bradbury writes well. But it makes for a poor movie.

Kreitseck was not a particularly successful screenwriter. He wrote the horrible sequels to the original Walking Tall and a couple other titles I’ve never heard of. The Illustrated Man was his first screenwriting effort. I won’t say he did the best he could with what he had to work with, because it could have been a much better movie. However, if an anthology was going to be made of this book, he should have chosen stories like The Fox and the Forest and Marionettes, Inc. which were better stories and would have worked much better on screen.

This is the second Jack Smight movie I’ve reviewed – the first being Damnation Alley. There are no major flaws in the directing and credit Smight for not driving his actors to overact in The Long Rain. Steven Spielberg could not have made this film much better. The script was just too thin.

Rod Steiger is intense as The Illustrated Man. That’s good because the opening sequence with Steiger killing the garter snake and feeding it to his Pomeranian was probably the best part of the movie. Science fiction fans would recognize Steiger from his work in Mars Attacks!. Claire Bloom, who plays the tattoo artist is adequate. Horror and science fiction fans would recognize her from the 1965 version of The Haunting and Clash of the Titans (1981). She is well recognized now for having played Queen Mary in The King’s Speech.

The movie was a flop and deservedly so. Despite having Jack Smight, who was a veteran of directing science fiction and horror direct the film, the script was too weak and uncompelling to make interesting.

The Illustrated Man By Ray Bradbury

The Illustrated Man
By Ray Bradbury
Copyright 1951

Prologue

A drifter meets a man along the road who, too, is a drifter – an out of work carnival worker. Despite the warm weather, he is heavily clad. When asked why, he reveals an endless series of tattoos that cover his body. He loathes them and the strange woman – an alien perhaps – who colored his flesh with the illustrations. He tells the man that, at night, the tattoos begin to move, and stories unfold; stories without happy endings. The men camp for the night and the Illustrated Man falls asleep. The drifter watches as the unhappy tales reveal themselves, one my one, upon the man’s inked skin.

The Veldt

Two parents of the future wonder if they’ve perhaps been over indulgent with their children who have become fascinated with their new, modern, nursery. In the house of the future, almost all services such as cooking and cleaning are performed automatically by the house itself. The nursery provides hours of entertainment through its walls which are projection screens that reveal whatever settings the children provide. This brother and sister have grown fond of the African veldt, and the dangerous creatures such as lions. The father resolves to shut down the nursery temporarily to instill a little discipline in the children. When mom talks him into turning it back on for just a little while, the kids act to make sure it never gets turned off again.

The Veldt is one of Bradbury’s earliest and most famous works. It was adapted for sci-fi radio drama in 1951 for Dimension X and again in 1955 for X Minus 1. It was adapted for television for the Ray Bradbury Theater and for the 1969 movie The Illustrated Man.

The idea of a house that made life chore free appears more than a few times in Bradbury’s fiction – perhaps most notably as the house in . . .And There Will Come Soft Rains that goes about performing its daily tasks long after man has ceased to exist and in I Sing the Body Electric. It is reflective of the post war economy and sociology of the early 1950s. After years of deprivation of consumer goods as the country fed the war machine, the efforts of research and development were funneled into inventing and improving consumer goods. The same phenomena emerged after World War I. Science fiction writers of that era did not foresee mankind’s focus returning to building better war machines for a 40 year long Cold War, nor the coming investment of research in development in information technology.

Kaleidoscope
A rocket ship is blown apart, leaving its crew to drift apart through space, living only as long as their oxygen lasts or they enter the atmosphere of whatever heavenly body they eventually encounter. They talk to each other as long as they can. As they talk, one astronaut comes to realize how small and insignificant his life has been – and how short, as if he were a shooting star, ablaze but for a moment.

This science fiction character study is short enough to be interesting and has a wonderful ending.

The Other Foot
In 1965, facing continued racial hostility and tension, blacks on Earth fled to Mars in rockets to build their own society. Word reaches Mars that a ship from Earth, presumably operated by white men, is on its way to Mars. They prepare to lynch the arriving astronaut upon his arrival. But when the man arrives, tells his tale, and promises complete supplication by all survivors of Earth’s nuclear war, the residents reevaluate the situation.

Bradbury’s thoughts on racism are obviously progressive for the time, but his expression of those beliefs would be considered old fashioned and condescending today. Perhaps that judgment is flawed by historical relativism on my part, but unfortunately, historical relatavism's fallacies are being visited upon classical literature today. Witness the bastardization of Twain's Huckleberry Finn

The Highway
A couple operate a rural roadside gas station in Mexico. They notice that a large number of vehicles are headed north on the highway, toward the United States. Finally, one of the cars stops long enough to tell them that atom war has come and the world is being destroyed. The couple is left wondering what The World is.

Perhaps a commentary on how isolated the lives of some people can be. Not an engaging story at all.

The Man
A rocket from earth arrives on a foreign planet. The captain expects to be greeted by the natives with pomp and circumstance. Instead, he finds out he’s been upstaged by an earlier arrival who has healed the sick, repaired the injured, and brought love and harmony to the world. Convinced that the new arrival is one of his competitors trying to dupe the people out of something he wants, he is determined to find the man. In the end, we learn that, no matter how he pursues, he will always be a moment too late.

Many writers of genre fiction are atheists or agnostics. Bradbury does not preach, but its obvious that he is talking about Jesus Christ or some other deity. (He never directly names Christ, but the deeds of the man fit the commonly held conception of Christ). He also provides a little commentary about how one goes about (and does not go about) finding Christ, for Christ does not deign to race mere mortals.

The Long Rain
Four astronauts on Venus search for the sundomes on Venus whilst enduring day after day of constant rain. Slowly, the drumming of the drops, the constant dampness and bleakness of their situation

This is bedrock Golden Age science fiction. It is atmospheric; it has drama; it has action. It’s a well told story that was an absolute pleasure to read.
This story was made into an episode of the Ray Bradbury Theater and was included as one of the stories told in the movie version of the book.

The Rocket Man
A character study of a professional rocket pilot told from the point of view of his son. When he’s home, he tries to keep his eyes from the sky because he longs to be there. When he’s in space, he tries to keep his thoughts from his family because he longs to be with them.

This was supposedly the story that inspired the famous Elton John song of the same name. I’m not a big fan of character studies, but this one was acceptable.

The Fire Balloons
This is the story of Father Peregrine and Father Smith of the Martian Chronicles. Arriving on Mars, Father Peregrine is determined to find the native inhabitants, prove that they have souls and save those souls. What he finds is an advanced race who, by eschewing all physical being, have achieved moral perfection.

This is essentially the same story told in The Martian Chronicles. Just as entertaining in this collection as it was in the context Bradbury’s anthology telling of the rise and fall of man’s settling of Mars.

The Last Night of the World
People all over the world have the same dream, that their world will end the next day. A couple reflects on how they, and the rest of the world will confront this madness. Will there be panic and mayhem, or will calm prevail with its certain inevitability. The couple decides on how they will meet their end.

This short story really lacks any moving plot, but Bradbury makes us ponder in what fashion we would meet our end, knowing it is coming for ourselves and for everyone. I think many would have met it in a more “R” rated fashion than Bradbury’s characters. But this was the 1950s and polite writers did not write about such things.

The Exiles
A rocket ship is on its way to Mars and its crew is beset with problems, for witches on Mars are conjuring spells to slow their arrival. Mars is a land of exile for authors like Edgar Alan Poe, Arthur Machen, and Ambrose Bierce whose works and very existence have been stricken from the annals of Earth. Then there is the snob, Charles Dickens, who feels he doesn’t belong is such company.

My summary might read silly, but in an age when Huck Finn is sanitized for offensive languages and politically correct though and speech codes prevail in academia and in the workplace, Bradbury seems more prescient than silly. Soon, the anti-smoking Nazis will erase all references to smoking from old movies. Remember, you read it hear first.

No Particular Night or Morning
An astronaut aboard a rocket begins obsessing over the existence of what he cannot see. If he can not see it in its corporal form, he can not be sure it exists. It drives him and other members of the crew insane.

This story ranks among the weaker stories in the book. It tries to be 50 percent character study and 50 percent story and, in the space of the few pages it occupies, does neither well.

The Fox and the Forest
An American couple are enjoying themselves as tourists in Mexico. Except they aren’t really Americans and they aren’t really tourists. They are fugitives from the year 2155 where they are forced to work as cogs in the military industrial complex of a never ending war. They are being pursued by a hunter that will bring them back. To hide, they fall in with an American movie company who are on location shooting a movie.

This was good, old fashioned Golden Age fare at its best and a quite enjoyable tale. It was adapted into an episode of for the radio show X Minus 1 in 1957.

The Visitor
A group of exiles lives on Mars, sent there to die of a slowly debilitating disease. A rocket ship lands and a man emerges. This man shows that he can transport people within their minds back to the places and times he loved. The desperate men fight over custody of him.

Bradbury tries to strike an emotional chord and fails to do so. While the story is the proper length for the tale he wants to tell, he does not do enough to develop the feeling of desolation and desperation in the characters to grip the reader and help him buy into their madness and desperation.

The Concrete Mixer
Martians decide they are going to invade Earth. A dissident Martian tries to explain how this is a bad idea because Earthlings have learned how to fight Martians through the various fictional accounts of Martian invasions that have been published. Faced with the alternative of death for treason, the dissident goes along with the invasion force. Instead of conquering the planet, they are welcomed by the earth men. Despite welcoming them, the Earthlings manage to conquer the Martians, but not through any means ever published in the John Carter of Mars series.

This story is about 30 percent Martian invasion and 70 percent commentary on the banality of 1950s California social scene. It is not weapons, but the superficial nature of mankind in California and the rampant consumerism of postwar era that defeats the Martians. It’s not a bad story for one that is blatant social commentary.

Marionettes, Inc.
A painfully married man has found the solution to being two places at once. One of him is at home, spending time with his possessive wife, the other of him is enjoying the Bahamas. He’s gone to Marionettes, Inc. and had an android duplicate made to take care of the unpleasant parts of his life. Except, what the man finds unpleasant, the android learns to love and decides to take over the man’s life.

This story was masterfully crafted, taking just three pages to develop a character and a plot. This is vintage Bradbury.

The story was expanded and made into radio drama for the science fiction series Dimension X and X Minus One and rank among the best of those series. It was also made into an episode of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

The City
An earth rocket lands on a remote planet and finds an abandoned city. While they explore the city, the city is exploring them, analyzing them, and identifying them. When it identifies them as the same race of being that brought destruction to the city’s inhabitants, it takes action.

Stories like this typify Golden Age science fiction and make it so dear to me. Not weighted down in historical background, unladen with technical explanations, yet clever with a new angle on the dangers of space travel.

Zero Hour
A new kids make believe game has swept the country. It’s called “Invasion” and has kids all over the country taking orders from an “imaginary” creature who lives in shrubs and rose bushes. Except he’s not imaginary and his goals are very real. And the kids, they’re not playing. They are deadly serious.

You can see the roots of so many “kids turned to evil” stories in this such as John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (upon which the movies Village of the Damned were based) and Steven King’s Children of the Corn. This ranks as one of the top stories in the book.

This story was adapted to radio by Ernest Kinoy for Dimension X and X Minus One. Just as other Bradbury works stood out in these radio shows, the script based on this Bradbury work ranks among the best of those shows.

The Rocket
A poor Italian junkyard owner has saved and saved so that he can buy new metal recycling equipment to keep his business going. Instead, he buys a prototype rocket ship that has no motor or equipment. He fixes it up with video equipment and makes it look real so that he can convince his children that they are going on an adventure in space to see the moon and Mars.

This is a somewhat heartwarming story, but probably not the strongest story upon which to close the book.

Epilogue
The tales have unfolded on the Illustrated Man’s tattooed body. There is but one space left, and it is blank. Our hobo story observer watches as the space slowly fills in with a scene where the Illustrated Man is strangling him to death. He gets up and makes haste away from the place, ending the story.

The Illustrated Man is Bradbury’s best known and perhaps best overall collection of short stories. All were written when he was young and eager to get published. None of the stories are pathetically bad and some are among the best science fiction I’ve ever read.

This is not the last appearance of the Illustrated Man in Bradbury’s work. The tattooed man is a sideshow exhibit in the evil carnival that visits Green Town, Illinois in Something Wicked This Way Comes.

A movie based on three stories from the book was made in 1969 and starred Rod Steiger. It has been a few years since I’ve seen it, but my best recollection of it is that it was “uneven.”

For those unfamiliar with vintage 1950s radio drama and who enjoy science fiction, I'd invite you to download episodes of Dimension X and X Minus One. Both shows did a superb job taking the short works of prolific Golden Age sci-fi writer like Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Clifford Simak, Robert Bloch, and Robert Heinlein and making them into exceptionally enjoyable plays for the theater of the mind. The writers for those shows such as Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts are all but lost to history. But when you hear those great stories played out through the audio medium, you appreciate how much these forerunners of television writing loved their craft and appreciated the work they so skillfully adapted.

Long After Midnight By Ray Bradbury

Long After Midnight
By Ray Bradbury
Copyright 1975

The Blue Bottle
Two down on their luck men hunt for a mysterious artifact on a post-apocalyptic Mars. The mythical blue bottle is said to contain exactly what the finder wishes for. Many scavengers search the Martian ruins for the elusive prize and a few find. When our hero finds the bottle, what will be inside for a man who wants nothing?

This was an intriguing, it not particularly strong story. Had it been any longer than 11 pages, it would have made for tedious reading. But it was good enough for the short time invested in reading it. It was a good story idea that perhaps Bradbury could have developed into something more significant. Would have worked well as a Twilight Zone script.

One Timeless Spring
A young adolescent is convinced that everyone around him is trying to poison him. His parents are poisoning him with the food they give him. His teachers are poisoning him with the knowledge they provide. And the girls start to poison him in a way that only girls can weave a spell over an adolescent boy’s mind. He fights hard against it because he knows what their poison will do. Its evidence is all around him.

The poison is, of course, the nourishment of body, mind, and soul that helps us grow and mature. Fear of growing up and growing old are the prevalent themes of Bradbury novels, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Farewell Summer. These books span 50 years of Bradbury’s career and are written from three different points of view of the subject of aging.

The Parrot Who Met Papa
A journalist is hired to write a story about a parrot gone missing from a bar in Cuba. This bar was frequented by none other that Ernest Hemmingway and it was to this remarkable bird with an astounding vocabulary, that Hemmingway revealed the idea and outline for what was to be his final novel. The bird was kidnapped by an unscrupulous writer who wants all of the secrets Papa revealed to his feathered confidant.

This story is mainstream fiction. Perhaps its because I loathe Hemmingway’s work or it just wasn’t that compelling a tale that I did not enjoy this story. In any event, I would rank it near the bottom of his body of work.

The Burning Man
A woman and her young son, on their way to a day at the beach, pick up a raggedy stranger from the side of the road. During the course of a bizarre conversation, he poses the question, “Do you think there is such thing as genetic evil in this world?” They promptly dump him at the side of the road. On the way home, they encounter a well dressed young boy whom they pick up. He asks the same question.

This story could have been developed a little more. There’s nothing particularly frightening in the way the strange man is written and there is nothing disarming about the young child which is what I assume Bradbury was going for.

A Piece of Wood
A young soldier is brought before his commanding officer after demonstrating discontent with his job. His commander asks him what he wants. He wants nothing less than total world peace, and he has developed the means to achieve it, if the rest of the world wants it or not.

This is the type of story that makes Golden Age sci-fi so enjoyable. No lengthy technical explanation. Just a little magic.

The Messiah
The Martian who is all things to all people makes a return – or at least one similar to him. This time, he appears at a Catholic church before a priest who wants nothing more than to see Jesus. The priest is confronted with a moral dilemma when he encounters the Martian who appears to him as Christ. Can he set free what he loves for the greater good?

I always thought that The Martian was one of the stronger stories in The Martian Chronicles. This one is much shorter, but recaptures the tragic nature of that poor Martian species doomed to be the person who people want to see the most. Exceptionally enjoyable!

G.B.S.-Mark V
A crewman aboard a rocket bound for a destination two years beyond Mars is able to channel George Bernard Shaw and enjoy discussions of philosophy, literature, and culture with the esteemed scholar. When disaster strikes the ship, the crewman and George Bernard Shaw discover they have damn near infinity to ponder and discuss.

Simple and unremarkable sci-fi story. Based on what I’ve read online, this is one of Bradbury’s more popular works, but it did not resonate with me. Perhaps it’s because I know (and care) so little about George Bernard Shaw.

The Utterly Perfect Murder
A 46 year old man wakes up one morning with the idea of returning to his old home town and killing one of his childhood buddies to get him back for slights real and imagined. The plan is perfect. Who would suspect an old childhood chum, now living far away, for getting revenge. But when he arrives at the man’s house and prepares to do the deed, he finds that someone or something has already had its way with his childhood nemesis.

This story has charm. I like stories with killers with seemingly no rational motivation. It’s also revealing of the nature of how we remember people of our youth and imagine how they must have turned out, only to find something much different than we ever conceived. It’s a phenomena encountered by anyone who’s ever attended a class reunion.


Punishment Without Crime
This is a sequel to the famous Bradbury story, Marionettes Inc. Marionettes Inc. no longer sells replica spouses to unhappy husbands and wives. They are now rented to angry spouses for revenge fantasies. When a man finally gets around to killing a marionette of his wife, his is prosecuted for murder without having actually killed a person.

This is a little less inspired than the original, which was a masterpiece. Still, it was a worthwhile sequel. Bradbury tells a great story with few words.


Getting Through Sunday Somehow
An American writer is cruising Dublin on Sunday, looking for inspiration for a story. While walking around, he finds a woman playing harp. He praises her playing and she is so disconcerted by his praise that she can play no more. She bids him to leave so that she might resume playing as she wanted to.

I think this is an allegory for the creative process. Every writer I know writes for an audience of one: themselves. I write for my own pleasure, not to impress anyone. Seeking approval of others for what you create is a track to mediocrity.


Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds
A New Yorker, struggling against the heat of the night by taking a late night walk, is drawn to an odd shop by a cool breeze wafting from an unlit alleyway. The shop’s proprietor is a purveyor of potions magical and powerful. In exchange for wealth, power, and the love of the beautiful witch, he must part with his soul. Needing to consider the bargain, he flees from the store only to encounter his bitter rival from work. He directs him to the strange shop.

This story is one of the magical tales that have made Bradbury a legend! It’s dark, creepy, and without a happy end. Its darkness reminded me very much of Something Wicked This Way Comes. We can also surmise that Bradbury is not a fan of New York with his dark depiction of its life destroying nature.

Interval in Sunlight
A woman travels through Mexico with her domineering, petulant husband who controls her and oversees every moment of her day. She fights with him, but always ends up giving into his demands and apologizing. When she’s finally had enough, she decides to make a break. But is her desire to be free of the burdensome, tedious mental abuse stronger than her need for the man she loves?

This story contained not an iota of sci-fi, fantasy, or horror. But Bradbury is well known for weaving traditional tales as well told as his sci-fi and horror classics. This story is longer than most, but Bradbury makes use of the extra words to develop an interesting, complex heroine and strong tension between her and her husband.

A Story of Love
An 11 year old loner falls in love with his teacher, a single woman of 26. The teacher is at first touched by the ardor of her pupil. But as the boy falls more deeply in love and invites her to join him on a walk, she becomes alarmed. She meets him and lays out some hard facts of life for him.

This is purely mainstream fiction and a beautifully told tale. In just a few pages, Bradbury develops two wonderfully deep characters caught in a relationship that must end in heartbreak. There is not even a hint of prurience. It’s simply a tale of tragically unrequited love that most boys experience at some point in their lives.

The Wish
Two lonely writers spend a Christmas evening together. Inspired by the crucifixion and rebirth of Jesus Christ, one of the writers wishes that, for just one hour, his late father would live again.

This is an oft-told tale of someone wishing a dead loved one back to life. The consequences are usually tragic. However, Bradbury spins the tale just a little differently and breaks the cliché.

Forever and the Earth
Thousands of years in the future, wealthy financier who is also a failed writer decides he must bring Thomas Wolfe into the future to rejuvenate literature. Wolfe is brought forward and writes stories so splendid that he is loathe to leave them behind. Alas, Thomas Wolfe is told he must go home again.

Not a terribly engaging story, but a nice homage to Thomas Wolfe.

The Better Part of Wisdom
A grandfather drops in on his grandson and his friend. The two are struck by the strong resemblance between themselves. That perception is driven home by a painting the grandson’s friend has made of his roommate. The two have a deep discussion of the importance of close friendships.

No supernatural or sci-fi elements here. The way Bradbury describes friendship between boys and men is contains much of the same intensity as that of the Hobbits in Tolkien.

Darling Adolf
An actor playing Adolf Hitler is convinced that, to make the movie a masterpiece, the producer will have to replicate the Nuremberg rallies and comes up with an elaborate scheme to draw thousands to hear the actor play Hitler and capture the energy of the crowd just like the Fuhrer once had.

This story did not work at all. Characters were entirely undeveloped and the story lacked any clear direction. A rare Bradbury clunker.


The Miracles of Jamie
An 11 year old boy is capable of pulling off small time miracles like athletic and academic triumphs. But, can he work his magic to save that which is most important to him?


The October Game
On Halloween night, a man, trapped in a loveless marriage, father to a loveless child, ruefully contemplates the emptiness of his life. He is determined to find a way, not only to separate himself from his wife, but to make her suffer in the process.

This story is a textbook example of good, old fashioned horror. With limited words, Bradbury develops the characters and motivation. Then, he provides the action and the twist. I’m sure those who get off on trying to anticipate the twist would get it, because it’s not too well disguised. Me, I like to just go with the story and let it take me where it’s going. Trying to anticipate plot twists takes energy away from simple enjoyment. What’s the point?

The Pumpernickel
A man and his wife stop at a deli on their way home from the movies. A loaf of unsliced pumpernickel makes the man nostalgic for his youth and a long remembered picnic at a swimming hole he and his buddies took when they were teenagers. He resolves to use that pumpernickel to find and reconnect with them.

Age is so pervasive in the works of Bradbury. He waxes nostalgic about the carefree nature of the child. His adult characters long for the freedom of youth. Most of these stories were written in Bradbury’s salad days. Now, as he has reached 90 years of age, I wonder what his attitude is toward being young.

Long After Midnight
Three mortuary drivers retrieve a suicide victim from a hanging tree. On the trip back to the morgue, the youngest of them berates the other two older men for not being more distraught over the death of such a young girl. As they are debating, the young man makes a discovery about the body that changes the entire picture.

This story is years ahead of its time! To say more would be to give away the ending, but I love the rhetorical question that is the last sentence in the story!


Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!
A grumpy priest hears the confession of a young man who is addicted to chocolate. The priests suffers the man’s tales of woe for days and weeks until the man announces himself healed and ready to see the world. Many years later, the priest receives a special thank you gift.

I think this story was supposed to juxtapose two extreme lifestyles. One lived by a glutton, and one sworn to poverty. It didn’t work for me.