The Ray Bradbury Stories I Remember

“Something Written This Way Comes”

I’m a big fan of science fiction.  I hope I’ve mentioned that by now.  John Carpenter and Ridley Scott, Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven, Halo and Half-Life, they’re all some of my favorites in their respective fields.  But I think my first love of sci-fi was none other than the great Illinois resident himself, Ray Bradbury.

The name may not immediately be recognizable to some, but most will remember him as the author of that book they didn’t read in high school, Fahrenheit 451.  Or, alternatively, as the author that other book you might have been assigned, Something Wicked This Way Comes.  I adore both those books, and think they deserve their standing as cornerstones of American literature classes, but my introduction to Bradbury came through his short stories, namely his loosely-related collection The Martian Chronicles.

I first got my hands on a copy of that book when I bought a fancy, gold-trimmed set of Ray Bradbury short stories from what was once a Barnes and Noble. It was book which I brought to school for probably every day of seventh grade, until I finished reading it.  It contained The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and R is for Rocket, four of his earlier short story collections.  After reading those I moved on to Fahrenheit 451 and Dandelion Wine, but I didn’t get to Something Wicked This Way Comes until a summer or two ago.

Maybe it’s because I was only finally old enough to really appreciate Something Wicked when I read it, but that one is my favorite work.  I need to go back and reread 451 and his short stories, because I think I may have missed out on quite a few key themes when I read them.  But that’s not what I’m going to talk about today.  For this entry, I want to tell you what I remember about these stories, and my impressions of them some six or seven years later.  The ones that have stuck with me, that I think are worth reading.  Or not worth reading, in some cases. 

A word of warning; there will be spoilers for plot points in some of the short stories I discuss here.  But the books are more than fifty years old, in some cases.  So I think it’s okay to discuss them.  Let’s get started.

The Martian Chronicles

It’s hard to break down my memories into separate stories beyond their original collections, and upon opening up my old copy, I realized how well I actually remember some of the stories within, and how well I do not remember most of them.

Anyway, the book was first published in the late forties, and republished and updated with additional stories intermittently after that.  The copy that I have doesn’t have every story from every addition (it is notably missing “Way in the Middle of the Air”), but it has most of them.  There were a lot of short ones, not longer than a few paragraphs or a page or two, that offered interim material and other connections between what were originally unconnected pieces.  I don’t remember those very well.

What I do remember quite clearly are the images that I had in my head as I read these stories.  A man, standing on the Martian desert, dancing with glee as trees grow in split seconds around him.  Flaming balls of sentient gas conversing with a priest about the nature of sin.  Human explorers locked in a Martian prison for the insane because they were claiming to be from Earth.  Sand ships, constructed by the native Martian peoples, abandoned on the dried seas as their species died out.  And that ominous phrase, “COME HOME,” broadcast across electronic newspaper machines over the entire red planet.

The work is a colorful, imaginative tapestry of various sci-fi themes and clichés, though they weren’t clichés back then.  And Bradbury demonstrates his love of certain topics, with several stories commenting on racial prejudice in America and the extinction of the Native American peoples at the hands of the Europeans.  Hell, Bradbury isn’t even very subtle at that one; chicken pox kills off the Martians.

But maybe the story I remember best is “There will Come Soft Rains,” ironically one of the few stories not to take place on Mars.  This piece highlights another fascination of Bradbury’s, one that crops up again and again; nuclear annihilation.

Bradbury did most of his famous writing in the beginning and middle of the Cold War, so extinction by nuclear warheads was a constant threat.  And it worked its way into the novel.  The collection of stories ends with Earth caught up in a destructive war that wipes out humanity, save the few sole survivors still on Mars.  “There will Come Soft Rains” describes an automated house that survived the war, as its robots water irradiated gardens and sing lullabies to an empty cradle.  It’s meditative and haunting, and one of the better looks at post-apocalypse.

But then there are other stories that are outliers. I like “Usher II” because it’s a retelling of “Fall of the House of Usher” but self-aware in its homage to previous works.  Then again, it’s also a story which seemingly exists only so Ray Bradbury can flex on all us casuals by sharing his impenetrable knowledge of American literature.  It features robotic ravens and a house akin to “Masque of the Red Death” that some people straight-up burn to the ground.  It’s a weird one.

There are other, happier stories, though.  Like “The Green Morning,” or… or… Well, most of the ones I remember end in a pretty depressing way, either with philosophical musings on the death of a culture or just a general loss of life.  But all the stories are fascinating to read, each with a different facet of life on the red planet, from the most mundane aspects to the more opulent extremes.  I really ought to read through these stories again and try and find the happier ones.

The Illustrated Man

The Illustrated Man is a frame story of sorts, similar to The Martian Chronicles, but the stories aren’t nearly as connected.  They exist together in the sense that they are separate tales told by tattoos covering the body of the titular illustrated man, a member of a traveling freak show.  The use of tattoos as living stories shows up again in Something Wicked, but I don’t know which one came first.  But, seeing as I myself have several tattoos, this book may have had more impact on my formative years than I expected.

The two most notable stories in my particular collection are “The Veldt” and “The Long Rain,” two stories of which I was taught in junior high.  “The Veldt” takes a look at what I assume, looking back, must represent the rise and eventual death of the nuclear family as it is replaced by automation, perhaps related to Bradbury’s own fear of television and, ironically, advancing technology.  Also, a house creates actual lions and the parents are eaten.  So that happens.

“The Long Rain” is actually, looking back, not one I was taught in junior high.  I’m thinking of a separate story, which I’ll get to later.  But my memories of “The Long Rain” are interesting, because it has merged in my mind with a separate short story that I want to write, and I can no longer remember which part is Bradbury and which part is me.  I know the original story has to do with a group of people hiking through a jungle that never stops raining, but beyond that I’m not sure.  I’m pretty sure it’s only in my version that they get turned into tigers.  Not sure what happens in the Bradbury version.

“Kaleidoscope” is an interesting story because it’s supposed to be one of Bradbury’s best loved, most unknown works.  Bradbury himself says that it’s his piece that is most commonly adapted for radio or stage by students of English classes, so I don’t know what that really says about the story.  I wasn’t very impressed with it, but Bradbury hyped it up so much in his introduction that I remember being disappointed.  But I also believe it’s the inspiration for that movie Gravity, because “Kaleidoscope” is a bunch of astronauts floating around in space after their ship blew up.  But without Sandra Bullock.

There are a lot of stories in this set that I don’t remember, but the ones I do are really weird.  There’s one about how everyone collectively knows that the world will end tomorrow, and they just kind of give up, which is way more unsettling to think about now than I remember it seeming.  There’s one about the fallibility of memory and how we know what exists and when, which is less scary now than it was when I read it.  And there’s something about aliens getting hit by a car and turned into concrete, I guess?  I never really understood that one.  Something about the dilution of culture by America, I think.

Oh yeah, and there’s that one where a husband is replaced by the android version of himself, except it’s actually a big marionette puppet and/or his brother or something? I may be making that last part up in my head. And one where children unwittingly invite extradimensional entities into our world via meaningless games and summer play.  And one about Jesus where Jesus is actually an immortal alien that travels from planet to planet.  It’s actually a really interesting take on the divide between faith and science and the nature of belief.  Bradbury was a surprisingly religious man, in some regards.

The Golden Apples of the Sun

I used to do this thing when I was younger where anytime someone brought up Ray Bradbury I would look at them and shout “RAYYYYY BRADBURY,” or alternatively sing in a mock-opera baritone “Golden apples of the SUUUUNNNNNN.”  It got irritating for everyone and I eventually stopped when my friends made fun of me for it enough times.  But they couldn’t stop me from reading. No one can.

My edition of the book actually contains both Golden Apples and R is for Rocket, but I don’t know which stories go where, so I’m just going to talk about both as if they were one unit.

“All Summer in a Day” was the story I was thinking of earlier when I discussed “The Long Rain,” and “All Summer” was the story I was taught in junior high.  A lot of you reading this out there may have been taught it, too.  It’s the story where these people live on Venus and the sun only comes out once every seven years, but this little girl is bullied and locked in a closet so she misses her first chance to see the sun in her entire life.  It’s pretty heartbreaking, looking back.

Ray Bradbury, besides tormenting children, also has a trend of writing about the social injustices of his time in ways that aren’t really subtle at all.  He has “The Big Black and White Game,” which is literally a baseball game about black people and white people, and I was confused by it when I read it.  There’s also “I See you Never,” which is about a Mexican immigrant who says goodbye to his uncaring landlady as he is deported.  Which, holy shit, this came out in the 40’s.  I didn’t really think about that story til I started writing this piece, but I feel like it’s more relevant now than it ever was in Bradbury’s time.

I think this collection is personally my favorite because it has the most stories that I remember.  It has “The April Witch,” which accidentally almost perfectly mirror’s Donovan’s psychedelic rock masterpiece, “Season of the Witch.”  Or at least I think it does.  It involves magic body swapping.  So maybe I’m drawing some tenuous connections here.

This collection also has “The Great Wide World Over There,” which I think is the first story I ever seriously considered trying to adapt into a movie.  I was twelve at the time, but I still took it seriously.  It’s about this old couple who can’t read but love to get mail because their nephew reads the mail to them.  Except the nephew dies in a car accident or something so they keep piling up all this mail from the great wide world that they can’t read.  It’s about reading and is depressing. I’m starting to see a trend here.

“The Garbage Collector” is just flat-out scary, since it details a trashman who is told by his boss to come in early to work tomorrow so he can get a good start on collecting all the bodies.  Because there’s going to be a war, and someone has to clean up the dead.  Good god.  Maybe it’s just the Cold War talking, but there is a lot of genocidal war in Bradbury’s works.  More than I remember.

I think “Here There by Tygers” would make a great real-time strategy video game akin to Pikmin.  Sort of, at least.  That’s how I interpreted this bonkers story about a group of scientists who land on a living planet that can create sentient life at will and also conjure up giant storms and earthquakes to destroy it.  It’s as much of a love story as it is about a planet that can also think and feel.  Oh yeah, and just before it is “A Sound of Thunder,” which is as close as science fiction got to Jurassic Park before Jurassic Park.  And it draws some eerie parallels to more modern issues of big-game hunting and democratic election.  Even more timely stories.

There are a lot of stories that I remember but don’t know the names to.  Like this one where a couple escapes into 1900’s Mexico City because the future is ruled by a tyrannical 1984-esque government.  I don’t remember its name, but it’s a fun read.  And there’s also a bunch of names for stories in here that I have no recollection of whatsoever.  Like “The Strawberry Window.”  What does it mean?  Knowing Bradbury, it’s probably something about how modern television is killing off old Americana or something.  Or transplanting culture.  Who knows?

I could talk for ages about Bradbury, and I could probably talk even more if I actually remembered more than a third of the stories in this book.  But these are the ones that stuck with me, for one reason or another.  Some are bad.  Some are really good.  And some are just plain eerie.  All of them are interesting to read, and take some aspect of regular existence and put a strange, often frightening twist on it.

If you want to get a better look at the kaleidoscope of ideas that is Ray Bradbury and his many works, I would suggest starting with Golden Apples, or Something Wicked.  I’d argue those are his greatest works of the ones I remember, and if you’re only going to read a few, might as well start with the best.  I’m sure that you can probably find most of these stories in their entirety online.  I know how Bradbury would feel about that, but hopefully I’ve piqued your interest at least a little bit.  One of these days I’ll get around to reading these stories again, and I think I’ll fall right back in love with science fiction.