The Stories
“Here and now, down there in that pit of jungled blackness is suddenly all the evil you will ever know. Evil you will never understand. All of the nameless things are there. Later, when you have grown you’ll be given names to label them with. Meaningless syllables to describe the waiting nothingness.”
“The Night”
In the past, these articles have been focused on books I liked and wanted to share. Some of them are legendary novels and all of them are good. But, this time, I want to focus on an author, but not just any author–the father of science fiction and one of the most influential writers of all time. Ray Bradbury. Though Bradbury has written many amazing novels (like Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes), you have to read his short stories to really know and appreciate Bradbury. I hauled out my 1059 page copy of The Stories of Ray Bradbury to point out my favorites of the 100 stories.
“It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it has passed the ancient Moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another.”
“Mars is Heaven”
I’ve read most of these stories over the years, but have been causally rereading these stories in order since I bought the book over summer. Although I’m 150 pages in and barely halfway down the first page of the Table of Contents, I’m not discouraged. The quotes included in this article are all selected from the stories I’ve read in the collection (I basically just included phrases I had underlined. FYI the quote from “The Night” is one of my favorites in literature).
Bradbury has an uncanny ability to never lose potency or the shock factor; each story is spookier than the last and each one will send a shiver down your spine in a new way for a new reason. Stories like “The Veldt”, an ominous tale of two children who escape the disappointment of their parents in a simulated grassland that proves all too real, are of Bradbury’s more famous stories. My personal favorites include “The Night”, a horrifyingly simple tale told in second-person that zeros in on a child’s fear of the unknown when his brother doesn’t come home one evening, and “The Scythe” which tells a story of the cycles of life and loss in a wheatfield with a twist ending that still has me reeling.
“The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.”
“There Will Come Soft Rains”
The great thing about these stories is that there’s something for everyone. Some are unsettling, some are downright scary, some are sad, and some are sweet. These are stories about love, loss, acceptance, revenge, existence – things that never change, no matter what planet you’re on or time you live in or how old you are. Read the stories that changed everything about everything by a man of extreme talent and endless imagination. A man who thought of it all before anyone else. Read about a martian so that you might be human.
“He knew it before he went in. He knew there was death in the house. It was that kind of silence.”
“The Scythe”
Facts Worth Mentioning:
Some of these stories are pulled from either of Bradbury’s two famous collections of short stories, The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles. The stories in each respective collection are seemingly unrelated, but are connected through a single story that frames the narrative. These short stories are endlessly rewarding…and are in collections much shorter than this one!
When Bradbury was 22, he asked out a bookstore clerk named Maggie. They were together until his death 56 years later. She was the only girl he’d ever dated. And to top off on that cuteness, she did the working while he stayed home to write. This was basically unheard off in the ‘40s. Go Maggie!
Not only could Bradbury not drive, he hated cars. He saw a huge crash once and he said it took him weeks to get over it. This fact makes stories like “The Crowd” that much more creepy.
Bradbury died in 2012, right before Curiosity Rover’s launch. NASA named the spot where it touched down “Bradbury Landing” to honor the late author and his countless works about Mars.
“It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason.”
“The Lake”