The Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury

First published: 1980

Subjects: Emotions and the supernatural

Type of work: Short fiction

Recommended Ages: 13-18

Form and Content

The Stories of Ray Bradbury collects one hundred tales that span Ray Bradbury’s four decades as a writer up to 1980. Although the author is best known as a writer of fantasy and science fiction, this omnibus volume also features his early horror stories and a generous sampling of his nonfantasy fiction. In contrast to earlier Bradbury story collections from which this compilation draws, the contents are not assembled according to a specific thematic or stylistic scheme. This arrangement allows the reader to explore ideas that pervade all of Bradbury’s work and transcend any one genre in which he writes, most notably the marvelous possibilities in everyday life and the persistence of fundamental human behaviors in the face of change and progress.

Bradbury’s tales of horror and the supernatural feature ordinary people who stumble upon the fantastic in the course of their mundane lives. In “The Scythe,” for example, a migrant worker looking to support his family takes up residence on an abandoned farm and discovers from the unusual behavior of the wheat he mows by hand every day that he has become the incarnation of the Grim Reaper, harvesting his daily ration of lives. In “Skeleton,” a plain young man develops devastating feelings of self-loathing upon realizing that he carries inside him a skeleton, “one of those jointed, snowy, hard things, one of those foul, dry, brittle, gouge-eyed, skull-faced, shake-fingered, rattling things that sway from neck chains in abandoned webbed closets.” These stories can be read as the grim flip side to a handful of lighter fantasies—“Uncle Einar,” “The Traveler,” “The April Witch,” and “The Homecoming”—all of which feature a family of benign supernatural creatures who resemble ordinary human beings in their emotions and interactions with one another.

Bradbury wrote most of the science-fiction stories collected in this volume in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Whether they are set on Earth or in outer space, they contrast sharply with the mostly forward-looking science fiction of their day. Earthbound tales such as “The Rocket Man,” about the family left behind by a space traveler, and “The End of the Beginning,” in which a husband and wife ponder the impact that space travel will have on their world, offer elegiac reflections on what humankind has given up in its pursuit of the stars. Likewise, stories set on other planets are more concerned with exploring timeless human needs than alien worlds. Complications in “The Off Season” and “The Long Rain” develop from the psychological problems that people face adapting to new environments. In “The Blue Bottle,” a quest for a legendary Martian talisman comes to symbolize the human tendency to strive for ideals. “The Fire Balloons” and “The Man” both examine humankind’s unquenchable religious yearnings in a universe that has displaced humans from its center.

Bradbury’s nonfantasy stories abound with eccentric characters and quiet moments of private revelation. Their concerns are indistinguishable from those of his supernatural and science-fiction stories. “The Big Black and White Game,” in which a baseball game draws out the racial tensions smoldering beneath the placid veneer of a small midwestern town, is as potent a study of the dark side of human nature as any of his horror tales. The characters in “A Picasso Summer” and “Power House” experience epiphanies that transform their lives as powerfully as would any encounter with the supernatural. “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” and “The Anthem Sprinters” each are parts of story cycles in which Bradbury uses, respectively, Latino and Irish characters to explore the universality of hopes and dreams across cultures, much the same way that he uses alien civilizations in his science fiction as a sounding board for insights into the human condition.

Critical Context

The Stories of Ray Bradbury includes much of the best work from the short-fiction collections that established Bradbury’s literary reputation: The Illustrated Man (1951), The October Country (1955), The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), and A Medicine for Melancholy (1959). First published at a time when fantasy and science fiction were separated from the literary mainstream as “popular fiction,” many of these stories helped draw attention to the way in which genre fiction could serve as a vehicle for the same themes and ideas found in so-called serious literature. Bradbury’s novels The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine (1957) both were assembled from short stories. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) each began as a short story before evolving into full-length novels.

Bradbury published little short fiction after The Stories of Ray Bradbury appeared, but some of his later novels—Death Is a Lonely Business (1985), A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities (1990), and Green Shadows, White Whale (1992)—elaborate ideas first tackled in his short stories and show how the timeless themes of his earlier writing continue to shape his mature work.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Ray Bradbury. New York: Chelsea House, 2001.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” New York: Chelsea House, 2001.

Eller, Jonathan R., and William F. Touponce. Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004.

Reid, Robin Ann. Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Touponce, William F. Naming the Unnameable: Ray Bradbury and the Fantastic After Freud. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1997.

Weist, Jerry, and Donn Albright. Bradbury, an Illustrated Life: A Journey to Far Metaphor. New York: William Morrow, 2002.

Weller, Sam. The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury. New York: William Morrow, 2005.