Ray Bradbury: Novels & Story Cycles
By Ray Bradbury
(887 pages, dystopian, 1945-1999)
There’s something for everyone in this collection of Ray Bradbury’s finest works. Whether you prefer standard sci-fi, or if a nostalgia-soaked bildungsroman is more your speed, Bradbury has you covered. Four of Bradbury’s most popular stories are assembled here in over 800 pages. Sure, the page count may seem daunting, but collections allow you the opportunity to pick your poison, if you will. No matter your choice, Bradbury’s descriptive style is present throughout to invigorate your imagination.
For sci-fi lovers there is The Martian Chronicles, a series of short stories documenting humanity’s colonization of Mars. It’s rife with metaphors of Bradbury’s critiques of the racism and colonization of his time. On a larger scale, Bradbury lets us imagine what may happen if we colonize a new planet without learning from our former mistakes. We follow generations of humans who learn too late that colonizing Mars is perhaps not the escape they imagined.
Fahrenheit 451 is probably Bradbury’s best-known work, and is lauded as one of the best dystopian novels of all time. Bradbury expertly crafts the anxiety-ridden main character, Montag, as he navigates through a world of government control and censorship of knowledge. For those who have read it in the past: try it again, and see how it compares to the recent movie!
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a perfect story for a spooky October day. Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway find themselves in an age-old battle of good versus evil when a mysterious traveling carnival arrives in town one night. I felt a familiar feeling from my childhood creep in while I read: one of adventure, of the unknown, like when you were dared to knock on the door of a neighbor who you heard was a witch. Bradbury truly has a knack for evoking deep childhood memories of fear and adventure. That being said, he starts to lose focus on the narrative and the pacing gets strange after the halfway mark. Although still a competent novel, it may have worked better as a novella, or a few short stories.
Dandelion Wine is what’s called a “fix up,” or a collection of short stories stitched together to create a cohesive narrative. Bradbury weaves a series of vignettes following the citizens of Green Town, Illinois, each loosely connected to the central character, twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding. Dandelion wine, which the title references, is a beverage created by processing large amounts of summer dandelions in a wine press. The Spaulding family prepare the drink every year, bottle it up in old ketchup bottles, and store them in the basement. The characters sip their dandelion wine on winter afternoons to remind themselves of the warmth of summer. In a way, this book does just that. It provides the reader with small glimpses of sunnier, happier times. You can drink in the nostalgia of your youth, page after page.
In my opinion, Bradbury’s true skill lies in his crafting of short stories. That’s not to say he is an incompetent novelist, but understand that his longer works may not be for everyone. If you can hold on through some slower sections of his novels, you’ll find your imagination on a wild ride.
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Shane Phillips
