I first read Ray Bradbury in 7th grade, my mind full virgin mush. I remember checking out his collection of short stories called R is for Rocket from the school library. I heard the “Sound of Thunder” while hunting dinosaurs and felt the “Long Rain” beat relentlessly on my cheeks. “Frost and Fire” awakened my mind to new worlds with new dangers. I hope to open this world to you and perhaps reawaken that young kid lurking inside us all.
Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, IL on August 22, 1920. This town in which he lived the majority of years from 1920 until 1934 provided that model for Greentown, which features in several of his stories. In Mr. Bradbury’s mind, this Greentown was the prototypical “Small Town America” where children play and apple pies are baked. However he then peels away the layers of this image to show the dark things that hide in the cellars of such a town. Waukegan also provided the library in which the young Ray spent a lot of time reading classic Sci/Fi and stories of wonder.
He moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1934 and graduated from Los Angeles High School. After high school, he sold newspapers on the corner. The country was in the midst of the Great Depression so money was as hard to come by as jobs. Therefore, young Ray would have to forgo college and instead immersed himself in the local libraries for his higher education. In was in such a library on the UCLA campus that he rented a typewriter in a study room to write his hit novel, Fahrenheit 451.
Ray Bradbury would not let the novel world take him away from his deep love of the short story. He collected a group of common themed shorts and bound them together in a serialized novel called, The Martian Chronicles (1950). The Chronicles tell the story of Mankind’s colonization of the planet Mars and the struggles and changes that Mars goes through as it is affected by things happening on Earth. It was his breakthrough collection and set him up forever as a star in short story history as a master of the art.
Here is an excerpt from “Sound of Thunder”:
“It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight.”
You feel the terror of the watcher. You want to look outside your window to make sure there is not some monstrosity standing there. You see the scene and you feel it. That is what Ray Bradbury brings to the world of Short Stories. That is his effect on writers, like myself, he has had over the years gone and the years to come.