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Fantasmas de lo Nuevo
En esta colección de dieciocho relatos, Bradury lleva al lector de viaje por el espacio y el tiempo, a dimensiones ilimitadas del futuro y a territorios inexplorados del pasado.
Los temas más celebrados de Ray Bradbury reaparecen en esta nueva colección con una renovada vitalidad: el tiempo --pasado, presente, futuro-- ambiguo, ilusorio, intimidante; los automóviles, a veces destinados a complacer instintos destructivos; las máquinas, respuestas a las esperanzas y necesidades del hombre y también inesperadas y graves amenazas. En "El motel de la Gallina Inspirada" hay demasiados muertos en la carretera; en "Canto el Cuerpo Eléctrico", un automóvil atropella a la abuela-robot que tiene una posible segunda oportunidad como guardiana protectora. "Viento de Gettysburg" cuenta la historia de un segundo Lincoln, resucitado en facsímil, lo que implica la resurrección de su asesino. En "Llamada nocturna", Emil Barton ha estado viviendo solo en Marte durante sesenta años, cuando de pronto alguien lo llama por teléfono, él mismo, Emil Barton de joven, el que ideó la posibilidad de una voz descarnada. Barton intenta salir de este solipsismo electrónico; siente que el pasado está devorándolo. En "La ciudad perdida de Marte" nos reencontramos con Sam Parkhill y el capitán Wilder, personajes de Crónicas marcianas, de visita en una ciudad mecanizada, un asombroso parque de diversiones donde cualquier sueño puede ser cierto, y también mortal.
Los temas más celebrados de Ray Bradbury reaparecen en esta nueva colección con una renovada vitalidad: el tiempo --pasado, presente, futuro-- ambiguo, ilusorio, intimidante; los automóviles, a veces destinados a complacer instintos destructivos; las máquinas, respuestas a las esperanzas y necesidades del hombre y también inesperadas y graves amenazas. En "El motel de la Gallina Inspirada" hay demasiados muertos en la carretera; en "Canto el Cuerpo Eléctrico", un automóvil atropella a la abuela-robot que tiene una posible segunda oportunidad como guardiana protectora. "Viento de Gettysburg" cuenta la historia de un segundo Lincoln, resucitado en facsímil, lo que implica la resurrección de su asesino. En "Llamada nocturna", Emil Barton ha estado viviendo solo en Marte durante sesenta años, cuando de pronto alguien lo llama por teléfono, él mismo, Emil Barton de joven, el que ideó la posibilidad de una voz descarnada. Barton intenta salir de este solipsismo electrónico; siente que el pasado está devorándolo. En "La ciudad perdida de Marte" nos reencontramos con Sam Parkhill y el capitán Wilder, personajes de Crónicas marcianas, de visita en una ciudad mecanizada, un asombroso parque de diversiones donde cualquier sueño puede ser cierto, y también mortal.
352 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1969
About the author
Ray Bradbury
2,300 books22.9k followersRay Douglas Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947.
His reputation as a writer of courage and vision was established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, which describes the first attempts of Earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, and the unintended consequences. Next came The Illustrated Man and then, in 1953, Fahrenheit 451, which many consider to be Bradbury's masterpiece, a scathing indictment of censorship set in a future world where the written word is forbidden. In an attempt to salvage their history and culture, a group of rebels memorize entire works of literature and philosophy as their books are burned by the totalitarian state. Other works include The October Country, Dandelion Wine, A Medicine for Melancholy, Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Sing the Body Electric!, Quicker Than the Eye, and Driving Blind. In all, Bradbury has published more than thirty books, close to 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, and plays. His short stories have appeared in more than 1,000 school curriculum "recommended reading" anthologies.
Ray Bradbury's work has been included in four Best American Short Story collections. He has been awarded the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, the PEN Center USA West Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. In November 2000, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was conferred upon Mr. Bradbury at the 2000 National Book Awards Ceremony in New York City.
Ray Bradbury has never confined his vision to the purely literary. He has been nominated for an Academy Award (for his animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright), and has won an Emmy Award (for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree). He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's Ray Bradbury Theater. He was the creative consultant on the United States Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. In 1982 he created the interior metaphors for the Spaceship Earth display at Epcot Center, Disney World, and later contributed to the conception of the Orbitron space ride at Euro-Disney, France.
Married since 1947, Mr. Bradbury and his wife Maggie lived in Los Angeles with their numerous cats. Together, they raised four daughters and had eight grandchildren. Sadly, Maggie passed away in November of 2003.
On the occasion of his 80th birthday in August 2000, Bradbury said, "The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me. The feeling I have every day is very much the same as it was when I was twelve. In any event, here I am, eighty years old, feeling no different, full of a great sense of joy, and glad for the long life that has been allowed me. I have good plans for the next ten or twenty years, and I hope you'll come along."
His reputation as a writer of courage and vision was established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, which describes the first attempts of Earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, and the unintended consequences. Next came The Illustrated Man and then, in 1953, Fahrenheit 451, which many consider to be Bradbury's masterpiece, a scathing indictment of censorship set in a future world where the written word is forbidden. In an attempt to salvage their history and culture, a group of rebels memorize entire works of literature and philosophy as their books are burned by the totalitarian state. Other works include The October Country, Dandelion Wine, A Medicine for Melancholy, Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Sing the Body Electric!, Quicker Than the Eye, and Driving Blind. In all, Bradbury has published more than thirty books, close to 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, and plays. His short stories have appeared in more than 1,000 school curriculum "recommended reading" anthologies.
Ray Bradbury's work has been included in four Best American Short Story collections. He has been awarded the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, the PEN Center USA West Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. In November 2000, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was conferred upon Mr. Bradbury at the 2000 National Book Awards Ceremony in New York City.
Ray Bradbury has never confined his vision to the purely literary. He has been nominated for an Academy Award (for his animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright), and has won an Emmy Award (for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree). He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's Ray Bradbury Theater. He was the creative consultant on the United States Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. In 1982 he created the interior metaphors for the Spaceship Earth display at Epcot Center, Disney World, and later contributed to the conception of the Orbitron space ride at Euro-Disney, France.
Married since 1947, Mr. Bradbury and his wife Maggie lived in Los Angeles with their numerous cats. Together, they raised four daughters and had eight grandchildren. Sadly, Maggie passed away in November of 2003.
On the occasion of his 80th birthday in August 2000, Bradbury said, "The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me. The feeling I have every day is very much the same as it was when I was twelve. In any event, here I am, eighty years old, feeling no different, full of a great sense of joy, and glad for the long life that has been allowed me. I have good plans for the next ten or twenty years, and I hope you'll come along."
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April 12, 2022
I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC
Io canto il corpo elettrico non è solo la poesia di Walt Whitman, una di quelle in Foglie d’erba, che lo stesso Bradbury riporta in epigrafe: è anche il titolo di uno di questi racconti, proprio quello che regala il titolo originale a questa raccolta.
In Italia uscì prima come “Il meglio di Ray Bradbury”: poi però quando fu ripubblicato all’inizio del terzo millennio, anche qui fu ripreso il titolo originale.
In totale diciassette racconti più una poesia.
Il celebre album omonimo dei Weather Report.
E non sono solo racconti di fantascienza, non almeno di quella più classica, anche se Bradbury è celebre soprattutto per quelli, non ci sono pompieri che bruciano i libri, ma ci sono un paio di racconti ambientati su Marte. La sensazione prevalente è comunque quella d’essere dentro un episodio di Ai confini della realtà - Twilight Zone. Infatti, proprio Io canto il corpo elettrico nasce dalla sceneggiatura che Bradbury scrisse per la serie tv di cui questo fu l’episodio numero cento.
”I Sing The Body Electric”, episodio #100 della serie “Ai confini della realtà”.
Chi sa viaggiare nel tempo, chi partorisce una piramide blu (il neonato esiste, ma è in un’altra dimensione), una gallina che riesce a prevedere il futuro e si esprime con le uova che depone (ambientato durante la Grande Depressione), un robot dalle sembianze di Abraham Lincoln ucciso in un cinema…
In un altro Bradbury gioca con intelligenza col termine “fairy” che in inglese significa sia fata che checca.
In quello del titolo, tre bambini sono appena rimasti orfani di madre, e il padre pensa di sostituirla con una nonna elettrica - i tre piccoli sono d’accordo ed eccitati dal fatto di poter progettare il nuovo parente elettrico. Che arriva consegnato a casa in una scatola che sta tra una cassa da morto e un sarcofago: sarà per questo motivo che la più piccola ha sempre paura che la nuova nonna possa morire da un momento all’altro?
Maureen Stapleton è “The Electric Grandmother” nel TV-Movie del 1982.
È una delle mie letture del periodo liceale. Alternando questi racconti con quelli di E.A.Poe.
E qui ce n’è uno che ricorda molto il grande scrittore dell’Ottocento, si intitola Il giorno che si aprirono le tombe – The Tombling Day: stanno per costruire una nuova strada che passerà sopra il vecchio cimitero, la gente può riesumare i proprio cari e spostarne i resti nel cimitero nuovo– un’anziana fa estrarre la bara del suo vecchio fidanzato morto sessant’anni prima, e scopre che lui è rimasto uguale, giovane e bello come se avesse ancora ventitre anni, mentre lei è invecchiata e incartapecorita, neppure l’ombra della bellezza che fu. Struggente.
In una bella intervista alla Paris Review Bradbury disse:
Quando parlo di fantascienza uso spesso la metafora di Perseo e della testa di Medusa. Invece di guardare in faccia Medusa, cioè la verità, ti giri e guardi alle tue spalle il riflesso nel lucido bronzo dello scudo, poi allunghi la spada dietro di te e tagli la testa di Medusa. La fantascienza finge di guardare dentro il futuro ma in realtà guarda il riflesso della verità che è davanti a noi. Si ha quindi una visione di rimbalzo, una verità di rimbalzo, che si può mandare giù e con cui ci si può divertire, invece di sentirsi intelligenti e super-intellettuali.
Io canto il corpo elettrico non è solo la poesia di Walt Whitman, una di quelle in Foglie d’erba, che lo stesso Bradbury riporta in epigrafe: è anche il titolo di uno di questi racconti, proprio quello che regala il titolo originale a questa raccolta.
In Italia uscì prima come “Il meglio di Ray Bradbury”: poi però quando fu ripubblicato all’inizio del terzo millennio, anche qui fu ripreso il titolo originale.
In totale diciassette racconti più una poesia.
Il celebre album omonimo dei Weather Report.
E non sono solo racconti di fantascienza, non almeno di quella più classica, anche se Bradbury è celebre soprattutto per quelli, non ci sono pompieri che bruciano i libri, ma ci sono un paio di racconti ambientati su Marte. La sensazione prevalente è comunque quella d’essere dentro un episodio di Ai confini della realtà - Twilight Zone. Infatti, proprio Io canto il corpo elettrico nasce dalla sceneggiatura che Bradbury scrisse per la serie tv di cui questo fu l’episodio numero cento.
”I Sing The Body Electric”, episodio #100 della serie “Ai confini della realtà”.
Chi sa viaggiare nel tempo, chi partorisce una piramide blu (il neonato esiste, ma è in un’altra dimensione), una gallina che riesce a prevedere il futuro e si esprime con le uova che depone (ambientato durante la Grande Depressione), un robot dalle sembianze di Abraham Lincoln ucciso in un cinema…
In un altro Bradbury gioca con intelligenza col termine “fairy” che in inglese significa sia fata che checca.
In quello del titolo, tre bambini sono appena rimasti orfani di madre, e il padre pensa di sostituirla con una nonna elettrica - i tre piccoli sono d’accordo ed eccitati dal fatto di poter progettare il nuovo parente elettrico. Che arriva consegnato a casa in una scatola che sta tra una cassa da morto e un sarcofago: sarà per questo motivo che la più piccola ha sempre paura che la nuova nonna possa morire da un momento all’altro?
Maureen Stapleton è “The Electric Grandmother” nel TV-Movie del 1982.
È una delle mie letture del periodo liceale. Alternando questi racconti con quelli di E.A.Poe.
E qui ce n’è uno che ricorda molto il grande scrittore dell’Ottocento, si intitola Il giorno che si aprirono le tombe – The Tombling Day: stanno per costruire una nuova strada che passerà sopra il vecchio cimitero, la gente può riesumare i proprio cari e spostarne i resti nel cimitero nuovo– un’anziana fa estrarre la bara del suo vecchio fidanzato morto sessant’anni prima, e scopre che lui è rimasto uguale, giovane e bello come se avesse ancora ventitre anni, mentre lei è invecchiata e incartapecorita, neppure l’ombra della bellezza che fu. Struggente.
In una bella intervista alla Paris Review Bradbury disse:
Quando parlo di fantascienza uso spesso la metafora di Perseo e della testa di Medusa. Invece di guardare in faccia Medusa, cioè la verità, ti giri e guardi alle tue spalle il riflesso nel lucido bronzo dello scudo, poi allunghi la spada dietro di te e tagli la testa di Medusa. La fantascienza finge di guardare dentro il futuro ma in realtà guarda il riflesso della verità che è davanti a noi. Si ha quindi una visione di rimbalzo, una verità di rimbalzo, che si può mandare giù e con cui ci si può divertire, invece di sentirsi intelligenti e super-intellettuali.
April 11, 2019
I Sing the Body Electric, a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury gets less ink than the more popular collections The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles but perhaps better demonstrates his great range of literary ability and imagination.
Focusing on a central Bradbury theme of nostalgia, while straying from the science fiction and fantasy genre, I Sing the Body Electric is best illustrated by the title story, which is by far the best and is on a short list of the best of Ray’s stories.
Another gem is “Lost City of Mars”, which masterfully explores Bradbury’s theme of loneliness and isolation. This collection also highlights Bradbury’s great range of literary appreciation with stories like "The Kilimanjaro Device", "Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine", "The Parrot Who Met Papa", and "G.B.S.---Mark V".
"Heavy-Set" is a disturbing story that reveals the authors great ability in the psychological horror genre. Finally the collection ends with the beautiful poem "Christus Apollo".
This is a great collection from a true master.
Focusing on a central Bradbury theme of nostalgia, while straying from the science fiction and fantasy genre, I Sing the Body Electric is best illustrated by the title story, which is by far the best and is on a short list of the best of Ray’s stories.
Another gem is “Lost City of Mars”, which masterfully explores Bradbury’s theme of loneliness and isolation. This collection also highlights Bradbury’s great range of literary appreciation with stories like "The Kilimanjaro Device", "Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine", "The Parrot Who Met Papa", and "G.B.S.---Mark V".
"Heavy-Set" is a disturbing story that reveals the authors great ability in the psychological horror genre. Finally the collection ends with the beautiful poem "Christus Apollo".
This is a great collection from a true master.
February 23, 2018
It’s a good thing I’m writing this review months after reading this book because a decent acid test for a short story collection is how many stories stick in your mind after you’ve put some time between reading and reviewing or just plain old remembering.
The centerpiece of the book is the title story, which was adapted into a Twilight Zone episode and a made for TV movie starring that kid from E.T. whose name wasn’t Elliot:
A dad buys a robot grandma to take care of his three children after his wife dies. The robot grandma makes crappy tasting wheat cakes, falls down a lot, and smells like motor oil, yet that doesn’t prevent her from winning the children’s hearts. Eventually. Dawwww!
Other stories that made an impression on me (i.e. are sort of imprinted on my aging crack-addled brain):
The funny one about the Irish Revolutionary dudes and saving some paintings.
The sad/sweet one about a guy who impersonated Charles Dickens.
The interesting one about the triangle baby and the human parents.
The weird one about a descendant of John Wilkes Booth shooting a robot Abe Lincoln.
The touching story about giving Ernest Hemingway a more fitting death.
The strange one about the old dude on Mars who punks himself over and over again.
Caveat emptor: There’s a poem at the end of the book that I sort of read in an I’m-almost-done-with-this-book-so-I’m-going-to-sort-of-speed-read-it-and-just-pretend-I-read-it way.
Miller Analogy Bonus public service content for you potential grad-schoolers:
Poetry : Jeff :: Kryptonite : Superman
The relationship is thus: Prolonged exposure to Kryptonite will kill Superman and prolonged (hell even brief) exposure to poetry will eventually kill me.
Good luck in grad school, kids! Stay in school, don't do drugs!!
Although Bradbury has a tendency to be lumped into the science fiction category, these stories straddle multiple genres and, for the most part, are well worth checking out. So if you were force fed Fahrenheit 451 as a high-schooler, give Bradbury, who’s raison d’etre (<- bonus French content) was the short story, another shot.
The centerpiece of the book is the title story, which was adapted into a Twilight Zone episode and a made for TV movie starring that kid from E.T. whose name wasn’t Elliot:
A dad buys a robot grandma to take care of his three children after his wife dies. The robot grandma makes crappy tasting wheat cakes, falls down a lot, and smells like motor oil, yet that doesn’t prevent her from winning the children’s hearts. Eventually. Dawwww!
Other stories that made an impression on me (i.e. are sort of imprinted on my aging crack-addled brain):
The funny one about the Irish Revolutionary dudes and saving some paintings.
The sad/sweet one about a guy who impersonated Charles Dickens.
The interesting one about the triangle baby and the human parents.
The weird one about a descendant of John Wilkes Booth shooting a robot Abe Lincoln.
The touching story about giving Ernest Hemingway a more fitting death.
The strange one about the old dude on Mars who punks himself over and over again.
Caveat emptor: There’s a poem at the end of the book that I sort of read in an I’m-almost-done-with-this-book-so-I’m-going-to-sort-of-speed-read-it-and-just-pretend-I-read-it way.
Miller Analogy Bonus public service content for you potential grad-schoolers:
Poetry : Jeff :: Kryptonite : Superman
The relationship is thus: Prolonged exposure to Kryptonite will kill Superman and prolonged (hell even brief) exposure to poetry will eventually kill me.
Good luck in grad school, kids! Stay in school, don't do drugs!!
Although Bradbury has a tendency to be lumped into the science fiction category, these stories straddle multiple genres and, for the most part, are well worth checking out. So if you were force fed Fahrenheit 451 as a high-schooler, give Bradbury, who’s raison d’etre (<- bonus French content) was the short story, another shot.
December 30, 2022
“Grandma! I remember her birth. Wait, you say, no man remembers his own grandma’s birth. But, yes, we remember the day that she was born.”
I first read this story many years ago, in a collection of short stories to which it gave its name I Sing the Body Electric!, which was published in 1969. It’s a great title, but one for which Ray Bradbury cannot take the credit, as it comes from a poem in “Leaves of Grass”, by Walt Whitman. Nor was the short story Ray Bradbury’s first outing for this piece. He originally wrote it as a screenplay for an episode of “The Twilight Zone”, in 1962. Ray Bradbury wrote quite a few episodes for that series. He also often used to adapt his own stories for various types of media, and this one was later adapted again, for a 1982 television movie, “The Electric Grandmother”.
A few days ago, I came across the story yet again, as part of a radio series called “Ray Bradbury’s Tales of the Bizarre”. The author himself delivered a little chatty introduction to each one. This dramtisation came across to me as a little clunky now, so I wondered how it would read on the page (or actually, as an ebook). On the radio it felt a little dated, and very much of the “friendly robot” type of Golden Age Science Fiction, when it was assumed that people would prefer their machines of the future to have a human-like form.
Ray Bradbury prefaced his story on the radio, by saying that the worst thing a parent could ever do, was to die. This sounded as if it were a spoiler, but it describes the situation at the start of the story. The story itself is really a description of how a dysfunctional family manages to heal itself, but disguised with a little of Ray Bradbury’s magical SF tinsel.
It is certainly garbed in the author’s unmistakeable lyrical style:
“Grandma, O dear and wondrous electric dream …
When storm lightnings rove the sky making circuitries amidst the clouds, her name flashes on my inner lid. Sometimes still I hear her ticking, humming above our beds in the gentle dark. She passes like a clock-ghost in the long halls of memory, like a hive of intellectual bees swarming after the Spirit of Summers Lost. Sometimes still I feel the smile I learned from her, printed on my cheek at three in the deep morn …“
This flowing dreamy narrative is completely lost in a radio dramatisation. So is the impression of short, peppered, disjointed sentences, making up the impressions which begin the story.
Tom, Timothy and Agatha have lost their mother. Their father tries to work something out, hiring maids, or live-in teachers, or casual babysitters, but none of them seem to fit in. Finally:
“Let the children live with me! Aunt Clara said. They’d rather kill themselves! Father said.”
Aunt Clara is intolerable! What they need is a grandmother, but as nine-year old Timothy points out, all their grandmothers are dead. But their father has an idea. He shows them a multi-coloured pamphlet, from a firm called ‘Fantoccini’.
““What are ‘Fantoccini’” said Agatha. “It’s an Italian word for shadow puppets, I think, or dream people, said Father.””
The advert proclaimed very grandly, “I Sing the Body Electric!”:
“Fantoccini Ltd. the answer to all your most grievous problems. One Model Only, upon which a thousand times a thousand variations can be added, subtracted, subdivided, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all …
— we have perfected the first humanoid-genre minicircuited, rechargeable AC-DC Mark V
Electrical Grandmother … ”
The pamphlet goes on in a verbose style, and the family decide as a whole that it would be well worth a look around the Fantoccini company showroom, in order to custom build their new grandmother.
The journey there is magical. Only Ray Bradbury could describe the way a helicopter appears, to whisk them into a building full of fantastical objects, creating impressions in all the family which were hard to forget. The children are shown displays of the various physical parts they can choose from, to create their new robotic grandmother. Each takes turns selecting what their grandmother should look like, the colour of her eyes, her hair:
“a thousand harp strands hung in filamentary tapestries like varieties of rain we ran amongst” and even the timbre of her voice.
“And the always flowing river ran its tide to an end and deposited us all on a far shore in the late day …”
Time passed. They waited, and waited:
“All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into ourselves.”
Still they waited.
Their new electric grandmother quickly wins them over, and soon becomes an essential part of the family. Tom, Timothy and their father begin to love her almost immediately, but Agatha remains distant and remote. She rejects the electric grandmother, and does not trust her:
“We’ll never be friends!” said Agatha.
“Never be friends,” said the echo.”
The others cannot understand this: they all adore their new grandmother, who seems so devoted to them:
“And the most peculiar and beautiful and strange and lovely thing was the way she seemed to give complete attention to all of us.
She listened, she really listened to all we said, she knew and remembered every syllable, word, sentence, punctuation, thought, and rambunctious idea.”
And another odd thing is, that she seems to subtly change and adapt to each of them; to make herself more into what they expect her to be.
“it became fascinating for me to watch and try to catch Grandma as she performed her changes, speaking to Agatha and melting her cheekbones to the horse, speaking to Timothy and growing as delicate as a Florentine raven pecking glibly at the air, speaking to me and fusing the hidden plastic stuffs, so I felt Catherine the Great stood there before me …
Hers was a mask that was all mask but only one face for one person at a time. So in crossing a room, having touched one child, on the way, beneath the skin, the wondrous shift went on, and by the time she reached the next child, why, true mother of child she was!”
She even seems to understand Agatha’s continual rejection of her, although it mystifies the rest of the family:
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked.
“Yeah, for cri-yi, she’s nuts,” said Timothy.
“No, she’s afraid,” said Grandma.
“Of you?” I said, blinking.
“Not of me so much as what I might do,” she said.”
As time goes on, the problem slowly becomes clearer.
In a sort of coda, the narrator explains that the electric grandmother stayed for many years, whenever she was needed by any of the family, or their children. We realise that the narrator is Tom, but grown now to be an old man. He remember the final words of the electric grandmother, when she departed:
“When you are very old and gone childish-small again, with childish ways and childish yens and, in need of feeding, make a wish for the old teacher nurse, the dumb yet wise companion, send for me. I will come back. We shall inhabit the nursery again, never fear.”
The story ends wistfully,
Ray Bradbury’s writing is unmistakeable. It has a whimsical quality; it is the shape of dreams. It is strange to think that the story originated in another format, and one which is more basic, in that it does not allow the imagination so much free rein. Perhaps today’s special effects and CGI could create some of the imagery to reflect the author’s words, but at the time he wrote it, the episode would have a very different, a more literal, feel. The subsequent 1982 television movie’s altered title, to the straightforward — and far less imaginative — “The Electric Grandmother”, illustrates this perfectly.
However the content of the story, as opposed to its style, is rather like that of Isaac Asimov, rather than a magical fantasy. The robot in particular reminds the reader very much of Asimov’s robots, and the domestic setting within a family, too is reminiscent of some of his tales. It has no twist, but seems to be a straightforward moral tale, or a tale of personal growth perhaps, set within a rather traditional Science Fiction story. What lifts it above the content, I feel, is the quality of Ray Bradbury’s writing. Even when the content is pedestrian, or rather humdrum, his hypnotic words pull you in.
“All about us in niches and cases, and hung from ceilings on wires and strings were puppets and marionettes, and Balinese kite-bamboo-translucent dolls which, held to the moonlight, might acrobat your most secret nightmares or dreams. In passing, the breeze set up by our bodies stirred the various hung souls on their gibbets. It was like an immense lynching on a holiday at some English crossroads four hundred years before.”
I first read this story many years ago, in a collection of short stories to which it gave its name I Sing the Body Electric!, which was published in 1969. It’s a great title, but one for which Ray Bradbury cannot take the credit, as it comes from a poem in “Leaves of Grass”, by Walt Whitman. Nor was the short story Ray Bradbury’s first outing for this piece. He originally wrote it as a screenplay for an episode of “The Twilight Zone”, in 1962. Ray Bradbury wrote quite a few episodes for that series. He also often used to adapt his own stories for various types of media, and this one was later adapted again, for a 1982 television movie, “The Electric Grandmother”.
A few days ago, I came across the story yet again, as part of a radio series called “Ray Bradbury’s Tales of the Bizarre”. The author himself delivered a little chatty introduction to each one. This dramtisation came across to me as a little clunky now, so I wondered how it would read on the page (or actually, as an ebook). On the radio it felt a little dated, and very much of the “friendly robot” type of Golden Age Science Fiction, when it was assumed that people would prefer their machines of the future to have a human-like form.
Ray Bradbury prefaced his story on the radio, by saying that the worst thing a parent could ever do, was to die. This sounded as if it were a spoiler, but it describes the situation at the start of the story. The story itself is really a description of how a dysfunctional family manages to heal itself, but disguised with a little of Ray Bradbury’s magical SF tinsel.
It is certainly garbed in the author’s unmistakeable lyrical style:
“Grandma, O dear and wondrous electric dream …
When storm lightnings rove the sky making circuitries amidst the clouds, her name flashes on my inner lid. Sometimes still I hear her ticking, humming above our beds in the gentle dark. She passes like a clock-ghost in the long halls of memory, like a hive of intellectual bees swarming after the Spirit of Summers Lost. Sometimes still I feel the smile I learned from her, printed on my cheek at three in the deep morn …“
This flowing dreamy narrative is completely lost in a radio dramatisation. So is the impression of short, peppered, disjointed sentences, making up the impressions which begin the story.
Tom, Timothy and Agatha have lost their mother. Their father tries to work something out, hiring maids, or live-in teachers, or casual babysitters, but none of them seem to fit in. Finally:
“Let the children live with me! Aunt Clara said. They’d rather kill themselves! Father said.”
Aunt Clara is intolerable! What they need is a grandmother, but as nine-year old Timothy points out, all their grandmothers are dead. But their father has an idea. He shows them a multi-coloured pamphlet, from a firm called ‘Fantoccini’.
““What are ‘Fantoccini’” said Agatha. “It’s an Italian word for shadow puppets, I think, or dream people, said Father.””
The advert proclaimed very grandly, “I Sing the Body Electric!”:
“Fantoccini Ltd. the answer to all your most grievous problems. One Model Only, upon which a thousand times a thousand variations can be added, subtracted, subdivided, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all …
— we have perfected the first humanoid-genre minicircuited, rechargeable AC-DC Mark V
Electrical Grandmother … ”
The pamphlet goes on in a verbose style, and the family decide as a whole that it would be well worth a look around the Fantoccini company showroom, in order to custom build their new grandmother.
The journey there is magical. Only Ray Bradbury could describe the way a helicopter appears, to whisk them into a building full of fantastical objects, creating impressions in all the family which were hard to forget. The children are shown displays of the various physical parts they can choose from, to create their new robotic grandmother. Each takes turns selecting what their grandmother should look like, the colour of her eyes, her hair:
“a thousand harp strands hung in filamentary tapestries like varieties of rain we ran amongst” and even the timbre of her voice.
“And the always flowing river ran its tide to an end and deposited us all on a far shore in the late day …”
Time passed. They waited, and waited:
“All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into ourselves.”
Still they waited.
Their new electric grandmother quickly wins them over, and soon becomes an essential part of the family. Tom, Timothy and their father begin to love her almost immediately, but Agatha remains distant and remote. She rejects the electric grandmother, and does not trust her:
“We’ll never be friends!” said Agatha.
“Never be friends,” said the echo.”
The others cannot understand this: they all adore their new grandmother, who seems so devoted to them:
“And the most peculiar and beautiful and strange and lovely thing was the way she seemed to give complete attention to all of us.
She listened, she really listened to all we said, she knew and remembered every syllable, word, sentence, punctuation, thought, and rambunctious idea.”
And another odd thing is, that she seems to subtly change and adapt to each of them; to make herself more into what they expect her to be.
“it became fascinating for me to watch and try to catch Grandma as she performed her changes, speaking to Agatha and melting her cheekbones to the horse, speaking to Timothy and growing as delicate as a Florentine raven pecking glibly at the air, speaking to me and fusing the hidden plastic stuffs, so I felt Catherine the Great stood there before me …
Hers was a mask that was all mask but only one face for one person at a time. So in crossing a room, having touched one child, on the way, beneath the skin, the wondrous shift went on, and by the time she reached the next child, why, true mother of child she was!”
She even seems to understand Agatha’s continual rejection of her, although it mystifies the rest of the family:
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked.
“Yeah, for cri-yi, she’s nuts,” said Timothy.
“No, she’s afraid,” said Grandma.
“Of you?” I said, blinking.
“Not of me so much as what I might do,” she said.”
As time goes on, the problem slowly becomes clearer.
In a sort of coda, the narrator explains that the electric grandmother stayed for many years, whenever she was needed by any of the family, or their children. We realise that the narrator is Tom, but grown now to be an old man. He remember the final words of the electric grandmother, when she departed:
“When you are very old and gone childish-small again, with childish ways and childish yens and, in need of feeding, make a wish for the old teacher nurse, the dumb yet wise companion, send for me. I will come back. We shall inhabit the nursery again, never fear.”
The story ends wistfully,
Ray Bradbury’s writing is unmistakeable. It has a whimsical quality; it is the shape of dreams. It is strange to think that the story originated in another format, and one which is more basic, in that it does not allow the imagination so much free rein. Perhaps today’s special effects and CGI could create some of the imagery to reflect the author’s words, but at the time he wrote it, the episode would have a very different, a more literal, feel. The subsequent 1982 television movie’s altered title, to the straightforward — and far less imaginative — “The Electric Grandmother”, illustrates this perfectly.
However the content of the story, as opposed to its style, is rather like that of Isaac Asimov, rather than a magical fantasy. The robot in particular reminds the reader very much of Asimov’s robots, and the domestic setting within a family, too is reminiscent of some of his tales. It has no twist, but seems to be a straightforward moral tale, or a tale of personal growth perhaps, set within a rather traditional Science Fiction story. What lifts it above the content, I feel, is the quality of Ray Bradbury’s writing. Even when the content is pedestrian, or rather humdrum, his hypnotic words pull you in.
“All about us in niches and cases, and hung from ceilings on wires and strings were puppets and marionettes, and Balinese kite-bamboo-translucent dolls which, held to the moonlight, might acrobat your most secret nightmares or dreams. In passing, the breeze set up by our bodies stirred the various hung souls on their gibbets. It was like an immense lynching on a holiday at some English crossroads four hundred years before.”
May 9, 2015
Imagine a summer that would never end.
Imagine a boy who would never grow up.
Imagine a dog that would live forever.
Imagine a small town, the kind that isn't lived in any more.
Ready? Begin . . .*
This book had been sleeping on my shelf for almost three decades. I was finally prompted to take it down after reading Neil Gaiman's short story The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury.
Yet another instance of one book leading to another in a never-ending chain of wonderments.
Quite honestly, I've read better, more imaginative stories than the tales featured between the pages of this book.
HOWEVER . . .
1. NO ONE is better at capturing the excitement of being young and stepping outdoors on a bright summer morning, taking a deep breath and plunging forward into the magic that awaits.
2. ANYONE looking to learn the craft of writing, and wanting to discover how to create consistently fine, well written fiction, need look no further than Mr. Bradbury's work.
I ran. Dog ran. Up a street, along an alley, around back, we ducked in the ferns by my grandma's house. "Down, boy," I whispered. "Here the Big Event comes, whatever it is!"*
*from Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's is a Friend of Mine
Imagine a boy who would never grow up.
Imagine a dog that would live forever.
Imagine a small town, the kind that isn't lived in any more.
Ready? Begin . . .*
This book had been sleeping on my shelf for almost three decades. I was finally prompted to take it down after reading Neil Gaiman's short story The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury.
Yet another instance of one book leading to another in a never-ending chain of wonderments.
Quite honestly, I've read better, more imaginative stories than the tales featured between the pages of this book.
HOWEVER . . .
1. NO ONE is better at capturing the excitement of being young and stepping outdoors on a bright summer morning, taking a deep breath and plunging forward into the magic that awaits.
2. ANYONE looking to learn the craft of writing, and wanting to discover how to create consistently fine, well written fiction, need look no further than Mr. Bradbury's work.
I ran. Dog ran. Up a street, along an alley, around back, we ducked in the ferns by my grandma's house. "Down, boy," I whispered. "Here the Big Event comes, whatever it is!"*
*from Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's is a Friend of Mine
November 16, 2020
Segundo libro de los cinco que me he propuesto leer del gran Ray Bradbury. Los primeros tres son de cuentos. Los últimos dos, novelas.
Aquí, en "Fantasmas de lo nuevo" y a diferencia de "Las maquinarias de la alegría", sí nos encontramos con un libro de ciencia ficción cargado de relatos sobre el pasado y el futuro. Historias que cruzan dimensiones y que desafían toda ley establecida de la ciencia.
De todos los relatos incluidos en el libro, estos son los que más me gustaron:
En "El invento Kilimanjaro" un hombre posee el poder viajar al pasado en su propia máquina del tiempo, que es un camión, pero que de alguna manera también hace referencia a los libros como otras máquinas para viajar temporalmente.
"El niño de mañana" es un auténtico cuento de ciencia ficción. Una fantástica historia acerca de una mujer que da a luz mediante una máquina de partos a un niño que nace en otra dimensión. Su apariencia es la de una pirámide azul de seis ojos. Imagínense el resto...
En "Viento de Gettysburg" un hombre asesina por segunda vez a Abraham Lincoln. A un robot de Abraham Lincoln.
En el cuento "Llamada nocturna", alguien llama por teléfono a Barton, un hombre de ochenta años que está solo en una casa vacía en el vacío planeta Marte. Es el 20 de julio de 2097 y el que llama es Barton, pero de veinte años. La conversación, imposible, se transformará en un contrapunto épico a partir de las siguientes llamadas. El sorprendente final conjuga buenas dosis de ciencia ficción, suspenso y originalidad, ya que es el mejor cuento del libro.
En "Canto al cuerpo eléctrico" una abuela robot le cambiará la vida a una familia demostrando que no siempre la tecnología es fría.
"Los amigos de Nicholas Nickleby" es un homenaje a Charles Dickens. Esta historia fantástica transcurre en 1929. Allí, un chico se cruza con el genial autor para ayudarlo a escribir la novela "Historia de dos ciudades".
Durante el cuento "La ciudad perdida de Arte", Bradbury hace lo que mejor le sale: crear increíbles mundos de ciencia ficción y complicar la situación de los seres humanos en el famoso planeta rojo.
Ha sido una muy grata lectura. Ahora vamos por "El país de octubre".
Aquí, en "Fantasmas de lo nuevo" y a diferencia de "Las maquinarias de la alegría", sí nos encontramos con un libro de ciencia ficción cargado de relatos sobre el pasado y el futuro. Historias que cruzan dimensiones y que desafían toda ley establecida de la ciencia.
De todos los relatos incluidos en el libro, estos son los que más me gustaron:
En "El invento Kilimanjaro" un hombre posee el poder viajar al pasado en su propia máquina del tiempo, que es un camión, pero que de alguna manera también hace referencia a los libros como otras máquinas para viajar temporalmente.
"El niño de mañana" es un auténtico cuento de ciencia ficción. Una fantástica historia acerca de una mujer que da a luz mediante una máquina de partos a un niño que nace en otra dimensión. Su apariencia es la de una pirámide azul de seis ojos. Imagínense el resto...
En "Viento de Gettysburg" un hombre asesina por segunda vez a Abraham Lincoln. A un robot de Abraham Lincoln.
En el cuento "Llamada nocturna", alguien llama por teléfono a Barton, un hombre de ochenta años que está solo en una casa vacía en el vacío planeta Marte. Es el 20 de julio de 2097 y el que llama es Barton, pero de veinte años. La conversación, imposible, se transformará en un contrapunto épico a partir de las siguientes llamadas. El sorprendente final conjuga buenas dosis de ciencia ficción, suspenso y originalidad, ya que es el mejor cuento del libro.
En "Canto al cuerpo eléctrico" una abuela robot le cambiará la vida a una familia demostrando que no siempre la tecnología es fría.
"Los amigos de Nicholas Nickleby" es un homenaje a Charles Dickens. Esta historia fantástica transcurre en 1929. Allí, un chico se cruza con el genial autor para ayudarlo a escribir la novela "Historia de dos ciudades".
Durante el cuento "La ciudad perdida de Arte", Bradbury hace lo que mejor le sale: crear increíbles mundos de ciencia ficción y complicar la situación de los seres humanos en el famoso planeta rojo.
Ha sido una muy grata lectura. Ahora vamos por "El país de octubre".
May 24, 2021
Collection of 29 short stories named after a line in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It is also the title of one of the stories. It is a combination of science fiction, fantasy, and realistic fiction. These stories are creative, including such topics as an alternate history of Lincoln’s assassination involving a robot, a family who buys an “electric grandmother” (precursor to artificial intelligence of today) to take care of house and children, and a man who stays to watch over Great Britain after the population relocates to a warmer climate. I particularly enjoy the way the author handles endings. Even in a story of few words, there is a sense of closure. This is one of the better collections of short stories I have read.
My favorites are:
"The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place” – a group of men are about to burn the house of a prosperous couple during “The Troubles.” The elderly, disoriented owner, whom they call His Lordship, asks them to spare his artwork. I will not spoil it, but the ending is priceless.
"Tomorrow's Child" – a woman gives birth to a child in the shape of a blue pyramid. His parents ask doctors to figure out if there is a way to reshape him into the form of a human baby. In the end they must make a difficult decision.
“Night Call, Collect” – a eighty-year-old man is stranded alone on Mars. Many years ago, he recorded his voice so he could call himself later and not feel so lonely. The ending can be interpreted in a couple different ways.
My favorites are:
"The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place” – a group of men are about to burn the house of a prosperous couple during “The Troubles.” The elderly, disoriented owner, whom they call His Lordship, asks them to spare his artwork. I will not spoil it, but the ending is priceless.
"Tomorrow's Child" – a woman gives birth to a child in the shape of a blue pyramid. His parents ask doctors to figure out if there is a way to reshape him into the form of a human baby. In the end they must make a difficult decision.
“Night Call, Collect” – a eighty-year-old man is stranded alone on Mars. Many years ago, he recorded his voice so he could call himself later and not feel so lonely. The ending can be interpreted in a couple different ways.
February 12, 2021
I Sing the Body Electric is certainly underrated when it comes to The Martian Chronicles, Golden Apples of the Sun, and The Illustrated Man. I found this collection of stories serves as a shinning testament to Bradbury’s breadth of storytelling.
I’m familiar with the title story, having watched it first as Twilight Zone episode adapted for television, but reading it through Bradbury’s prose style brought certain characters and other moral insights to life for me in new ways. This story is probably the most beautifully written of the entire collection.
Heavy-Set—a bizarre story about a mother and her grown son who still live together really surprised me as I’ve never read any psychological/horror with sexual undertones by Bradbury before. Nevertheless, I thought he executed this sort of existential trap that exists between the mother and son in such a tense, yet brilliantly haunting way. (Trust me, you'll just have to read it for yourself.)
All of these stories hold a heavy theme of perception vs. reality. The close third-person narration allows us to understand how the story the narrator tells is always somewhat insulated from reality, but, of course, with Bradbury, there’s always more to the text than what’s on the page. The characters often experience delusion by their own loss of objectivity in a world only slightly blurred from reality. This subtle shift is what gives Bradbury’s writing a SFF feel, as it’s not a total departure from reality, but just enough to give you goosebumps.
As always, Bradbury’s beautiful prose-poetry is the complete package, layered with rich, moral insights and enough nostalgia to make you weep.
May 24, 2017
Normally I find Bradbury a quaint and light read - something I can easily fly through and admire his imagination. For whatever reason, though, this time around I found him exhausting and tedious.
There's a terrible stagnancy in Bradbury's fiction. It seems he's always yearning for his past, and his future always seems to be some sort of recreation of the small mid-West town ideology that he remembers from his childhood.
And while he is conscious of the nuclear standoffs of his Cold War era, he seems deaf to other contemporary social elements. There was so much going on when he wrote this - the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, Hippies, Woodstock, and on and on. Yet, none of that really shows in these stories.
For instance, most of this was written in the late 60s and early 70s, yet he referred to a guy a K-K-Kenneth, and it had nothing to do with the Klu Klux Klan. In another you had a guy rambling about a holocaust with imagery of burning in ovens - yet he wasn't talking about the Jewish Holocaust of WWII.
It's just a curious, out-of-touch-with-modern-society feeling that I've noticed with him over and over again and the more I read by him, the stronger that feeling grows.
(I've still got one small anthology, one huge omnibus, and his mystery trilogy left to go... I'm really wishing I hadn't bought a big stockpile that day when it was on sale.)
There's a terrible stagnancy in Bradbury's fiction. It seems he's always yearning for his past, and his future always seems to be some sort of recreation of the small mid-West town ideology that he remembers from his childhood.
And while he is conscious of the nuclear standoffs of his Cold War era, he seems deaf to other contemporary social elements. There was so much going on when he wrote this - the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, Hippies, Woodstock, and on and on. Yet, none of that really shows in these stories.
For instance, most of this was written in the late 60s and early 70s, yet he referred to a guy a K-K-Kenneth, and it had nothing to do with the Klu Klux Klan. In another you had a guy rambling about a holocaust with imagery of burning in ovens - yet he wasn't talking about the Jewish Holocaust of WWII.
It's just a curious, out-of-touch-with-modern-society feeling that I've noticed with him over and over again and the more I read by him, the stronger that feeling grows.
(I've still got one small anthology, one huge omnibus, and his mystery trilogy left to go... I'm really wishing I hadn't bought a big stockpile that day when it was on sale.)
May 30, 2019
He leído prácticamente todas las antologías de Bradbury y me siento con autoridad para decir que esta es una de las mejores. Para mí está al nivel de
El hombre ilustrado
e incluso de
Crónicas marcianas
aunque la gran colección sigue siendo, sin discusión,
El país de octubre
. Al menos hasta que llegue el día en que las relea todas, porque lo cierto es que me he quedado sin libros de Bradbury en la biblioteca.
La nostalgia y la poesía corren como ríos de oro por las páginas del autor estadounidense. En ellas nos asomamos a un verano que es tal vez el último verano, eco de todos los que fueron, y un hechizo nos hace olvidar, olvidar y retroceder, para vivirlo una vez más como ese niño de doce años que un día fuimos y que siempre ha permanecido en nosotros.
Todos los cuentos de esta colección son maravillosos, a excepción de un par "solo" muy buenos. La plegaria final no me ha parecido un cierre acertado, aunque sí coherente. Imprescindible.
La nostalgia y la poesía corren como ríos de oro por las páginas del autor estadounidense. En ellas nos asomamos a un verano que es tal vez el último verano, eco de todos los que fueron, y un hechizo nos hace olvidar, olvidar y retroceder, para vivirlo una vez más como ese niño de doce años que un día fuimos y que siempre ha permanecido en nosotros.
Todos los cuentos de esta colección son maravillosos, a excepción de un par "solo" muy buenos. La plegaria final no me ha parecido un cierre acertado, aunque sí coherente. Imprescindible.
October 14, 2019
Some great stories, but he has better collections. Start with R is for Rocket, or Golden Apples of the Sun, or October Country, or Dandelion Wine, or Illustrated Man...
June 12, 2008
In some random article, I once read the phrase "as lonely as a Bradbury protagonist," and after reading this, I couldn't echo that sentiment more. "I Sing the Body..." is a collection of twenty-eight stories that conceptually fall all over the fictional map. There's bi-dimensional babies, Martian messiahs, present-day apparitions of literary and historical figures, and robots in every shape and form. These stories explore what it is to be human, lonely, afraid, excited, and hopeful. In their shared solitude and existential wonderment, these protagonists are all alike.
Bradbury casts his characters in adverse and bleak environments, but avoids depressing narrative, instead endowing them with curiosity and excitability. However, some of the settings are so wretched and perplexing that you feel like he's giving you a window to cruel psychological experiments. He toys with his characters in multifarious ways, and offers them their greatest desires, only to deny them their rewards and watch them squirm in agony.
Not all of these stories are dark, though. Bradbury illuminates longing, love, and loneliness with sprightly and hopeful prose. Perhaps this is the book's value: you're made to sympathize, discover, and cry for fulfillment alongside the characters in these stories without getting too attached and despondent yourself. This lightheartedness can make the book droll from time to time, as most of the stories have similar characters who react in similar ways to problems.
"I Sing The Body Electric" is an enjoyable, sometimes miry collection by a monster author who has a gift for evocative and driving prose.
Bradbury casts his characters in adverse and bleak environments, but avoids depressing narrative, instead endowing them with curiosity and excitability. However, some of the settings are so wretched and perplexing that you feel like he's giving you a window to cruel psychological experiments. He toys with his characters in multifarious ways, and offers them their greatest desires, only to deny them their rewards and watch them squirm in agony.
Not all of these stories are dark, though. Bradbury illuminates longing, love, and loneliness with sprightly and hopeful prose. Perhaps this is the book's value: you're made to sympathize, discover, and cry for fulfillment alongside the characters in these stories without getting too attached and despondent yourself. This lightheartedness can make the book droll from time to time, as most of the stories have similar characters who react in similar ways to problems.
"I Sing The Body Electric" is an enjoyable, sometimes miry collection by a monster author who has a gift for evocative and driving prose.
July 25, 2012
Once upon a time I seemed to be involved in a regular Golden Age science fiction orgy. Bradbury, Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Silverberg....the lot. That took me from pre-teens all the way through college. I still read SF, but not in the quantities that I did. It's a shame, really, I had forgotten how much I really loved Ray Bradbury. Digging into this short story collection for my Birth Year Challenge was absolutely delightful. I got to enjoy the title story all over again (I'd read it many moons ago). I love Bradbury's use of language and his way of using SF situations to describe the emotions of now. Whether that "now" be when the stories were actually written or the now of 2010. He absolutely captures the human condition whether he's showing the future humans on Earth or humans on Mars or humans in space. Four and 1/2 stars out Five.
How could I not love the writing of a man who gives us this?
"What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we dared to hope or dream..." (from the title story)
Or, less philosophical, but entirely delightful:
"Out of the ditch, we unloaded ourselves into a great Buck-a-Night Bungalow Court in a murderers' ambush behind a wood and on the rim of a deep rock-quarry where our bodies might be found years later at the bottom of a lost and sourceless lake, and spent the night counting the rain that leaked through the shingle-sieve roof and fighting over who had the most covers on the wrong side of the bed. (from "The Inspired Chicken Motel")
I'm glad the Challenge gave me the chance to read Bradbury again. I won't wait so long to do it again.
This review was first posted on my blog My Reader's Block. Please request permission before reposting. Thanks.
How could I not love the writing of a man who gives us this?
"What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we dared to hope or dream..." (from the title story)
Or, less philosophical, but entirely delightful:
"Out of the ditch, we unloaded ourselves into a great Buck-a-Night Bungalow Court in a murderers' ambush behind a wood and on the rim of a deep rock-quarry where our bodies might be found years later at the bottom of a lost and sourceless lake, and spent the night counting the rain that leaked through the shingle-sieve roof and fighting over who had the most covers on the wrong side of the bed. (from "The Inspired Chicken Motel")
I'm glad the Challenge gave me the chance to read Bradbury again. I won't wait so long to do it again.
This review was first posted on my blog My Reader's Block. Please request permission before reposting. Thanks.
February 6, 2017
I really enjoyed this compilation. I found 2 of my new favorite pieces. Since there are too many stories for me to review, I will simply rate the stories. I would definitely recommend this book for Bradbury fans. Even if you're not a Bradbury fan, you should still read it.
"The Kilimanjaro Device" ***
"The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place" ***
"Tomorrow's Child" ***
"The Women" ****
"The Inspired Chicken Motel" **
"Downwind from Gettysburg" *** 1/2
"Yes, We'll Gather at the River" ** 1/2
"The Cold Wind and the Warm" ***
"Night Call, Collect" ****
"The Haunting of the New" *****
"I Sing the Body Electric!" ***
"The Tombling Day" **
"Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine" ***
"Heavy Set" ** 1/2
"The Man in the Rorschach Shirt" ***
"Henry the Ninth" ***
"The Lost City of Mars" *** 1/2
"The Blue Bottle" **
"One Timeless Spring" ***
"The Parrot Who Met Papa" ***
"The Burning Man" **
"A Piece of Wood" *** 1/2
"The Messiah" **
"G.B.S. Mark V" *** 1/2
"The Utterly Perfect Murder" ** 1/2
"Punishment Without Crime" **
"Getting Through Sunday Somehow" ***
"Drink Entire: Against the Madness of the Crowd" ***
"Christus Apollo" *****
"The Kilimanjaro Device" ***
"The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place" ***
"Tomorrow's Child" ***
"The Women" ****
"The Inspired Chicken Motel" **
"Downwind from Gettysburg" *** 1/2
"Yes, We'll Gather at the River" ** 1/2
"The Cold Wind and the Warm" ***
"Night Call, Collect" ****
"The Haunting of the New" *****
"I Sing the Body Electric!" ***
"The Tombling Day" **
"Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine" ***
"Heavy Set" ** 1/2
"The Man in the Rorschach Shirt" ***
"Henry the Ninth" ***
"The Lost City of Mars" *** 1/2
"The Blue Bottle" **
"One Timeless Spring" ***
"The Parrot Who Met Papa" ***
"The Burning Man" **
"A Piece of Wood" *** 1/2
"The Messiah" **
"G.B.S. Mark V" *** 1/2
"The Utterly Perfect Murder" ** 1/2
"Punishment Without Crime" **
"Getting Through Sunday Somehow" ***
"Drink Entire: Against the Madness of the Crowd" ***
"Christus Apollo" *****
November 12, 2017
All that gorgeous language disguises some serious flaws. Namely: 1. Narrator, men, boys, and robots all have that same flights of fancy speech style, while women and girls are too weak and/or wily, 2. characters are indistinguishable from one another, only known by their roles, 3. Science & numbers are ridiculous, and 4. ideas, when stripped of language and summed, are simple. A two-star book, really... but oh that language.
March 10, 2021
Several stories in this collection, including the first few, are just so-so. They feel like the work of a writer whose name alone is a steady gig, who knows he's above average and that's good enough. But oh boy do they start getting genuinely good - round about story 4, 'The Women', I began to be more than passingly entertained. The table of contents conforms pretty closely to the shape of a normal distribution in quality, with the titular story near the center peak. Bradbury's ideas, command and careful deployment of eclectic language, sudden glimpses into characters... when they all land in the same story, it's gold.
Bradbury is primarily known as a science fiction writer; what surprised me most about this collection is how much his short fiction turns on the numinous - shifts in the indefinable spirit of a person or place or reality itself - rather than on futurism, engineering, or political machination, even when these are present.
Were I ever to make a "favorite 100 short fiction" anthology, titles from this collection would be in the running.
Bradbury is primarily known as a science fiction writer; what surprised me most about this collection is how much his short fiction turns on the numinous - shifts in the indefinable spirit of a person or place or reality itself - rather than on futurism, engineering, or political machination, even when these are present.
Were I ever to make a "favorite 100 short fiction" anthology, titles from this collection would be in the running.
November 5, 2016
Bradbury at his best combines nostalgia and creepiness in a tone reminiscent of the old Twilight Zone TV series. At his worst his prose is florid and purple with just enough misogyny to make reading him very uncomfortable. The writers of Mad Men must have grown up on Bradbury's fiction because all his men tend to have a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other and take no guff from their women who are silly and hysterical and often need a good slap.
There are some good examples of Bradbury's short fiction in this collection. Heavy-Set is a genuinely creepy tale of a socially awkward loner that offers no solutions. Yes, We'll Gather at the River captures the fatalism of a dying small town. The strongest of the collection may be Night Call, Collect in which a bored twenty year man plays an extremely cruel joke on his future seventy year old self.
Bradbury's misogyny is on display in several stories. Tomorrow's Child features a bad mother who becomes a hysterical alcoholic after giving birth to a mutant child and has to be slapped back to her senses by her husband. The Haunting of the New has a wealthy socialite rejected by her new house for having lived too promiscuous a life. The main character of The Tombling Day is an extremely vain old woman who envies the dead because they never age and become unattractive. In The Lost City of Mars a poet repeatedly kills himself in a simulator to escape from his hated wife. The only positive female character in the collection is the Grandmother in the title story, and she is a female robot who has to care for the most angry and bitter little girl in fiction.
While Bradbury uses the Walt Whitman quote "I sing the body electric!" just as a way of referring to a robot, he actually tries to use Whitman's literary cataloging technique in a few of his stories and the results are tough. The title story as well as Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine include cataloging rambles that come across as self-consciously literary and pretentious. I find myself wishing Bradbury had followed the example of Thomas Wolfe would used the technique so well in his novels.
I have criticized the collection quite a bit, but there is material here worth reading. If you enjoy creepy nostalgia you will enjoy Bradbury, even though you have to put up with his excesses.
There are some good examples of Bradbury's short fiction in this collection. Heavy-Set is a genuinely creepy tale of a socially awkward loner that offers no solutions. Yes, We'll Gather at the River captures the fatalism of a dying small town. The strongest of the collection may be Night Call, Collect in which a bored twenty year man plays an extremely cruel joke on his future seventy year old self.
Bradbury's misogyny is on display in several stories. Tomorrow's Child features a bad mother who becomes a hysterical alcoholic after giving birth to a mutant child and has to be slapped back to her senses by her husband. The Haunting of the New has a wealthy socialite rejected by her new house for having lived too promiscuous a life. The main character of The Tombling Day is an extremely vain old woman who envies the dead because they never age and become unattractive. In The Lost City of Mars a poet repeatedly kills himself in a simulator to escape from his hated wife. The only positive female character in the collection is the Grandmother in the title story, and she is a female robot who has to care for the most angry and bitter little girl in fiction.
While Bradbury uses the Walt Whitman quote "I sing the body electric!" just as a way of referring to a robot, he actually tries to use Whitman's literary cataloging technique in a few of his stories and the results are tough. The title story as well as Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine include cataloging rambles that come across as self-consciously literary and pretentious. I find myself wishing Bradbury had followed the example of Thomas Wolfe would used the technique so well in his novels.
I have criticized the collection quite a bit, but there is material here worth reading. If you enjoy creepy nostalgia you will enjoy Bradbury, even though you have to put up with his excesses.
April 30, 2019
This anthology of short stories was pretty uneven in my opinion. There were some great highs, and some really bad lows, and quite a lot of "meh". In fact, I think this would have been a much stronger anthology if there were 8-10 LESS "meh" short stories in it. I think some of these were simply included because Bradbury had written them at some point and they hadn't been in a collection yet and they needed to hit a page count. I could be wrong, but it certainly felt that way to me.
I know many of these stories were written in the 60s or earlier, but some of them REALLY did not age well and the misogyny is a little hard to overlook in some of these, particularly the one about the interdimensional baby - Tomorrow's Child I think.
I did particularly enjoy though the stories in here that were in part tributes to other writers, especially the two that revolved around Hemingway. The first story in the collection, The Kilimanjaro Device I thought was particularly good and a strong start to the collection. Unfortunately, for my taste this was followed up by quite a bit of "meh" and a few downright unenjoyable stories. Bradbury is a classic and his writing is phenomenal, but I don't think this collection showcases his work particularly well.
I know many of these stories were written in the 60s or earlier, but some of them REALLY did not age well and the misogyny is a little hard to overlook in some of these, particularly the one about the interdimensional baby - Tomorrow's Child I think.
I did particularly enjoy though the stories in here that were in part tributes to other writers, especially the two that revolved around Hemingway. The first story in the collection, The Kilimanjaro Device I thought was particularly good and a strong start to the collection. Unfortunately, for my taste this was followed up by quite a bit of "meh" and a few downright unenjoyable stories. Bradbury is a classic and his writing is phenomenal, but I don't think this collection showcases his work particularly well.
March 29, 2013
I read this as a teen. And now that I've re-read, I'm thinking about the things I missed when I was young, the nuance and the subtext...must reread everything! Anyway, this is probably his most literary collection of stores. It was published in 1969 but some of the stories are older than that, but this is really a timeless set of fictional parables, poems and ruminations. I would still tell any teenager to read it and fall into its worlds.
I was lucky enough to see Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen on stage a few years ago at the LA Times Festival of Books. It was a great discussion.
I was lucky enough to see Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen on stage a few years ago at the LA Times Festival of Books. It was a great discussion.
February 10, 2017
Not every story hits, but those that do are true classics of dark, fantastical, and general literature, especially "Tomorrow's Child," "Night Call, Collect," "The Lost City of Mars," "The Burning Man," "The Blue Bottle," "The Parrot Who Met Papa," "A Piece of Wood," "Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds," "Punishment Without Crime," and especially "Heavy-Set," which is one of my favorite short stories in all of written history.
Few writers in the English language are more talented, imaginative, influential, and important than Ray Bradbury.
Few writers in the English language are more talented, imaginative, influential, and important than Ray Bradbury.
May 9, 2016
The stories in this collection are hit and miss, more misses for me than hits... Bradbury was always a weird writer for me. Here, I either understood everything he said in a story, or was so baffled that I had to skip a story because I just couldn't put the words together to a narrative I can actually grasp. I did love couple of the stories, like "The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place", "Night Call, Collect" and "Punishment Without Crime". The title story is also quite decent.
October 17, 2017
If you enjoy Ray Bradbury's inimical style of writing, you'll enjoy this collection of stories. Some are not particularly memorable and many are. I've seen a couple of different editions that list different stories. The version I read included a number of stories that I had read before, nearly all of the stories in the second half or final third of the book, published elsewhere -perhaps in The Martian Chronicles, or The Illustrated Man, or Dandelion Wine. It was a pleasure to revisit them, to enjoy Bradbury's prose.
These are the stories in my version:
"The Kilimanjaro Device"
"The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place"
"Tomorrow's Child"
"The Women"
"The Inspired Chicken Motel"
"Downwind from Gettysburg"
"Yes, We'll Gather at the River"
"The Cold Wind and the Warm"
"Night Call, Collect"
"The Haunting of the New"
"I Sing the Body Electric!"
"The Tombling Day"
"Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine"
"Heavy-Set"
"The Man in the Rorschach Shirt"
"Henry the Ninth"
"The Lost City of Mars"
"The Blue Bottle"
"One Timeless Spring"
"The Parrot Who Met Papa"
"The Burning Man"
"A Piece of Wood"
"The Messiah"
"G.B.S.-Mark V"
"The Utterly Perfect Murder"
"Punishment Without Crime"
"Getting Through Sunday Somehow"
"Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds"
"Christus Apollo"
These are the stories in my version:
"The Kilimanjaro Device"
"The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place"
"Tomorrow's Child"
"The Women"
"The Inspired Chicken Motel"
"Downwind from Gettysburg"
"Yes, We'll Gather at the River"
"The Cold Wind and the Warm"
"Night Call, Collect"
"The Haunting of the New"
"I Sing the Body Electric!"
"The Tombling Day"
"Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine"
"Heavy-Set"
"The Man in the Rorschach Shirt"
"Henry the Ninth"
"The Lost City of Mars"
"The Blue Bottle"
"One Timeless Spring"
"The Parrot Who Met Papa"
"The Burning Man"
"A Piece of Wood"
"The Messiah"
"G.B.S.-Mark V"
"The Utterly Perfect Murder"
"Punishment Without Crime"
"Getting Through Sunday Somehow"
"Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds"
"Christus Apollo"
September 8, 2017
I haven't read Ray Bradbury since high school so I was pleasantly surprised. This was far more optimistic and almost celebratory than I expected. Having checked out the Walt Whitman poem that he drew inspiration from I can definitely see the ties. Overall an enjoyable read.
September 24, 2023
If a short story collection can make me tear up I know it was a good one ❤
November 7, 2008
If you like Ray Bradbury in general, this is an awesome collection of weird little short stories. If you don't know him, this is an excellent book to use to get acquainted with him.
The stories in I Sing the Body Electric were so varied. I enjoyed all the little vignettes of futuristic sci-fi and alternate universes. The sampling is so wide that no two stories can be tied together. They range from fantastic (The Lost City of Mars) to scary (Night Call, Collect) to just plain weird (Tomorrow's Child). They taught me a lot about the boundaries (or lack thereof) in science fiction writing.
Bradbury's narratives make me want to sit and savor the words, drink them up, roll them over my tongue a hundred times. His characters aren't exactly deep in these stories, mostly two-dimensional people, but they are all unique, colorful, memorable.
It is in description that Bradbury really excels, but in my humble opinion, every other aspect of his craft is quite impressive as well. I underlined so many tasty phrases in this book. Thank goodness I had my own copy.
The stories in I Sing the Body Electric were so varied. I enjoyed all the little vignettes of futuristic sci-fi and alternate universes. The sampling is so wide that no two stories can be tied together. They range from fantastic (The Lost City of Mars) to scary (Night Call, Collect) to just plain weird (Tomorrow's Child). They taught me a lot about the boundaries (or lack thereof) in science fiction writing.
Bradbury's narratives make me want to sit and savor the words, drink them up, roll them over my tongue a hundred times. His characters aren't exactly deep in these stories, mostly two-dimensional people, but they are all unique, colorful, memorable.
It is in description that Bradbury really excels, but in my humble opinion, every other aspect of his craft is quite impressive as well. I underlined so many tasty phrases in this book. Thank goodness I had my own copy.
January 11, 2016
I thought I would love this book but, as it's often the case with short story collections, it's pretty irregular. Tomorrow's Child, Heavy-Set, The Lost City of Mars and the title story are above average while stories such as The Inspired Chicken Motel and Henry the Ninth are not that successful. Still an interesting example of fiction that reaches beyond the sci-fi genre.
October 12, 2017
A really good collection of short stories. I think my favorite is Tomorrow's Child for all its quirkiness.
August 18, 2016
Това е чиста проба поезия в проза!
April 5, 2024
Bradbury’s fiction treads the fine line between fantasy and reality. what struck me most was the sublime ease with which he weaves his worlds and narratives, as if they always existed and he simply laid them bare for the reader to see. The unreal or fantastical is no more extraordinary than the mundane, and this in itself is wondrous. Without trumpets or fanfare, Bradbury can transport you to Mars, birth an electric grandmother, resurrect Charles Dickens, and so much more. I’ve waited long enough to read his work, and I’m glad so much of it awaits me.
Favorite stories: Tomorrow’s Child, The Inspired Chicken Motel, Night Call, Collect, I Sing the Body Electric!, Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine, The Lost City of Mars
The Inspired Chicken Motel -
“I mean, any family that has a proper disrespect, each for the other, can stay together. As long as there is something to fight about, people will come to meals. Lose that and the family disintegrates.”
“Any face like that, with so much loss in it, when it finds something to hold and look at, how can you help but pay attention?”
The Haunting of the New -
“I hit forty, forty has hit me, like a locomotive.”
I Sing the Body Electric! -
“All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into our-selves.”
“What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we had dared to hope or dream...”
Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine:
“Oh, it’s a fierce awful time of night. A long way back to sunset, and ten thousand miles on to dawn. We have need of friends then.”
“I’m a man who could never fit his dream.”
Favorite stories: Tomorrow’s Child, The Inspired Chicken Motel, Night Call, Collect, I Sing the Body Electric!, Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine, The Lost City of Mars
The Inspired Chicken Motel -
“I mean, any family that has a proper disrespect, each for the other, can stay together. As long as there is something to fight about, people will come to meals. Lose that and the family disintegrates.”
“Any face like that, with so much loss in it, when it finds something to hold and look at, how can you help but pay attention?”
The Haunting of the New -
“I hit forty, forty has hit me, like a locomotive.”
I Sing the Body Electric! -
“All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into our-selves.”
“What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we had dared to hope or dream...”
Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine:
“Oh, it’s a fierce awful time of night. A long way back to sunset, and ten thousand miles on to dawn. We have need of friends then.”
“I’m a man who could never fit his dream.”
September 9, 2017
2.5 stars
This one brought up interesting thoughts of how we relate to and trust those who we see as similar to us. And what could be more similar than to have a robotic grandmother literally reassembling herself to look like you?
I liked the action of the robot assembly and discovery, but then the overly philosophical child psych parts became a bit tedious. The tone also felt flippant when the robot was like "Oh your mom just died. Obviously I just need to show you that I'm a robot who can never die so you'll trust me." It made the grief seem really textbook and not relatable or heartfelt.
The discussion about what makes a machine evil or wonderful was really intriguing to me, but it was much more “tell” than “show”. I almost wish we could have seen more of the Grandmother proving how machines were a reflection of their creators. I really loved the idea that the Grandmothers were literally referred to as the shadows and puppets of their creators and users. There was a lot of great imagery and metaphor within that.
This one brought up interesting thoughts of how we relate to and trust those who we see as similar to us. And what could be more similar than to have a robotic grandmother literally reassembling herself to look like you?
I liked the action of the robot assembly and discovery, but then the overly philosophical child psych parts became a bit tedious. The tone also felt flippant when the robot was like "Oh your mom just died. Obviously I just need to show you that I'm a robot who can never die so you'll trust me." It made the grief seem really textbook and not relatable or heartfelt.
The discussion about what makes a machine evil or wonderful was really intriguing to me, but it was much more “tell” than “show”. I almost wish we could have seen more of the Grandmother proving how machines were a reflection of their creators. I really loved the idea that the Grandmothers were literally referred to as the shadows and puppets of their creators and users. There was a lot of great imagery and metaphor within that.
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