inverarity | Entries tagged with ray bradbury

Two boys save their town from Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show.

William Morrow, 1962, 293 pages

Few American novels written this century have endured in the heart and mind as has this one - Ray Bradbury's incomparable masterwork of the dark fantastic.

A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. And two inquisitive boys standing precariously on the brink of adulthood will soon discover the secret of the satanic raree-show's smoke, mazes, and mirrors, as they learn all too well the heavy cost of wishes - and the stuff of nightmare.

( Every Bradbury story is set in Green Town. )

Also by Ray Bradbury: My reviews of The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles.

My complete list of book reviews.

Colonialism on another planet: haunting, lyrical, and cranky.

Bantam/Spectra, 1950, 181 pages

Leaving behind a world on the brink of destruction, man came to the red planet and found the Martians waiting, dreamlike. Seeking the promise of a new beginning, man brought with him his oldest fears and his deepest desires. Man conquered Mars - and in that instant, Mars conquered him. The strange new world with its ancient, dying race and vast, red-gold deserts cast a spell on him, settled into his dreams, and changed him forever. Here are the captivating chronicles of man and Mars, the modern classic by the peerless Ray Bradbury.

( Earthmen ruin everything. )

Verdict: A sci-fi classic every science fiction fan should read at least once. The Martian Chronicles is not an epic or even a series of adventures; it's Ray Bradbury musing about how Earthmen ruin everything, and intentionally or unintentionally saying a lot about cultural imperialism and colonization. Fine prose almost makes up for its flat vision of a future ruled by unimaginative, homogeneous men from Green Bluff.

Also by Ray Bradbury: My review of The Illustrated Man.

My complete list of book reviews.

I reviewed Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man a couple weeks ago and said it didn't really age well. I just watched the 1969 movie on Netflix and... boy, did it not age well.

The movie depicts three of the eighteen short stories from Bradbury's book: "The Veldt," "The Long Rain," and "The Last Night of the World."

Rod Steiger's hammy scene-chewing and the atrocious acting of all the other actors was bad enough (it seemed like the camera lingered on everyone's face just long enough for them read a cue card and change expressions), but science fiction movies from the 60s and 70s all seem to have this trippy aesthetic that makes them laugh out loud funny. Fifties and Eighties sci-fi also bears the cheesy signs of their respective eras, but the late 60s and early 70s was just The Time That Taste Forgot. Everyone wears shiny jumpsuits and plastic boots, living rooms look like the inside of a public restroom, and all the special effects are buzzing synthesizer hums.

Not recommended, not bad enough or funny enough even to be worth MST3King.

( Alexandra Quick update )

I read a lot of classic sci-fi growing up: Edgar Rice Burroughs, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, and so on. But there are a lot of big names that I've neglected, so when Audible ran one of their sales recently, I took the opportunity to download a few classics by authors I hadn't read much.