Mini-Review: Ray Bradbury, Master of the Short Story

[bibliogramma]

The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury

One of several re-reading projects I've been meaning to get around to is the short fiction of Ray Bradbury. This is the first collection I've gone back to, and after two, maybe even three decades since my last reading, it's amazing how many of these stories are ones I remember, and at the same time, ones that I get thrills and chills about all over again as if I'd never read them before.

It's a powerful collection, containing such stories as: "The Veldt" (children turn on their parents using the technology of a simulated playground), "The Other Foot" (the reaction of a Martian colony of black people driven off earth to the news that most of the remaining white people on earth have died in a world war and the survivors desperately need their help), "The Rocket Man" (a child and his mother deal with the danders faced by his father's career as a 'rocket man'), and "The Exiles" (what happens to the spirits of books and their creators when all the books are destroyed?), to mention just a few of the 18 classic short stories in this collection.

Bradbury's gift was to be able to write just enough, no more and no less, that each story was complete and full to the brim - nothing wasted, nothing missing - and to tell in this way a simple story that somehow had meaning and relevance far beyond the basic plot of the tale. A master storyteller.