Two by Bradbury

[bibliogramma]

The Martian Chronicles
Something Wicked This Way Comes

I've been re-reading a lot of Ray Bradbury's work recently - mostly his collections of short stories, which are without question among the finest examples of the craft of the short form.

The Martian Chronicles, like several other of Bradbury's collections, seems to tell a story - overtly, about the human attempts to colonise Mars - but each story in and of itself speaks to elements of the human condition, from hope and joy to hate, suppression and fear. Re-reading the stories in this volume was like a master class in the art of distilling human existence in all its rich variety into a few pages full of words and images.

I was not as pleasantly occupied by my reading of Something Wicked This Way Comes. I don't remember reading this novel before, and I doubt that I will return to it as I have to his short stories or his classic novel Fahrenheit 451. Something Wicked This Way Comes feels like a potentially great short story drawn out to lengths that the material simply doesn't sustain. And in the drawing out, it accentuates one of the great flaws on Bradbury's work - the idea that only boys and men can have wonderful adventures and fight the great struggles against the dark. In most of his short stories, this unfortunate tendency is clear, but not generally expounded upon. Something Wicked This Way Comes is too full of observations about the nature of boys and men when confronted with the felicities and adversities of life, without any corresponding observations on what sorts of exciting and important things girls and women can do.

Ah, but those splendid short stories - that's what's worth remembering.