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One of the most attractive aspects of Bradbury's sprawling body of work is his habit of returning to certain themes and thinking his way laterally along them.

One of his masterpieces, The Long Rain, does just this its Venus-stranded astronauts driven mad or to suicide by the pummelling downpour. As they begin to lose radio contact with each another they confront the collapse of sanity, attempts to face death with bravery, and the possibility that life is, after all, meaningless.įor a writer who can justly be accused of sentimentality (more on that later), Bradbury is very good at imagining nasty situations and playing them through to a bitter end. Kaleidoscope, meanwhile, describes a starship's crew drifting in space after the destruction of their craft. No Particular Night or Morning centres on a conversation between two astronauts, with the exaggeratedly empiricist standpoint of one (what isn't in front of you might as well not exist) proving a treacherous position to adopt in deep space. Two powerful examples of this latter tendency are to be found in The Illustrated Man. But most often and memorably his work falls into that territory best summed up as speculative fiction, with a particular emphasis on dystopian futures and the existential ramifications of space exploration. True enough, when you plough through the 1.800 pages of his two-volume Collected Stories you discover various styles: fable, autobiography, horror, social comedy, murder mystery, romance. When such occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room." Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticised my taste in space-travel, sideshows or gorillas. For that was the beginning of my writing science fiction. Unhappy for a month, he eventually realised why: In the introduction to his mammoth 1980 collection, The Stories of Ray Bradbury, he recounts his misery when playground teasing made him stop collecting Buck Rogers comics.

Bradbury has made one of the simplest and most attractive responses I know to this sort of generic hand-wringing.