science fiction as a sounding board for insights into the human condition.

In an introduction to this collected edition of one hundred of his favorite stories, Ray Bradbury describes himself as like the man in the Irish police report—drunk and in charge of a bicycle. In his case, however, he says, he has been drunk with life and constantly moving through it with a mixture of terror and exhilaration. He discusses his work as the result of a childhood stuffed with images from science fiction, circuses, sideshows, and motion pictures, and how the people he has met and the places he has seen since childhood became additional raw material for turning into the finished products of his art. The Middle West, California, Mexico, and Ireland all appear in these stories, sometimes transmuted into the locales of fantasy.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury, at almost nine hundred pages, is far from a collection of all his work in the form, but the selection printed here from the beginning of his writing in the mid-1940’s to the late 1960’s includes many of his best-known and enjoyed tales and allows an appreciation not only of the career of a single writer but also enables the reader to draw some conclusions about the writing of fiction in the decades shortly after World War II.

A little research into the original places of publication of these stories shows how much harder it is to succeed at the writing of short stories today than it was thirty-five years ago. Then the newsstands were filled with a variety of vehicles from pulps to slicks, all of which printed fiction and most of which have disappeared. Bradbury built his reputation in now-vanished magazines such as Weird Tales, Dime Mystery, Collier’s, Planet Stories, American Mercury, Charm, and others, all now gone. Even today’s Saturday Evening Post went out of publication for a while, and its reappearance brought back only a pale copy of the magazine that used to be the summit of the fiction writer’s hopes. Yet, these magazines were the market place for short fiction in the United States; when they departed, there were that many fewer places for a writer to learn the craft, and that much less incentive for a writer to work at less than novel length.

The collection also shows a curious fact about Bradbury’s reputation: it explains why his name is most likely to be thought of when someone who does not like science fiction thinks of the genre: Bradbury’s work was frequently displayed in the mass-circulation magazines such as Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, Collier’s, and Playboy, but he published relatively little in the specialized science-fiction outlets. Bradbury’s writing, sometimes criticized for sentimentality, filled the need of another market, too: much of it was first published in magazines such as Mademoiselle, Charm, and Seventeen.

A purist might object to the selection of stories on the grounds that some, but not all of, for example, The Martian Chronicles are here. The connecting thread of narrative in The Martian Chronicles, however, is so thin that little is lost by reprinting only some of its stories. Many of Bradbury’s best short stories are included, and, as the collection shows, his strengths are best displayed in this form. From what may be his strongest collection, The Illustrated Man, are reprinted the stories “No Particular Night or Morning,” “The Veldt,” and “The Long Rain.” From the above-mentioned The Martian Chronicles come “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “Mars Is Heaven,” and, as stories representative of Bradbury’s work, it is hard to fault this choice. “There Will Come Soft Rains” is the often-anthologized tour de force about an automated house that has survived a nuclear war. It is a story without human characters in which the robot mechanisms of the house show a maniacal perseverance in their tasks, although the reason for their existence is gone. “Mars Is Heaven” makes science fiction out of the transplantation of turn-of-the-century Illinois to Mars, where the familiar faces and buildings greet an American expedition to that planet. The sentiment for a vanished America is there, science fiction is there, and a characteristic macabre touch enters at the end, as the purpose of the town becomes clear to the captain of the expedition.

Bradbury has frequently expressed his admiration for Edgar Allan Poe, and there are few better continuers of the tradition of atmospheric horror than Bradbury. In his hands, however, the tale of terror takes on a different look, because whereas Poe often worked to make the familiar seem strange, Bradbury often does exactly the reverse, humanizing and domesticating the monstrous. The story “Homecoming” is perhaps the best example of this process. It is indeed the story of a homecoming, complete with nostalgia and family tradition and the renewal of ties. The family that gathers, however, includes vampires, witches, and werewolves. The stranger, the outcast, in the family is Timothy, the only one normal by our standards, who keenly feels his deviance from what is usual in his small society. Among them all, only he is mortal. “Uncle Einar” and “The Traveler” also deal with the Elliott family of “Homecoming.”

The atmosphere of horror remains, although the supernatural disappears, from one of Bradbury’s most famous stories, “The Next in Line.” The story is set in the Mexican town of Guanajuato, and its chilling center describes a visit to the catacombs of that city, where the mummified dead produce an obsessive fear in the American woman who is touring the country with her husband. As events conspire to keep the couple in Guanajuato, the fear that she will die there and be left to shrivel in the dry tunnels overwhelms her. The story is as terrifying as anything Poe ever wrote, and the terror is produced entirely through the use of atmosphere: not a ghost appears, nor is one needed. In a coincidental comment about what generates emotion in a story, a picture book was published in 1979 joining the text of “The Next in Line” to photographs of the actual mummies of Guanajuato. Somehow the real thing was not as fearsome as the story, showing that the imagination is the best set decorator.

Bradbury’s forte is fantasy, an ability that comes through even in those stories closest to genre-standard science fiction. In “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed,” a human restaurateur on Mars meets the Martians themselves, and the figures of that dwindling race would be familiar to any fourteenth century balladeer: whatever they may be called, the Martians are the inhabitants of Fairyland, and their world is that third alternative to Heaven and Hell, the timeless world of enchantment. That fantasy is always very close to the surface in Bradbury’s stories, and often familiar, often homely, when it does appear. When a ghost does show up in one of the tales, it is likely to be the ghost of old Aunt Tildy, as in “There Was an Old Woman.”

In many of the stories, the fantasy results from the intrusion of the strange into everyday affairs. The idea of a setting on Mars may seem exotic, but as in “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” or in “The Off Season,” when the human character runs a hot-dog stand, much of the exotic disappears. The setting of “The Fire Balloons” is again Mars, but it is a Mars of human settlements, the familiar boom town of the American West re-created on another planet. The priests of the story face exactly the same situations they would have encountered in the California of two hundred years ago. The thrust of fantasy into the story, however, is again the appearance of the Martians, and the question of what kinds of sin are possible to creatures of nearly pure spirit becomes the central concern of Father Peregrine.

The reverse of this process, the unexpected advent of the ordinary into the strange, produces, oddly enough, exactly the same effect. It once again domesticates the bizarre, and puts it in human dimensions. In the science-fiction vein, an example of this reversal of atmosphere occurs in “The Long Rain.” In that story, the crew of a spaceship has been wrecked and stranded on Venus, a world of eternal rain. They are making their way toward the Sun Dome, one of a number of rescue stations established on the planet for precisely such eventualities. In a setting in which one can drown simply by tipping his head back, in which one can go insane from the endless drumming of the rain, where fungi and vegetation spring up in minutes, the intrusion of the ordinary is in the form of the desires of the characters: what they yearn for is hot chocolate with marshmallow, dry towels, and sandwiches of chicken, tomato, and onion.

In the genre of fantasy, there is the process in the story “The April Witch.” Here Cecy, one of the Elliotts of “Homecoming” and “The Traveler,” wants, with the coming of April, to be in love, an oddly human desire for one of her kind. Her spirit enters the body of an ordinary girl for bathing, powdering, and dressing in preparation for one night at a dance. Cecy, whose body has never left the room in the Elliott house where she lies forever sleeping, cherishes the memory of that night.

Not all of Bradbury’s fantasy comes in the form of character or setting. Sometimes it takes the form of usual people in usual places, who find themselves in the course of their everyday affairs doing unusual things. One such story with a Mexican setting is “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” the story of five poor Mexicans of identical size who collectively buy a white summer suit. They take turns, each wearing the suit for one night, and four are happy—their dreams are fulfilled—until the turn comes for the fifth member, notoriously slovenly in his habits. They adventure through the evening, protecting the suit from harm until, as the result of a traffic accident one of them realizes that the intrusion of the fantastic has not been the power of the suit, but the joy which lay in their minds, and that the fantasy has been within themselves all along, only released by the suit.

As “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” shows, Bradbury is skillful in the handling of humor, and perhaps finally, the sense of humor is the magical power lying within us to bring our fantasy to life. Some people are richer than others in this respect—their humor lying closer to the surface—or are fortunate enough to live in a society that fosters and encourages the play of fantasy. One such society is the contemporary Ireland of “The Anthem Sprinters,” a story that takes its name from the habit of some of the Irish film audiences of dashing from the theater in the few seconds between the conclusion of the film and the playing of the national anthem. This situation, however, is only the beginning of the story, as the telling of the custom leads to a contest between two of the best of the sprinters as team captains, with the American narrator taking part. Yet, the narrator finds, as the film ends and he runs to the lobby, that the magic of the film has released the fantasy inside the Irish teams, and he returns to the theater to find them sitting there, captured by the final song, with tears streaming down their faces.

Bradbury’s stories, be they set in Mexico or in Illinois or in Ireland or even on Mars, are the intrusion of the magic that can release the fantasy within the readers; and this collection of his best work contains many stories that do precisely that.