SHORT STORY SUMMARY

“Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up…” announces the house. It gets busy making
breakfast, rattling off the importance of today’s date and reminding of the day’s
upcoming activities. It prepares the owners for the weather outside. The house cleans up
the uneaten breakfast, and little robot mice vacuum the floor.

This is about the time you realize there are no occupants in the house, and it is carrying
on as usual without anyone there to notice. And that is where the question comes into
play… the question “Who is the main character of this story?” Is it the house? With all
it’s chores and voices? The house that pulls the blinds and opens the garage and turns
on the sprinklers? Or is the main character the people who are not even there? What
happened to them? Why won’t they be back? What is the bigger story here?

“There will come some rains and the smell of the ground…” reads the house to Mrs.
McClellan. A very considerate house to choose the favorite poem of it’s matron
occupant when she does not make a request of her own. “And no one will know of the
war, not one will care at last when it is done…”

MY THOUGHTS

Yes, another story I remember reading for the first time over 20 years ago. This one
stuck with me because of the haunted feeling I was left with after reading it. The
realization that our humanity is really so fragile. I remember the discussion my English
teacher engaged my class in.

We discussed this thought: “The development of the Atomic bomb will end all war or all
men.” It was a thought that was hard for us to accept, because war is part of our reality.
Nuclear weapons don’t cause a second thought for most of us. We discussed alienation.
Not little green aliens… but how alienated people in the future will become… from each
other. And how we are the people in the future when considering when this story was
written.

Anyway, some food for thought… I’d love to hear your thoughts! Please feel free to
leave me a comment.

INTERESTING TIDBITS

• Word Count: 2,134
• Page Count: 4
• This story was first published in 1950 as part of The Martian Chronicles.
• Be sure to check out Jason Sanford’s review of this story.

WHERE TO FIND THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS

• You can download a free copy at the Jerry W Brown web site.

NON SPOILER SUMMARY 

The Hadleys live in a Happy-life Home, which is an automated house. It clothes them, feeds them and rocks them to sleep. It also has a massive nursery for the children that reads their minds and recreates any fantastical scene down to the tiniest detail. Wonderful scenes, like Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin and his Magical Lamp, angels, flying Pegasus, cows jumping over the moon. But lately, instead of pleasant fantasies, the children have been dwelling in Africa. Hot, sweaty, stinky, flies buzzing over carcasses, threatening lions hovering in the distance, Africa. And when the parents decide that this is a problem and choose to turn off the nursery, and the house, the children throw an epic tantrum. Who will win this power struggle? 

MY THOUGHTS 

The Veldt is my all time favorite short story. Probably because it is the first short story I ever read. It also the most memorable. Why was it so memorable? Because to this day… after 25 years, I still remember the sick feeling I had in my stomach at the end of the story. It disturbed me. It still does. Virtual reality. Lions. Death. Suspense. An ending that leaves you shocked and horrified. Yes, Ray Bradbury gave us a masterpiece. If you haven’t read this one, invest 10 minutes, it’s worth your time. Then leave me a comment, I’d like to know what you think about The Veldt. 

INTERESTING TIDBITS 

• Word Count: 4612
• Page Count: 11
• Published: 1950
• Ray Bradbury is, well, Ray Bradbury! ‘Nuff said. Did you know he is 90 years old now?  Read up on him at wikipedia, or check out his website.  I enjoyed watching a few video clips there, and thought it especially fascinating to hear his take on why he enjoyed writing short stories. He suggested that writing a novel took a huge investment of time and energy, with no guarantee of a reward. Whereas, short stories, if he wrote one a week, he had 52 stories, and at least some of them had to be good! Which equaled much less sacrifice for a higher chance of payoff. Interesting!
• Also be sure to check out Rusty’s review of The Veldt.

WHERE TO FIND THIS STORY 

• You can read The Veldt for free at veddma.com.
• You can listen to a reading of The Veldt by Stephen Colbert on youtube.
• In fact I found dozens of links to discussions, notes, reviews, and videos just by typing “The Veldt” into the Google searchbox.

The Illustrated Man is a 1951 book by Ray Bradbury which contains 18 science fiction short stories. The stories are loosely tied together by a tattooed guy called “The Illustrated Man.” Apparently each of his tattoos is animated and tells a different story from the book. If you have ever seen the movie Something Wicked This Way Comes then you’ll recognize “The Illustrated Man” as one of the carnies! Anyway, almost all of these stories were previously published elsewhere before The Illustrated Man, but were brought together for this now-famous book.

The Illustrated Man is quite well known and has won several accolades, including:

• placing 10th in the 1952 Astounding / Analog All-Time Poll.
• being nominated for the 1952 International Fantasy award.
• taking 22nd place in the 1956 Astounding / Analog All-Time Poll.
• being ranked 33rd in the 1999 Locus All-Time Poll.

So, here is a listing of the stories included in The Illustrated Man: (I’ve linked to the ones that I have reviewed, but Wikipedia gives a short summary about each of them too.)

1. Prologue: The Illustrated Man
2. The Veldt
3. Kaleidoscope
4. The Other Foot
5. The Highway
6. The Man
7. The Long Rain
8. The Rocket Man
9. The Fire Balloons
10. The Last Night of the World
11. The Exiles
12. No Particular Night or Morning
13. The Fox and the Forest
14. The Visitor
15. The Concrete Mixer
16. Marionettes, Inc.
17. The City
18. Zero Hour
19. The Rocket
20. Epilogue

If this sounds like something you might like then be sure to check out The Illustrated Man at Amazon.com, or look for a used copy on eBay.

Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell:

Johnny has been working with McDunn at the old lighthouse for the past three months. The lighthouse is situated on a rock 2 miles out to sea, and Johnny is looking forward to “shore leave” the following day. That night, McDunn tells him about a huge sea creature that comes to the lighthouse every year to cry out at the fog horn… and tonight is that night! The two make their way to the top of the tower and watch as the monster ascends and begins its yearly ritual. Very fascinating indeed, but when McDunn turns off the fog horn the monster shows its true, primitive nature!

“What do we do?”

“Do? We got our job, we can’t leave. Besides, we’re safer here than in any boat trying to get to land. That thing’s as big as a destroyer and almost as swift.”

“But here, why does it come here?”

The next moment I has my answer.

The Fog Horn blew.

And the monster answered.

My Two Cents:

• The good:

• The feeling captured by Bradbury in this story is spectacular! The detailed descriptions, the rustic dialog and the tone of the story all work together perfectly to create an amazing reading experience.
• I really enjoyed reading about how the monster connected with the lighthouse and fog horn – it makes sense, in a lonely sort of way.
• The character McDunn was awesome! He totally captured the hermity, salty, old seaman personality type. He was an integral and enjoyable part of the story.

• The bad:

• There were a couple parts of “The Fog Horn” that felt forced – like the revelation that “tonight is the night he comes!” Yeah, nice timing.
• The online version of this story that I read had a few spelling mistakes, but nothing big enough to keep me from reading this superb story.

Fact Sheet:
• Page Count: 5
• Word Count: 2,997

Where you can find “The Fog Horn”:

• “The Fog Horn” is included in Ray Bradbury’s excellent collection The Golden Apples of the Sun.
• You can read a free online version of this story at The Fantastic Films of Ray Harryhausen fan site.

Some Interesting Links:

• “The Fog Horn” was the basis for the 1953 science fiction film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.
• Special thanks to one of my readers, Paolo, who recommended this great story!

Craving More Stories?
If you enjoyed this story then you might also like The Father-Thing, about a boy who suspects that his father has been replaced by an alien, by Philip K. Dick.

Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell:

Eckels is a man who wants adventure – so he hands over a hefty check to Time Safari Inc, a company that will take him into the past to hunt dinosaurs. Sounds like a blast right? Well, not really, there are just so many darn rules: stay on the path, don’t touch the dirt, only kill the dinosaur right before its natural death – stuff like that. It’s all for a good reason though – they wouldn’t want to do anything that would cause a snowball effect in time and radically alter the future. But when the huge and terrifying T-rex finally shows up somebody (guess who?) loses his nerve and runs away. Only problem is he made a (seemingly) small mistake.

The Monster, at the first motion, lunged forward with a terrible scream. It covered one hundred yards in six seconds. The rifles jerked up and blazed fire. A windstorm from the beast’s mouth engulfed them in the stench of slime and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with sun.

The rifles cracked again, their sound was lost in shriek and lizard thunder. The great level of the reptile’s tail swung up, lashed sideways. Trees exploded in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweler’s hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat. Its boulderstone eyes leveled with the men. They saw themselves mirrored. They fired at the metallic eyelids and the blazing black iris.

My Two Cents:

• The good:

• A very cool and memorable story that has been widely read by the general population – in fact I myself had to read it for 10th grade English class!
• Who wouldn’t want to travel into the past on an adventure like this?
• A classic Ray Bradbury short story – if you like his other stuff then you will most likely enjoy “A Sound of Thunder” too.

• The bad:

• There is some stilted dialog, but hey, it was written in 1952 so what do you expect?

Fact Sheet:
• Page Count: 10
• Word Count: 4,362
• “A Sound of Thunder” garnered the following awards:

• It placed eighth in the 1999 Locus All-Time Poll for best short story.

Where you can find “A Sound of Thunder”:

• This short story first appeared in the June 28, 1952 issue of Collier’s magazine.
• “A Sound of Thunder” is also included in the amazing collection entitled Stories of Ray Bradbury.
• You can read a nice online version (with full color illustrations taken from the EC comic!) at the Scary For Kids website.

Some Interesting Links:

• This story has been reprinted many, many times. It has also been made into a TV episode, a comic book and a movie.

Craving More Stories?
If you enjoyed this story then you might also like Small Moments in Time, about a time traveling man working in turn-of-the-century Kansas, and the horrible secret he discovers there, by John G. Hemry.

Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell:
Margot is a nine year old girl whose family moved from Earth to Venus when she was four. She remembers the sun shining on Earth – something that it rarely does on Venus. All of the rain and cloud cover on her new planet are affecting her emotions, but her chance to see the sun once again is quickly approaching. The story takes place on the one day when the rain will stop and the sun will shine for a couple of hours. All of the children in Margot’s class are eagerly awaiting their first glimpse of the sun, but when the teacher leaves for a few minutes they decide to pull a very mean prank on Margot.

The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.

It rained.

It had been raining for seven years; thousand upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.

“It’s stopping, it’s stopping!”

My Two Cents:
I remember reading “All Summer in a Day” when I was in grade school, and only recently did my sister remind me of it. A great short story that is full of many lessons.

• The good:

• A classic Ray Bradbury story!
• The writing is superb! This is Bradbury at his best with some amazing descriptions of the rain, the jungle and even Margot’s health.

• The bad:

• Ugh! This story really tugs at your heart-strings! I admit it… I almost cried.
• It will make you hate bullies even more!

Fact Sheet:
• Page Count: 4
• Word Count: 1,942

• “All Summer in a Day” garnered the following awards:

• Although this short story never won any major awards, the 1980 book Stories of Ray Bradbury (which included this story) placed sixth on the 1981 Locus Poll for best single author collection.

Where you can find “All Summer in a Day”:

• This short story first appeared in the March 1954 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
• “All Summer in a Day” has been collected in many anthologies – most recently in the 1990 version of Stories of Ray Bradbury – a great collection of many of his pre-1980 short stories.
• You can read a free version of this short story at the Department of Defense Educational Activity web site. (You need to click on the link under Training Resources to download the .doc version of “All Summer in a Day”.)

Find The Stories of Ray Bradbury at Amazon.com

Related Yet Still Interesting Links:

• The cloud cover of Venus provided science fiction authors with a plethora of ideas for stories and novels. Take a look at Wikipedia’s article for information about other stories set on Venus.
• “All Summer in a Day” was made into a short, 25 minute film in 1982. Here is the IMDB page about it, and a link to a YouTube version as well.
• Did you know that Ray Bradbury has more than five hundred published works – including short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, and verse? Yep. You can learn more about this prolific science fiction author at his official web site.

Craving More Stories?
If you enjoyed this story then you may like Star Light, Star Bright, a story about supremely gifted children, by Alfred Bester.

Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell:

“The Veldt” follows George and Lydia Hadley, who live in their ultra-modern Happylife home with their two children, Wendy and Peter. Their amazing house does it all – it cooks and cleans for them, turns the lights on and off automatically, rocks them to sleep, and even has a virtual nursery. Aah – and it is the nursery that is the beginning of their problems! When Lydia decides that the African scenes the children conjure up in the nursery are a little bit too realistic she and George restrict their use of it. Wendy and Peter, however, are not happy with their parents’ restrictions, and decide to take matters into their own hands.

They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. “But nothing’s too good for our children,” George had said.

The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

My Two Cents:
• The good:

• “The Veldt” was one of the first science fiction short stories I ever read, and I was blown away by the cool ideas and dark themes presented in it.
• The first time I read this story was over twenty years ago, before I had ever heard of a “holo-deck”, but I instantly loved the concept. Could this be the first mention of the famed Star Trek Holo-deck? Possibly! Sure, the one in “The Veldt” uses “odorophonics” and crystal walls with “superreactionary, supersensitive color film” behind them, but it is still the same awesome idea – a room that creates a virtual playland.
• If you are a fan of Ray Bradbury’s writings then this is one story that you can’t miss!

• The bad:

• Remember, this story was written in 1950 so there are some outdated concepts. It definitely isn’t anything that should keep you from reading this great short story, however.

Fact Sheet:
• Page Count: 11
• Word Count: 4,612
• “The Veldt” garnered the following awards:

• While this short story didn’t win any awards on its own, The Illustrated Man (the collection in which it appears) has won several – including placing 33rd in the 1999 Locus All-Time Poll.

Where you can find “The Veldt”:

• This short story first appeared in the September 23, 1950 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
• “The Veldt” is included in Ray Bradbury’s fantastic short story collection The Illustrated Man.
• You can listen to the Spaceship Radio audio version of “The Veldt” at the Internet Archive, or the Dimension-X version.
• You can read a free online version of “The Veldt” at veddma.com.

Some Interesting Links:

• I’m sure you’ve heard of Ray Bradbury, but if not then be sure to check out the Wikipedia article about him.
• Is “The Veldt” a reaction to the invention of television? Hmm… maybe. James Wallace Harris thinks so.

Craving More Stories?
If you enjoyed this story then you might also like The Father-Thing, about a boy who suspects that his father has been replaced by an alien, by Philip K. Dick.

by Ray Bradbury

• Page count: 9

Marionettes, Inc. is a famous short story by the legendary science fiction author Ray Bradbury.

Marionettes, Inc. is a story about two men who feel they are trapped in their marriages, and the desperate and misguided attempts they make to get out of them by replacing themselves with identical robots (hence the “marionettes”). However, not everything turns out as they had hoped!

I would wager that there are very few people indeed who haven’t heard of Ray Bradbury or his famous book The Illustrated Man. He has several very famous science fiction short stories, but I had never read Marionettes, Inc. until recently. A great piece by one of the classic masters of science fiction.

They both stared up through the dark air.

In the window above them, on the second floor, a shade raised. A man about thirty-five years old, with a touch of gray at either temple, sad gray eyes, and a small thin mustache looked down at them.

“Why, That’s You!” cried Smith.

“Sh-h-h, not so loud!” Braling waved upward. The man in the window gestured significantly and vanished.

Where you can find Marionettes, Inc.:
• Marionettes, Inc. first appeared in March 1949 in Startling Stories.
• It was also published in 1951 in Ray Bradbury’s book of collected short stories The Illustrated Man.

Unfortunatley, this (and any story by Ray Bradbury) is very difficult – if not impossible – to find for free online. If you want to read Marionettes, Inc. you’ll have to get a copy of The Illustrated Man. The nice thing is that the book is famous enough, and has been around for so long, that it is easy to find. You can certainly buy a new copy, but you could probably also find one at your local library, in a used bookstore or on eBay.

You can learn more about Ray Bradbury by reading the biography on his web site, or take a look at the Wikipedia page about him.