Ray Bradbury

Author

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Ray Bradbury's 1962 dark fantasy follows two thirteen-year-old neighbors, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, in the small Illinois town of Green Town. In late October a traveling show, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, arrives out of season and begins offering townspeople what they secretly crave, at a terrible price. As the boys uncover what the carnival really feeds on, Will's father, a quiet, aging library custodian, must decide how to stand against it. Among coming of age books, it stands out for treating childhood's edge as a place of real moral danger, and for its lyrical, autumn-soaked prose. It is a short, atmospheric story about fear, regret, friendship and the ways desire can be turned into a weapon.

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Author

The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles follows the human settlement of Mars through a chain of linked stories. Early expeditions meet a gentle, sophisticated Martian civilization and wreck it, sometimes by violence and sometimes by accident. Settlers then arrive in numbers, bringing their towns, prejudices and appetites with them, until a catastrophe on Earth cuts the colonies off. Bradbury treats Mars as a mirror: the book reads as a meditation on colonial conquest, nuclear fear, censorship and the cost of treating a new world as a blank slate. Its lyrical, melancholy tone sets it apart from engineering-minded space adventure. Among science fiction books, it is a standard introduction to the genre's literary and humane side, and it remains short enough to read in a weekend.

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