Long After Midnight

Long After Midnight by Ray Bradbury was published in 1976. This volume is the last of Bradbury’s great short story collections. It is one of my personal favorites.

There are 22 short stories. Each short story is 10 to 15 pages long. That makes the stories ideal to read one story in a sitting.

“One Timeless Spring” is a unique coming-of-age tale of a 12-year-old who is convinced his parents are poisoning him.

“The Utterly Perfect Murder” details a 48-year-old’s revenge on the boy who bullied him when they were 12 years-old.

“Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!” depicts the relationship between a Catholic priest and the rotund young man who periodically comes to confession to talk of his peculiar obsession.

“The Parrot Who Met Papa” is an utterly hilarious spoof of Hemingway (or maybe Chandler) and his literary groupies.

The title story is a very different one for Bradbury, about a lonely oceanside suicide … and then there are some of Bradbury’s usual stories about friendly robots and light horror. The book is a truly marvelous story mix. Read by Jimmie A. Kepler

Zen in the Art of Writing

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury is not a single volume on writing. Rather, it is a collection of essays written over his long career. Each of the essays has a real nugget of insight for the reader. Bradbury teaches us about writing. He tells us to write about what we love, and what we hate and to always stay drunk on writing, because it saves us from the world of reality. The book’s title is a little misleading. While Bradbury makes some statements that sound like a “Zen Master”, that is the closest I could come to finding anything “Zen” about the book. I find the title a “hip” title some marketer probably dreamed up.

Bradbury devotes a chapter on the mechanics of writing, the way he learned it. To achieve success as a writer according to Bradbury, one must write at least a thousand words a day. The thousand words a day minimum must continue until the process becomes automatic. It is simply fascinating to get into the mind of one of the greatest science fiction writers on how the craft is done. This chapter alone is worth buying the book which is very economical. It is a wonderful book for the beginning writer and very inspirational for the advanced writer.

The Illustrated Man: Chapters Nineteen –Twenty-One

The Illustrated Man
Dust-jacket from the first edition

Chapter  Nineteen – Usher II

Literary expert William Stendahl has retreated to Mars to escape the book-burning dictates of the Moral Climate Monitors. On Mars he has built his image of the perfect haunted mansion, replicating the building from Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usher, complete with mechanical creatures, creepy soundtracks and the extermination of all life in the surrounding area. When the Moral Climate Monitors come to visit, each of them is killed in a manner reminiscent of a different Poe story, culminating in the immurement of the lead inspector. When all of Stendahl’s persecutors are dead, the house sinks into the lake.

Chapter Twenty – The Playground

When Charles Underhill was a boy, he was tormented by neighborhood bullies. When his son begins playing in a local playground, he becomes deeply disturbed when he sees a bully from his youth.

Chapter Twenty-one – The Illustrated Man

An overweight carnival worker is given a second chance as a Tattooed Man, and visits a strange woman who applies skin illustrations over his entire body. She covers two special areas, claiming they will show the future. When the first is revealed, it’s an illustration of the man strangling his wife. Shortly after this comes to pass, the carnival workers run the man down, beat him, and look at the second area, which shows an illustration of the same beating they are doing.

The Illustrated Man: Chapter Seventeen – Zero Hour

The Illustrated Man
Dust-jacket from the first edition

Children across the country are deeply involved in an exciting game they call ‘Invasion’. Their parents think it is cute until it turns out that the invasion is real and aliens are using the children to help them get control of Earth.

The Illustrated Man: Chapter Sixteen – The City

The Illustrated Man
Dust-jacket from the first edition

A rocket expedition from Earth lands on an uncharted planet to be greeted by a seemingly empty city. As the humans begin to explore, they realize that the city is not as empty as it seems. The city was waiting for the arrival of humans; the contingency plan of a long dead civilization, put in place to take revenge upon humanity after their culture was wiped out with biological weapons by humans long before recorded history. Once the city captures and kills the human astronauts, the humans’ corpses are used as automations to finalize the city’s creators’ revenge; a biological attack on the Earth.

The Illustrated Man: Chapter Fifteen – Marionettes, Inc.

The Illustrated Man
Dust-jacket from the first edition

A man attempts to escape his marriage by replacing himself with a robot to fool his wife into thinking he hasn’t left and tells a friend about it. The man comes back and tells the robot to go back into the box, and the robot disobeys him saying he has fallen in love with the wife. The robot then proceeds to put the man in the box and goes to visit the wife.

The Illustrated Man:Chapter Twelve – The Fox and the Forest

The Illustrated Man
Dust-jacket from the first edition

A couple from the future tires of the war in their modern lives, so they go on a vacation to the more serene past in an attempt to escape with the help of a company called Travel in Time, Inc. They go to Mexico in 1938, but are pursued by a government agent who forces them to come back to 2155.

The Illustrated Man: Chapter Eleven – No Particular Night or Morning

The Illustrated Man
Dust-jacket from the first edition

Two men in a spaceship are discussing how empty and cold space is. The first man is a little bit insane and keeps asking questions about how there is nothing sure in space and there is no night or morning. He refuses to believe anything about reality without sufficient evidence and soon becomes skeptical of everything he cannot directly experience. He said that he doesn’t believe in stars because they are too far away. The second man is wandering about the ship when he learns that someone has left the ship, and it is the first man. The first man is still talking to himself and has killed himself by letting himself fly freely through space.

The Illustrated Man: Chapter Ten – The Exiles

The Illustrated Man
Dust-jacket from the first edition

Numerous works of literature are banned and burned on Earth. The fictional characters of these books are portrayed as real-life entities who live in a refuge on Mars. However, they are vulnerable, as when all the books on a character are destroyed, the character itself vanishes permanently. When the group of characters learn that some people are coming for them, they stage a counterattack, but are foiled by the astronauts who burn the last remaining books from Earth, unknowingly annihilating the entire colony.

The Illustrated Man: Chapter Nine – The Last Night of the World

The Illustrated Man
Dust-jacket from the first edition

In this story, a married couple awakens to the knowledge that the world is going to end that very evening. Nonetheless, they go through their normal routines of going to work, eating, brushing their teeth, and falling asleep, knowing and accepting the fact that they will not wake up.