By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Let’s take a closer look at some of the most notable quotations from one of Ray Bradbury’s very best stories, ‘The Veldt’ (1952). The story must certainly rank among Bradbury’s most unsettling, because it suggests that children have the capacity to do terrible things, and to turn on the very people to whom they owe their existence: their own parents.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Flying Machine’ is a 1953 short story by Ray Bradbury, included in his collection The Golden Apples of the Sun. Often analysed as an allegory for nuclear proliferation during the Cold War, ‘The Flying Machine’ is in fact a subtler story than this critique implies, and so its symbolism requires further analysis and interpretation to be more fully understood. It is a story in which a Chinese emperor discovers a man has developed a machine that enables man to fly, and promptly orders for the machine to be destroyed and its inventor put to death.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Highway’ is from 1950: an early short story by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). In just a few pages, Bradbury gives us one of his earliest responses to the atom bomb and nuclear Armageddon.
Bradbury is widely recognised as one of the greatest – and most lyrical – science-fiction writers of the twentieth century, although he preferred to describe himself as a ‘fantasy writer’ or simply as a ‘writer’. Although he is known for novels such as the dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451 and the horror novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, much of Ray Bradbury’s best work was in the short-story form.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Long Rain’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied short stories by the American writer Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). Although Bradbury preferred to describe himself as a ‘fantasy’ writer, this story is most accurately categorised as science fiction. It was originally published (under the title ‘Death-by-Rain’) in the magazine Planet Stories in 1950, and is set in a jungle on Venus where four stranded astronauts attempt to reach the safety of the ‘Sun Dome’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘All Summer in a Day’ is a 1954 short story by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). The story is set on Venus, where the sun only comes out once every seven years for a couple of hours; the rest of the time, the sun is hidden behind clouds and rains fall constantly.