By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Marionettes, Inc.’ is a 1949 short story by the American writer Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). The story was reprinted in Bradbury’s 1952 collection The Illustrated Man. It concerns a company which can manufacture lifelike plastic doubles of people; these ‘marionettes’ can then stand in for the person they resemble while the real person is elsewhere.
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 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.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr probably never said, ‘predictions are hard, especially about the future.’ And although the job of authors of science fiction and speculative fiction isn’t to make accurate predictions about what our future lives might look like, but to entertain us by tapping into current concerns, fears, dreams, and ambitions for where humanity might be heading, it can still be fun to read stories set in the future which managed to get things right (or sometimes, not so right).