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What do you imagine when you hear the name . . . Bradbury?
You might see rockets to Mars. Or bizarre circuses where otherworldly acts whirl in the center ring. Perhaps you travel to a dystopian future, where books are set ablaze . . . or to an out-of-the-way sideshow, where animated illustrations crawl across human skin. Or maybe, suddenly, you're returned to a simpler time in small-town America, where summer perfumes the air and life is almost perfect . . . almost.
Ray Bradbury—peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors—is a literary giant whose remarkable career has spanned seven decades. Now twenty-six of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.
Anonymous
Posted August 19, 2012
These authors have all been influenced by Bradbury and each wrote a story that has the feel of Bradbury. None was more successful than Charles Yu, (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe) and Kelly Link. I've discovered authors because this book and have been impressed enough to make purchases.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted November 27, 2012
These stories, and more, are funny, thought provoking, sad, mysterious, supernatural, and most of all, psychological. These stories force you to see beyond the life you’ve built for yourself, which was the goal of Ray Bradbury all along. This tribute is worthy of the celebrated author, and he will be sorely missed.
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Posted July 28, 2012
This wonderful anthology was published only a month after Ray Bradbury passed away, so the timing is especially poignant. Editors Sam Weller and Mort Castle have put together an amazing collection of stories that manages to feel “Bradbury-esque” without losing the flavor of each particular writer’s style, a remarkable achievement. Each author was asked to write a short story to celebrate the esteemed man, and each one took that instruction to heart in different ways. Some of the stories are directly related to specific Bradbury tales, and are instantly familiar. Others evoke the emotions one feels when reading a Ray Bradbury story, and you will recognize those too.
These stories explore common Bradbury themes, such as loss, marriage, death, loneliness, and especially the future. Several stories in this collection pay tribute to Bradbury’s love of science fiction and what a future Earth might be like. Kelly Link’s Two Houses is a great example, a very strange tale about twelve women traveling through space on a ship called The House of Secrets, complete with a talking computer named Maureen that can alter the ship’s décor at will. Probably my favorite story of the bunch is Young Pilgrims by Joe Meno, where two children living on an unnamed planet, a desolate place with un-breathable air run by strict and menacing adults, discover an underground Eden filled with remarkable plants and animals and oxygenated air. In the afterwards, Meno mentions that he was influenced by Bradbury’s famous story The Veldt, which was immediately recognizable to me. Robert McCammon’s Children of the Bedtime Machine is a hopeful story set in another desolate future, and describes a lonely woman who finds a machine that when cranked, shows a hologram of a child.
Many of the stories derive their inspiration from specific Bradbury tales. Joe Hill’s By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain is a companion piece to The Fog Horn, and has an eerie, otherworldly quality to its sad story about a dead sea monster. The Companions, by David Morrell, imagines Bradbury’s The Crowd in reverse, and is a spine-tingling tale of guardian angels. The Tattoo by Bonnie Jo Campbell is, as you might expect, an homage Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, and is an odd and magical story about a man who gets an enchanted tattoo at a carnival, a tattoo whose pictures change and form stories, stories that don’t always have happy endings. One of the funnier stories is by Charles Yu as he re-imagines There Will Come Soft Rains, in Earth (A Gift Shop), where a future Earth is devoid of people, except as a tourist attraction.
I wish I had the space to specifically mention each story in Shadow Show, but I will say that I was moved in one way or another by all of them. The collection as a whole is filled with everything you would expect from Bradbury’s own stories: wonder, sadness, the joys of childhood, and enough imagination to fill ten rocket ships. It made me want to dust off my old Bradbury paperbacks and reread the stories that I remember from my earliest days of reading fantasy and science fiction. I’ll have to admit it’s been a while since I’ve read a Bradbury story, and if it’s been a while for you too, and you’re looking for a nostalgic reading experience, you’ll want to dive into Shadow Show as soon as possible.
Many thanks to Library Thing for supplying a review copy.
Anonymous
Posted July 11, 2012
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Posted September 25, 2012
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Anonymous
Posted July 10, 2012
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Overview
What do you imagine when you hear the name . . . Bradbury?
You might see rockets to Mars. Or bizarre circuses where otherworldly acts whirl in the center ring. Perhaps you travel to a dystopian future, where books are set ablaze . . . or to an out-of-the-way sideshow, where animated illustrations crawl across human skin. Or maybe, suddenly, you're returned to a simpler time in small-town America, where summer perfumes the air and life is almost...