Dear Ray Bradbury fans, my name is Phillip Tanderad, I’m a seventh grade student in a small town in and Nova Scotia Canada. For my English class me and my three friends had to analyze Rays story “All Summer in a a day”. After spending ten precious minutes of our time, we got to the ending of that particular abomination, and realized how terrible the ending is. We believe that Ray should be brought back to life, and forced to make an ending that actually provides closure. For years of my life I have read nothing but rays literature, and I have been very satisfied. Starting today we will not read anything ever written by Mr. Bradbury until the ending is changed.

How would you like it to end?

Is there an alternative ending that would make sense to you, and that would still make for a satisfying story?

Think of one, and you'll feel better.

Dear Philip:

Since Ray passed away in 2012, the ending to "All Summer in A Day" will never be changed. And if you keep your promise never to read anything by him again, you're going to be missing out on some wonderful books and stories (unless you are a much older person like me, and have read almost everything he ever wrote).

As for myself, I think "All Summer in A Day" is one of Ray's most wonderful stories, and has the perfect ending to this melancholy tale. However, I also think that DouglasSP's suggestion is a great one: why don't you write an ending to the story that you think would be more satisfactory? Given that Ray loved to encourage young writers, I think he would second the suggestion.

Good luck to you and your classmates on your homework assignment.

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Originally posted by Philip Tanderad:
We believe that Ray should be brought back to life...

Great idea! And after he kicks Thom Mayne's bum he can get on that rewrite!

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Originally posted by douglasSP:
How would you like it to end?

Is there an alternative ending that would make sense to you, and that would still make for a satisfying story?

Think of one, and you'll feel better.

If at all possible get ahold of the short film made in 1982. Although some Ray Bradbury Theater episodes also vary or expand on the original stories, this particular version provided a wonderful ending without compromising the original story in any way.

(Here is a link to save you the trouble. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV-rzGx21rw )

I have never reconciled with the ending of "Season of Disbelief" (it's the section of Dandelion Wine dealing with Mrs. Bentley). I always feel, and always will, that she made the wrong decision, period, but I guess Ray's intention was to make a lasting impact which he did. Overall my life has been incalculably enriched by his work and I hope yours is too!

Browsing around old threads . . .run across this young feller's disappointment in 'All Summer In a Day' . . . a story I really liked at more or less the same age . . . you can't demand that all stories have happy endings. That ain't real, man -- (that's the stoner in me talking). People can be self-centered and kids can be mean. He's showing it up. I remember a few horrors from my grade-school days. Don't you?

A friend of mine once compared many Bradbury stories to a window. When the window opens the story is already going on and when it closes the story is still going. This is a perfect example. The story never tells what happened after the closet door was opened.

That reminds me of a TV series (on the Sci-Fi Channel? I had it on DVD) called "The Lost Room" where the Gumby-and-Pokey like device of "opening a door into another place and time" was used extensively. I thought that one really had its moments.

Refresh me please as to where the Ray Bradbury "All summer in a day" story appears? I could probably dig it up on-line from one of the big content vendors but that would mean the unscented e-book format. Yuck.

Btw, looking for the story just now turned up this link to a short magazine item by R.B.:

[url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/take-me-home[/url]

Hope I got the syntax right... I'm not familiar with this use of the <TITLE> attribute as it's different in HTML. Also, why does it say "imported forums" below this message?

"All Summer in a Day" was first collected in A Medicine for Melancholy (1959), but it has appeared in many other books.

Here's a fairly complete list:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?58363

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Also, why does it say "imported forums" below this message?

At one point the website owners switched from an older to a newer message board format, possibly also a different provider. This resulted in a situation akin to the Star Trek episode in which the transporter malfunctioned, creating two Captain Kirks! When the powers that be got wind of the double message board situation, they supposedly imported all threads from the old board to the new with some distressing results. In some cases replies continued to be added to threads on the old board resulting in two different versions of the same thread.

Some messages from particularly large threads had already simply disappeared from the old board, while others may have been lost in the move. Many, many others were duplicated, resulting in two copies of countless threads! We have only two moderators both of whom have much better things to do than remove duplicate threads years old so there they sit. Sad but true!

Ah, very interesting web page ("isfdb dot org") - thanks. Looks like a custom database? Goes back to 1954 anyway (that was a big year for me) so that's impressive. Interesting that they have concurrent or parallel Wiki material... I am at least playing around with that stuff (Mediawiki, Dokuwiki etc.) but I'm still not sure what it's good for.

Roger re: migration issues, between message boards and providers. Been there, done that... still doing it actually - I have experimental pages at www stelex dot net. If the support boards for this sort of thing are any indication then backup and continuity continues to be a HUGE topic.

Just to chew the fat a little bit, would it be useful to map or flag some of the duplicate threads in some way?

Also, I am persuaded that it is useful to have a *permanent*, serially generated number on each post for reference purposes. Not many people seem to want to do this, or if they do then the serial numbers are not readily displayed, and tools for using them (search forward or backward, recall a specific number, search a set range etc.) aren't well documented.

I'm kind of reminded of a current (spring 2019) story about Apollo 11 where telemetry from a small experimental payload related to the lunar surface regolith issue was stored on magnetic tape, and then, decades later, retrieving the data for possible analysis got pretty dicey.

https://www.wired.com/story/mo...asa-lunar-ambitions/

Going back to identify the duplicate threads it would be just as easy probably to delete as to lock them. It would be possible with enough looking to identify where they leave off.

Hmmm! I just now came across an example of the duplications. Wow.