Hi everyone! Huge RB fan here!

Can someone tell me the title of a Bradbury short story ( I'm 90% sure it's Bradbury) that has it's locale in the foreign legion. A convicted soldier is to be executed and the execution method is to be placed on a machine that carves your crimes all over your body. Anybody recognize that?

Thanks!

Finally, one I know, and 90% is right. "In the Penal Colony," by Franz Kafka, appears in "Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow," which Bradbury edited. I had to force myself through that story but find myself thinking of it from time to time and may go so far as to actually read it again.

Thank you dandelion! 90% LOL!
Yeah, that story gave me nightmares forever. Funny I don't recall that title. I thought the title was the name of the 'machine'

Thanks!

That collection ("Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow")is an interesting one. One of the stories I still remember from it was called, "The Sound Machine" by Roald Dahl. This story posited a person who invented a machine that could hear sounds that were beyond human sensitivity. I remember in particular a scene where he heard thousands of screams when people mowed their lawns and trimmed their bushes. Anyway, Roald Dahl is the guy who wrote "Matilda", "The Witches", "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", "James and the Giant Peach" and several others. He also wrote a bunch of kind of sci-fi abstract stuff. Although widely recognized as a great writer of children's literature, he has written a lot of interesting stuff. Well worth pursuing.

As I look at my old Bantam paperback I thought I would share a couple excerpts from Bradbury's introduction to this collection (for those who don't have access to the book):

"I am no glib theorist or literary technician capable of diagramming these stories for you in great sweeps of logic and detail. And, the good Lord knows, the scientific method and I are only nodding acquaintances. I have had nothing but my emotions to go on, and what little I've learned in a few short years of writing in the field itself. It is all too easy for an emotionalist to go astray in the eyes of the scientific; and surely this is no handbook for the mathematician or the chemist or the specialist in physics. Somehow, though, I am compensated by allowing myself to believe that while the scientific man can tell you the exact size, location, pulse, musculature and color of the the heart, we emotionalists can find and touch it quicker."

"I have always believed that Life itself is more than fantastic. Therefore, most of these stories simply illustrate how fantastic life is. Life, to the believer OR agnostic, is a pretty wonderful affair. I mean wonderful in the sense of true wonder, awful in the sense of awe, stressing the "im" in impossible."

"This book, I hope, will show you that for all its reality, life is still a fantasy. For it is not only what life does in the material world that counts, but how each mind sees what is done that makes the fantasy complete. We are two billion worlds on a world here . . ."

"The fact is that as we get older the wonders and awes seem to fade a trifle. All of us work ourselves into our own little phonograph record existence, play the same tune each day, with perhaps a fox trot arrangement on Saturday and a hymnal of same on Sunday. This is the safe, sane, sure little path we must all take if we are to live on this world. In habit there is comfort, in routine there is satisfaction. Only occasionally, as years pass, do the sunsets, the awes, wonders, and beauties break through our shells. So now and then, we must remind ourselves of the wondrous and the delightful. Some of us sit down and write fantasies. Others, like yourself, read them."

Pretty cool, huh?


[This message has been edited by Mr. Dark (edited 06-14-2002).]