Well? Has anybody actually read the first volume of Ray’s Collected Stories, edited by professors Touponce & Eller?

I’m a bit disappointed not to see more comments on the books themselves, so to provide some sort of start to a discussion, I’ve decided to post my notes on the stories, made just after I’d read ’em. I’ll post them in bunches, starting with the eight amateur publications which are placed last in the book.

Note that these are summaries rather than reviews, with the odd throwaway critical comment. I don’t think it’s necessary to provide spoiler alerts for any of these very early pieces, since they’re of mainly academic interest. If some of the meatier stories seem to require one, I’ll put it in.

Also note that the notes are written in my native British-oriented spelling, so don’t all rush to tell me how to spell “dialog”. Lastly, textual or background information is taken from The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: Volume 1 (1938 - 1943), ed. Jonathan R. Eller & William F. Touponce (Kent State University Press, 2011).

Here goes:

Hollerbochen’s Dillemma:

A surprisingly science fictional shortie in which Hollerbochen has the power to foresee his own death. He can escape this by suspending time for a very short while. On a particularly bad day, an elevator accident and a gun-toting mugger are both on the menu. Hollerbochen can achieve a stay of execution by suspending time, but when he tries to do so for too long, there is a massive build-up of energy, a mighty explosion, and the poor hero is blown to atoms. The story evinces the occasional clumsiness of a beginner, and also features the supposedly futuristic abbreviations championed by Forry Ackerman - text messaging language, 60 years too early!

Hollerbochen Comes Back:

A sequel written for laughs more than anything else. Hollerbochen reconstitutes his body and returns to life - all to save the budding science fiction writer, Bradbury, who has been castigated by fans because of the supposed logical inconsistencies of the first Hollerbochen tale, from further embarrassment. Fellow fans such as Kuttner and Ackerman are namechecked, and the freewheeling, occasionally funny wordplay is rather reminiscent of John Lennon's Learish humour in A Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write. And Hollerbochen? Oh, he comes to grief anyway.

Don’t Get Technatal:

The entire story is a dialogue between a husband, who is a writer, and his wife. Set in 1975 (!), the background to the piece is that the ruling Technate has eliminated nearly all crime and other forms of imperfection and hardship in society. The writer complains that he has nothing to write about in such a sterilized existence. The opening of the story shows an improvement over the earlier efforts in the book, with its smooth and unobtrusive introduction of the two characters. After that, a failure of logic and plotting sets in. Why would a writer be unable to write fiction, just because his work is unlike real life? Wouldn't such a boring situation make fiction about crime or war quite sought after? Then there is the attempt at a shock ending, rather reminiscent of "A Sound of Thunder", which never really satisfied me as making sense in the more famous story, and certainly doesn't do so here. The author appends a note explaining that he is in fact enthusiastic about the idea of the Technate - but the story argues otherwise, and so will some of the important work that follows.

Pendulum [first version]:

I found this unsophisticated early effort rather likeable, even though it still has that annoying simplified spelling that was apparently a fad in the fanzines of the day. Layeville, the protagonist, invents a time machine and unveils it before an audience of the world's most distinguished scientists. Unfortunately, the machine explodes and takes the scientists with it. As punishment, the central character is entombed within a giant glass pendulum, which swings forever beneath the machine (which is repaired for this purpose). Robots tend to his needs. For a thousand years, the pendulum swings, apparently slowing or freezing time for its occupant. The surrounding city is destroyed, but still the pendulum swings, and still the robots do their work. Eventually the prisoner does die - it isn't clear why. Despite its juvenile qualities, I thought I caught a flash or two of the later Bradbury - the sun which "crimsoned" towards the horizon, for example. But the author also shows that hard science fiction would not really be his métier, since the plot battles to make sense.

Luana the Living:

The turgid narrative of a traveller through the Amazon jungle. In a forest clearing, he encounters what appears to be a gathering of zombies, engaged in a sinister moon worshipping ritual. He is observed and flees for his life, but back in the safety of civilization he develops a morbid fear of the full moon, which had loomed over the jungle scene. He looks in a mirror and finds that he has become one of the zombies! The story is competently written for much of the way, but lacks the spark of originality that is much in evidence in his later dark tales. It seems, rather, that Bradbury was affecting the manner of one of the established horror writers - Lovecraft or A. Merritt, perhaps. Certainly there is a touch of the "lost valley" convention in the story. Towards the end of the story, as the author piles on layers of description to thicken the atmosphere of dread, there are trace elements of the mature author's cascading metaphors.

The Piper [first version]:

The first of two versions of this story. The title character is a Venutian who summons up a menacing horde from the caves and hill of Mars, their purpose being to engulf and destroy the Earth colonists. Most of the narrative is unfolded as the telling of a story by a father to his son. The story is (very understandably) bereft of the poetic qualities of Bradbury's later Martian tales. In fact, it is a little muddled. For example, why must the Piper be from Venus? That seems to overcomplicate the plot. And secondly, who are the real Martians? The father character tells his son that they, presumably humans, are the last "real" Martians. The original inhabitants have been colonized and displaced. The menacing hordes that the Piper summons forth appear to be older inhabitants of Mars. Whatever the case, there is little continuity to the "canonical" Martian tales.

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Hu- :

Just an extended joke, really - Waldo is extremely irritated by clichés; in fact, they spur him on to outbreaks of violence. He sees a doctor - what we would call a therapist today - and his condition is cured, even though the therapy still manages to go spectacularly wrong. Bradbury was probably expressing his irritation at the amateurish efforts prevalent in the pulps and fanzines of the day, even as he himself groped towards his true writing "voice".

The Secret:

As one might expect of this bit of Bradbury juvenalia, it's rather uncharacteristic of the mature author. Here, a galactic empire (the only one I can remember Bradbury ever writing about, although it's an SF staple) creates an archive of relics of all the civilizations it has come across - but there's a fragment of 20th century pop culture from Earth that leaves the alien archeologists stymied. The story - once again very short - is another elaborate joke, rather similar to many such pieces by Isaac Asimov.

Tale of the Mangledomvritch:

The decidedly weird mr. Bengol and his 17 children are left stranded on the sidewalk as mrs. Bengol goes to investigate the interior of a dime store. Something menacing lurks there - a seething cauldron of diverse humanity which engulfs each of the children mr. Bengol sends after his wife. Written with occasional fanzine trappings, the story is obviously satirical in intent, although I'm a bit too far removed from its time and milieu to be more specific. The predatory mass inside the dime store faintly echoes a superior story to come: "The Crowd".

douglasSP, I'm delighted you're doing this. I own a copy of the book, and have read all of the Eller/Touponce material and sampled a few of the stories, but don't have time to study them or write about them. (Too busy studying Ray's screenplays for my PhD!)

Yes, Douglas, thanks, but I will skip until I get a chance to read all of them. So far I've read most of those through anthologies or some other source.

For me, the main thrill was simply to have all these stories on my bookshelf at last, and of course to read them. Most of the titles have been familiar to me for years, thanks to Dandy's lists, and also thanks to online sources such as ISFDB. But still - it's wonderful to discover what they were actually about. And just to scratch that itch some more, the editors provide summaries of many completely unpublished stories as well.

Five more stories, this time starting at the top of the table of contents (these notes are from a spreadsheet, so please excuse the lumpy text and lack of paragraph divisions):

Pendulum [second version] [spoilers]

John Layeville demonstrates his time machine to a gathering of the world's most eminent scientists - but something goes wrong and nearly the entire gathering is killed in an explosion. Layeville's arch enemy, Leske, is one of the few survivors, and he conceives the device for Layeville's punishment. A giant pendulum is constructed, within which he is to be trapped for an eternity, swinging endlessly back and forth, while the time field operating in the device suspends time for its inhabitant: the rest of the world ages, but not the prisoner. And so Layeville, who becomes known as The Prisoner of Time, outlives first his captors, then the entire human race, then the regime of robots that replaces it. At last an alien race arrives, destroying all remnants of humanity and its robot successors. They are determined to stop the pendulum as well, and at the end of the story, as the pendulum's mechanism begins to fail, Layeville at last faces his doom. As in the original amateur version of the story, it isn't made clear exactly how or why the protagonist dies, and this is a pity, because the story implies a rather neat science fictional device: when the pendulum stops, so does the suspension of time within it - and this means that the occupant instantly ages many centuries, killing him! As it stands, though, it could simply mean that the malevolent aliens will certainly exterminate the prisoner. Oddly enough, I didn't find the story significantly better than its predecessor, which was very brief, but almost poetic in its brevity. Hasse's collaboration added a more elaborate pseudo-scientific explanation of the time machine. A framing device - peaceful, birdlike alien explorers who find Layeville's manuscript - is also added. The story has much more meat on its bones than the early one, adding characters and episodes, but unfortunately the addition of substantially more dialogue is no improvement - the characters speak in an off-puttingly mannered, pulpy style. Still, it was Bradbury's first professional sale.

Gabriel’s Horn:

This is the second of Bradbury's collaborations with Henry Hasse to be featured in this book, and as the editors comment, it is stylistically rather anonymous. It is set in a dimly defined post-war scenario, where we find Gabriel and his tribe living a primitive hunter-gatherer existence. They are menaced by mysterious antagonists referred to as the Invaders (humans, like Gabriel and his people), who hunt them for sport. Gabriel, his beloved Llya, and arch-rival Muhn flee to a network of caves to escape the invaders. Muhn chooses this moment to challenge Gabriel's leadership and wrests his prized horn from him. The horn is supposed to be a weapon, but no one, including Gabriel, has yet worked out exactly how to use it as one. So far, nothing remarkable has ever happened when Gabriel blows the horn, but of course the results are quite different when Muhn tries to use it in an underground cave system. The story packs in a number of fantasy/science fiction elements, without using them in a particularly successful or distinctive way. Elements of the story world are undeveloped and leave unanswered questions - who are the Invaders, for example? Where do they come from? It also features a few amateurish improbablities and plot weaknesses: is it at all likely that Muhn would be the only unsuccessful hunter among a hundred, and yet still feel up to challenging Gabriel's leadership? I also found the abbreviation of Gabriel's name to "Gab" in numerous places distracting. No one calls him this in the story, so it seems inappropriate. I had the strange feeling for most of my reading, that the story may be related, somewhere in Bradbury's mind, to a better and more famous story, "Frost and Fire". You have a hero and his girl friend (whose name, Lyte, is very similar in the later story) who shelter in a network of caves, and an embittered rival who complicates their struggle for survival. But that's just the story furniture, of course, and the resemblance ends there.