Final Victim:

This tale has even fewer of Bradbury's stylistic trademarks than "Gabriel's Horn". It deals with a law enforcement officer called Skeel who, traumatized and embittered by the slaughter of his colleagues in a clash with pirates, has turned into a serial killer who slays, rather than arrests, offenders he is dispatched to apprehend. He is employed by Federation Patrol, stationed in the asteroid belt. When the sister of one of his victims (who was innocent of any crime) lures him into a trap, bent on revenge, the two of them become stranded on a dangerous asteroid, where tentacled creatures lurk in waiting, and they have to strike an uneasy truce to survive. Hasse was in posession of the manuscript for some time, and the story may well reflect his writing more than Bradbury's. Scientific details such as the appearance of an asteroid in bright sunlight are unlikely to have been provided by Bradbury. Not that the story contains much believable science - asteroids almost never have an atmosphere to speak of, and tentacled creatures, besides being a pulp cliché, are unlikely to find a habitat there. Nevertheless, the ending of the story provides a decent attempt at emotional depth, as well as a forseeable but still fairly satisfying plot twist.

The Piper [second version]:

Kerac, the last member of the Golden Race of Mars, returns from his exile on Jupiter to find his civilization destroyed by the Jovians, and all members of his nation killed or removed. But there is another breed of Martians living in mountain caverns - the primal Dark Race, who never venture into sunlight. Kerac uses his pipe to summon forth the Dark Race at night, to overrun the Jovian masters of the planet. Our hero is not spared, however. The story is crude and derivative by comparison with the beauty of the collected Martian Chronicles (the two Martian races correspond quite obviously with the Eloi and the Morlocks, for example), but not nearly as weak as I'd thought on a first reading, some years ago. The earthy description of the Jovian city, its nightlife, and its mining population is passably skillful. But considerations of quality aside, the story probably wasn't continuous enough with the author's later Martian tales to warrant revision and inclusion in a collection.

The Candle [spoilers]:

One of Bradbury's earliest weird stories, or dark fantasies, if you will. It's a surprisingly good one - no masterpiece, but as good as some of the stuff that has turned up in collections over the years. At the beginning of the story we find the protagonist poring over a display of firearms - but among these is a candle that mesmerizes him. Only gradually do we learn what the hero's trouble is - his wife has run off with a lover. The proprietor of the shop explains that the candle can snuff out a life when the victim's name is whispered into the flame. The protagonist decides to send the candle to his wife, and tries to trick her into extinguishing her lover. It all goes wrong, of course, in an ending that was clearly visible to me some distance away. But surprisingly, Bradbury couldn't find what to me seems the obvious ending, and an uncredited Henry Kuttner wrote the last page or so.

My impressions of the rest of the stories start here:


Is That You, Bert?

Long lost alien encounter story, circulated but not published in the 1940s. This is the earliest finished version, in which a hillbilly grandpa, Gramp Gordon, who is all alone at home, has a very strange visitor. The visitor doesn't speak, and Gramp can't see very well, so the realization of the true nature of the visitor creeps up on the reader only gradually. There is the smell, of course ... but by the time Gramp's son arrives on the scene, there has been a horrible accident. Not what you might expect, though. Written with Gramp's speech in hillbilly dialect as thick as molasses, which was almost completely removed for a later revised and renamed version. the alien character conforms to certain SF clichés of the day, but the story manages to induce a shiver or two, which could perhaps have been turned into a real chiller by the Bradbury of ten years later. But of course, he wasn't writing anything like this ten years later.

The Wind

Bradbury's first version of "The Wind" is substantially different from the version I've always known - the rewritten version that first appeared in Dark Carnival. In this early treatment, the personification of the wind is much more literal and explicit than in the later one. We are told expressly that the wind wants John Colt, the central character, which means that it wants his soul, to carry it off, as it has done with many others. The wind is constantly in dialogue with Colt, stroking his brow, turning the pages of his book, and responding directly to everything he says. Eventually, the protagonist despairs of escape, and tries to commit suicide, to no avail. The wind gets him. In the later story (as I remember it from my last reading in the 1990s), the supernatural character of the wind is presented much more obliquely, and the door is open for a reading in which the protagonist's imagination may be playing tricks on him - until the end, at least.

Eat, Drink, and Be Wary

This shortie answers the question: "Did Bradbury ever make a fiction sale to John W. Campbell's Astounding Science-Fiction?". Well, yes and no. As explained in professor Jon Eller's textual notes, Astounding had a column called "Probability Zero" that ran occasionally from 1942 to 1944. The column featured short fictional pieces with a 750 word limit, mainly humorous in tone and with a science fictional bent. The contributions were mainly "liar's tales" and appeared under the sub-heading "Calling All Liars!". This Bradbury item is a first person account of a doctor's patient who has a fanciful problem: he attended a Venutian banquet, where the custom is to eat so much that a human being would normally die. The patient's solution was to wear a device which displaces his stomach into another dimension, where it and its food contents are minute in size. Now his dillemma is that he must either keep on eating constantly to deliver sufficient nutrition to his tiny stomach, or he can throw a switch and return it to its normal state, in which case he would explode instantly from the massive volume of food he has ingested! The story doesn't really make sense, but this hardly matters in the tall tale category in which it was placed. So the answer to my opening question is yes, Bradbury did sell two short pieces of fiction to Astounding - but because of their brevity and the special category in which they were placed, they are regarded by most fans as not really "counting".

Promotion to Satellite

Pietro is an Italian labourer who slaves away to prepare a space ship for its journey to Mars. He is weighed down by an enormous family that he has to support … but Pietro dreams of the stars. He inveigles his way on to the ship, where he does hard labour in the engine room, not much superior to what he did before. But early in the journey there is an accident on board, involving a cracked radium container and leaking radiation. A volunteer must enter the engine chamber and remove the radioactive matter - but it is understood by all that this is a suicide assignment. Pietro volunteers. He steps into space with the container, and becomes a permanent satellite himself. His proud widow can trace his passage across the night sky, and the government decrees that all spacecraft should stay clear of his orbit. For a story that has never been collected or anthologised, this is rather good. It's impossible not to like the strong, sympathetic central character, and the only thing about him that editors must have found distracting is the thickly laid on Italian English in which he speaks. Why Bradbury chose to have Pietro and his friends speak in this cartoonish pidgin is a mystery to me (it is the only Bradbury story other than "Massinello Pietro" to feature an Italian speaking protagonist). There is also the slapdash science - double strength radium doesn't really exist - but on the other hand, there have been many latter day accounts, both real and fictional, of workers entering nuclear reactors in circumstances comparable to those in Bradbury's story.

The Crowd

One Bradbury's paranoid nightmares (in the same vein as "The Wind" and "Skeleton") features Spallner (perhaps a slightly disguised variation of Spaulding), who is involved in a traffic accident and, as he recovers from his injuries, cannot shake off the disturbing impression that the crowd of onlookers gathered much too quickly. He begins to study newspaper reports of road accidents, and in his collection of clippings, he discovers that the same faces seem to appear repeatedly in the crowds that gather at accident sites. He begins to suspect that the crowd has hastened the deaths of some victims, by moving them before professional help arrives. From there, it's but a short hop to the conclusion. Spallner starts driving around to investigate the phenomenon further, and the inevitable happens ... In this early version of the story, the sinister nature of the crowd is made much more overt than in the subtler, rewritten version. That's my impression, anyway - I haven't compared the two versions side by side.

Chrysalis

Possibly Bradbury's most impressive science fiction effort to date, this is the eerie tale of a scientist, Smith, who appears to die as the result of radiation exposure, only for a mysterious cocoon to form around his body - within which he might just still be alive, despite receiving no nutrition for months on end. The story is told entirely from the viewpoint of the two doctors and an assistant who monitor the development of Smith's mysterious transformation. There is Rockwell, who is intrigued, even enthused by the phenomenon, and who hopes that Smith will emerge as a sort of superman. Then there is the apprehensive, ultimately hostile Hartley, and the more subdued McGuire. Bradbury's speculative ideas are quite cleverly wrought, although they result in a story that's mostly talk, with little action. The story was submitted to John W. Campbell of Astounding fame, and Bradbury was hopeful that the vaguely medical and scientific ideas in the story, such as accelerated evolution, possibly stimulated by radiation, would sound convincing enough to satisfy that legendary and demanding editor. According to Touponce and Eller, Campbell was interested enough to suggest that Henry Kuttner assist with revisions - but ultimately he didn't buy the story. The ending is a memorable contrast between the seemingly normal and the breathtakingly fantastic - the sort of thing that should come as no surprise to Bradbury fans.

Subterfuge

The Venusians invade Earth in the year 2087 - only to find it deserted. All humans appear to be gone. Their plan to enslave the human race and replenish the stock of their own by abducting human women, must now fail. The Venusians must leave face extinction themselves. But - and this is the subterfuge of the title - the human race has survived, thanks to the plan of a scientist called Harler. Half the Earth's population is sacrificed, a quarter is placed in hibernation in the form of disembodied brains, and the final quarter will hide in plain sight, in a drastically altered form, until the Venusians are gone. The story is one of the weakest in the volume so far. The plot seems overcrowded and the telling is rushed, with none of the author's stylistic trademarks. It's mostly explanation and information dumping on the way to the surprise ending, and even then the plot doesn't withstand close scrutiny. How could the Venusians be so powerful, and yet so dumb? Another trivial point I noticed is that here, as in his later Martian stories, Bradbury doesn't seem to have anticipated that the Earth's population would rise to far above two billion. This must be one of the "perfectly dreadful" early Bradbury stories Arthur C. Clarke once referred to (introduction to The Best of Arthur C. Clarke, Sphere, 1973)!

The Parallel [A Blade of Grass]

A newspaper clipping about a human scientist who faces prosecution because he's been dabbling in an advanced type of robot introduces this story, in which the shoe is on the other foot. A robot researcher has developed biological life after experimenting with protoplasm - his colleagues threaten all sorts of reprisals, including rust. Our robot hero's heretical theory that biological entities once created robots, is no help. Still, he insists that human attributes such as creativity have no equivalent in the robot world. The story isn't bad for its time, and for this stage of the author's development, cleverly holding up a mirror to human prejudices and xenophobia.

And Then – the Silence

Humans settle the planet of Xoton. Everything goes well, until the unseen masters of the planet rise up and obliterate them by animating the very mountains, rivers, and other natural features of their world. This shortie is told from the viewpoint of one of the mysterious aliens. Bradbury returned to the basic idea of humans overcome by unsuspected peril on a seemingly welcoming world in several later stories, "Mars Is Heaven!" being the most famous.

The Lake

The narrator returns to the lake where, as a twelve year old, his best friend drowned, never to be found. What happens next is beautifully judged: wistful, rather than scary, and emotionally satisfying without being glutinously sentimental. The author himself thought it was his first really good story, and how right he was.

Morgue Ship

Bradbury's setup for this story is rather intriguing: a two-man space ship roams the solar system, recovering the scattered bodies of war casualties. The hero is jaded and demoralized by this grim task and constantly looks forward to his last tour of duty. So far, so good. But when an enemy alien is brought aboard, still alive, there is trouble. The alien hijacks the ship and tries to force the crew to rescue his leader. Bradbury resolves the situation with a tense standoff and a flurry of action - but it's all more than a bit improbable and unconvincing.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Steve Temple, an out of work writer, finds a mysterious typewriter from the future in his apartment. Through it, he is able to communicate with a woman named Ellen, who desperately appeals to him to commit a murder, the purpose of which is to change the future and prevent an evil dictator from rising to power. As Steve carries out his dreadful mission, his greatest anxiety is that his link to Ellen will be severed if the future is changed - and he has fallen in love with her. The story is good enough to grip a reader previously unfamiliar with it. There are even traces of Bradbury's flowing, stream of consciousness dialogue in the passages where the hero speaks to a peripheral character called the Greek. Its weaknesses are the usual ones of pulp fiction - severe improbabilities and plot contrivances. Still, I can only assume that Bradbury never returned to it for one of his collections because it isn't all his own work.