Hi guys. I'm trying to find the name of a Ray Bradbury short story I read when I was a kid. I've been doing some web searching tonight but to no avail. In this story as I remember it, someone goes to another planet and sees a variety of life-forms laid out in a field, apparently dead or in suspended animation. He notices a machine of some kind going around collecting things and he's all like, "Oh no, it's going to get me too! I'm going down!" But somehow there's a happy ending and it leaves him alone or whatever it does isn't as bad as what he thinks it will do.

Any thoughts??

Uh, if it ends up not all that bad, probably not RB. The closest would be "The Scythe" and that's hardly happy.

Thanks for your response. I looked up The Scythe - not it. Sounds like an amazing story, though. The one I'm thinking of may well have been by someone else. It was in a school textbook. I remember us also reading another short story around the same time, about a society in which no one feels the need to go outside anymore and a guy gets questioned by the cops for taking a walk. Maybe that one was by RB and I attributed the other one to him as well.

Hi Wundergecko. That story about the guy who gets questioned for taking a walk most definitely IS Bradbury's story "The Pedestrian". The first story you asked about DOESN'T sound like a Bradbury.

It's quite common on this forum for people to have remembered a story as Bradbury which actually turns out to be by Vonnegut, Asimov or Heinlein!

Thanks Phil! I was reading all kinds of sci-fi / fantasy at that time, in and out of school, and I obviously couldn't keep the various authors straight in my memory. I will continue the search for the other story elsewhere...can't be that obscure if it made into a textbook.

Trouble is, "The Pedestrian" has made it into so many textbooks that doesn't narrow the search much.

Well, that's a good point. Hopefully I'll track it down someday, though. I can SEE my imagination's rendering of it very clearly, but of course can't remember any Google-able phrases (or an author)!

Upside: this has inspired me to read more RB. What a dude.

At least it did some good.

Regulars, notice how once every five or ten times one of these stories is actually by Bradbury? And how, when it is Ray's I usually know it and when it isn't I usually don't?

It did do some good in that sense, definitely.

It'd be great if there were some kind of sci-fi / fantasy identification service. I've got all kinds of other stories lodged in my head that I think I have less chance of finding than this one. When I was a little girl my dad gave me a stack of sci-fi collections from the 50s and 60s that had some awesome stories in them, but of course, I only remember the dust jackets (vaguely), not the authors.

Back in the 1990s, I was the Information Officer of the British Science Fiction Association. One of the things I did in that role was try to answer questions exactly like this. Where I couldn't come up with an answer myself, I would circulate the questions to a team of expert volunteers. All this was before the WWW, but we had quite a good success rate.

Nowadays, posting on a forum like this is as good a way of seeking info as anything. At least here we're quite a friendly bunch!

There used to be several wonderful newsgroups on Usenet I recommended before it degenerated into a spam dumping ground.

The only place I can highly recommend is here: http://forums.abebooks.com/abecom/start/

1. Sign up
2. Make sure you are in the Booksleuth Forum
3. Post in the Science Fiction section of the Booksleuth Forum
4. Make sure you use a SPECIFIC title such as "blue androids attack earth," not just "looking for an SF story."
Good luck!

"Blue Androids Attack Earth" is one of my favourites. I especially like the bit where (spoiler alert!) the blue androids attack the Earth. Now, If I could only remember who wrote that story...

quote:

Originally posted by philnic:
"Blue Androids Attack Earth" is one of my favourites. I especially like the bit where (spoiler alert!) the blue androids attack the Earth. Now, If I could only remember who wrote that story...

100% NOT Ray Bradbury! That's all the hint you're getting.

quote:

Originally posted by philnic:
Back in the 1990s, I was the Information Officer of the British Science Fiction Association. One of the things I did in that role was try to answer questions exactly like this. Where I couldn't come up with an answer myself, I would circulate the questions to a team of expert volunteers. All this was before the WWW, but we had quite a good success rate.

Nowadays, posting on a forum like this is as good a way of seeking info as anything. At least here we're quite a friendly bunch!

Sounds like a good system you had going on there. And you are a friendly bunch, which is appreciated!

quote:

Originally posted by dandelion:
There used to be several wonderful newsgroups on Usenet I recommended before it degenerated into a spam dumping ground.

The only place I can highly recommend is here: http://forums.abebooks.com/abecom/start/

1. Sign up
2. Make sure you are in the Booksleuth Forum
3. Post in the Science Fiction section of the Booksleuth Forum
4. Make sure you use a SPECIFIC title such as "blue androids attack earth," not just "looking for an SF story."
Good luck!

Thanks! I'll give it a try.