Loren's guide to RBT has been out there for nearly 20 years - and has been copied from on more than one occasion. I remember referring to it when I started my own (horribly incomplete) episode guide, here.

Where does the time go?

A man on a flaming pie has just appeared at my window to tell me that random story #5 is "The Emissary".

The story appeared in Dark Carnival, The October Country and The Stories of Ray Bradbury.

The story was completely rewritten for its appearance in the latter two collections (Eller & Touponce, The Life of Fiction), so I'll think about which one I should read for this exercise, or perhaps both.

Well, things have been pretty tough, this past week, but at last I’ve had a chance to re-read “The Emissary”.

Of the stories we’ve re-read so far, this is the best example yet of Bradbury’s relentless, cascading images and metaphors. The plot itself is fairly slight: Martin, a bedridden little boy, relies on Dog, his faithful companion, for sensory input from the outside world. Dog carries a tag inviting visitors to Martin’s bedside, and he takes this task very seriously. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that the story has the same mixture of eeriness and sentimentality as “The Lake”, among others.

For some, the rich, intense imagery represents Bradbury’s occasional tendency to over-write. Kingsley Amis, in his seminal work New Maps of Hell (1960), quotes the opening paragraph and finds in it “that particular kind of sub-whimsical, would-be poetic badness that goes straight to the corny old heart of the Sunday reviewer”.

With which I don’t agree. The heart of the story is the way Dog expands Martin’s shrunken world by bringing the aromas and essences of his meanderings to his master’s bedside. Bradbury’s metaphoric intensity serves this point completely. And Kingsley Amis was usually distinctly short of Christmas cheer, anyway …

A note on the text: I’ve recently become quite aware of the textual differences between British and American editions, and when I came across “tea and biscuits” in my Harper Voyager edition, I quickly scurried over to my Everyman edition, and there it was: tea and biscuits. I thought Americans would say “tea and cookies”! Just shows you.

Biscuits/cookies: interesting! I've always suspected that Americans know "biscuits" but choose not to use it. (They also know "trousers" but default to "pants"!)

Personally, I quite like the biscuits sold in Popeye's, but they're different to the vast array of biscuits on sale in Tesco...

Oh yes, and I blogged about Kingsley Amis' bizarre reviews a couple of months ago. The polite word to describe him was "curmudgeon". But there are plenty of other words that would be more accurate...

I think it was on a recent instalment of the Graham Norton Show that there was quite a detailed analysis of the transatlantic differences between biscuits and cookies. That's what made me notice it.

Originally posted by douglasSP:

quote:

A man on a flaming pie has just appeared at my window to tell me that random story #5 is "The Emissary".

"A man on a flaming pie..." This conjured an image of Charles Nelson Reilly. But of course that was a flying hat.

"The Emissary" is wonderfully read by Ray Bradbury on the audio release of The Stories of Ray Bradbury:
http://www.spaceagecity.com/br...storiesofrbaudio.htm

A copy was kindly given to me recently...still passing it forward...

Here is a picture of Joseph Mugnaini's brilliant interpretation of the climax of Ray's short story, "The Emissary". This art is from a series of prints Mr. Mugnaini created called TEN VIEWS OF THE MOON, which pictured the way he visualized a number of Ray's stories:

Visitor.jpg (10 Kb, 22 downloads) visitor.jpg

I was waiting for dandelion (or another Beatles fan) to point out where the "flaming pie" allusion comes from: it's from a very early written piece by John Lennon, explaining the origin of the name of the band. Decades later, Paul McCartney released an album called Flaming Pie.

Linnl and Richard: excellent links. Thanks.

quote:

Originally posted by Richard:
Here is a picture of Joseph Mugnaini's brilliant interpretation of the climax of Ray's short story, "The Emissary". This art is from a series of prints Mr. Mugnaini created called TEN VIEWS OF THE MOON, which pictured the way he visualized a number of Ray's stories:

Chilling. And I would have to see it right before bed!

The tribe has spoken, and randomly chosen story #6 is "Pendulum".

This is one of the author's earliest stories. It was first published in Super Science Stories, November 1941. This is the second version of the story (the original was not professionally published) and this later version is a collaboration with Henry Hasse, who toughened up the "scientific" content slightly.

The story isn't in any "proper" Bradbury collection, but it can be found in (deep breath) The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, Volume 1: (1938 - 1943), ed. Jonathan R. Eller & William F. Touponce (Kent State University Press, 2011) .

I did find an unauthorized copy somewhere on the internet, a few years ago, but never got around to reading it.

I recently posted comments about "Pendulum" on the "Reading the Collected Stories" thread, and I don't have anything new to say about it, so I'll re-post my recent comments here:

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.

According to the tea leaves, random story #7 is "The Sound of Summer Running".

This story was first collected as an untitled chapter of Dandelion Wine, but appears as a titled story in R Is for Rocket and Bradbury Stories (2003). I'll read it later today.

I was sick for a few days (it's winter around here), but the sniffles are gone and I've finally read the latest random story.

“The Sound of Summer Running” is a representative piece of Bradbury whimsy, evoking the magic of summer and of boys endlessly haring across lawns and gullies towards unlimited adventures and mischief. Mr. Sanderson, proprietor of the shoe store, has the tables turned on him when Douglas virtually sells him his own tennis shoes. Luckily, mr. Sanderson was young once …

The story is pitch perfect for Dandelion Wine, where it appears as an untitled chapter, but somehow it also works as a selection in R Is for Rocket, in which Bradbury directly addresses a young audience.

WONDERFUL story.