What do you think is Ray’s greatest Science Fiction short story?

Respectfully, this for me is like asking someone to name their favorite child. There are so many great stories by Mr. Bradbury, I wouldn’t know where to begin.

I agree that it is almost impossible to pick just one Ray Bradbury science fiction story as "the greatest". However, two personal favorites that immediately come to mind are "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "All Summer in A Day". Both are sad, poignant, and (at least for me) unforgettable.

This is a very good question, because many people think Ray was mainly a science fiction writer, while he often said he wasn't a science fiction writer at all (except for Fahrenheit 451, which he admitted was SF). The truth is somewhere in between. Ray did write science fiction — a lot of it — during the 1940s, but after Fahrenheit 451 he wrote virtually no new SF.

So what was the best of his science fiction period?

In all probability, Ray's best science fiction story is "And the Rock Cried Out".

If you absolutely forced me to name just one SF story by him, that's the one I'd name.

However, there are other very strong contenders: "There Will Come Soft Rains", "A Sound of Thunder", "The Veldt", and "The Fog Horn". "The Fireman" (the shorter version of Fahrenheit 451), must be considered as well.

And don't forget the story that was for many years my favorite Ray Bradbury story: "Frost and Fire". The first few pages are as good as anything I've mentioned here, although the story is a bit more ordinary towards the end.

"The Long Rain" and "All Summer in a Day" (his two Venus stories) are good too. There are others, but I'll stop there!

He was a writer who wrote science fiction, and speculative fiction, and fantasy, and horror, and, well, he just wrote. He was a writer. As a kid, I welcomed his diversity, because I never would have read a book like Dandelion Wine if Bradbury hadn't already hooked me with his science fiction and fantasy.

A favorite not mentioned yet in this thread in The Golden Apples of the Sun, a captivating tale masterfully told by Bradbury. He could pull us in with the turn of a phrase, or take a collection of stories and make them something greater when brought together in the Illustrated Man. "It was a warm afternoon in September when I first met the Illustrated Man." From the first line, he captivates you, draws you in, wanting to know more.

Mike, I know exactly what you mean. I first read Ray when I was in seventh grade. I had taken out a couple of Robert Heinlein science fiction novels from my school library, and was disappointed to learn those were the only two Heinlein books my school library had. A very wise librarian pulled a book off the shelf, handed it to me, and said, "Why don't you take out this one? I think you'll like it." I went home, sat under a tree in the backyard of my parent's house, and began to read. The book was THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN. I couldn't put the book down. I still remember thinking: "Rocketships! Dinosaurs! Baseball! All the thing I love. This writer must have written this book just for me." I imagine a lot of Ray's readers feel the same way. I've been hooked on Ray's writing ever since. I once told the foregoing story to Ray and added, "I don't know what Isaac Newton felt like when that apple hit him in the head while sitting under a tree, but it was probably the same way I felt sitting under that tree in my backyard reading your stories."

Richard, another one of his fine stories can be found in The Golden Apples of the Sun collection -- "The Foghorn," which was originally published as “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.” It's as much about loneliness and the modern world meeting the past as it is about monsters. I read it again a month or so back and it was better than I had remembered, or perhaps I have a different appreciation and understanding when I'm older compared to my younger self. It's not a science fiction story, but it reminds me there are so many great Bradbury stories that I have difficulty narrowing it to but a few.

Speaking of "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms"...the current issue (July/August, 2022) of THE SATURDAY EVENING POST has an article called "The Post Goes to the Movies", which discusses a number of classic films which began as stories which appeared in the POST. Those films include such classics as THE QUIET MAN, THE MOUSE THAT ROARED, TRUE GRIT, NOTORIOUS and, yes, THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. The article notes that Ray always said that the inspiration for the story "came from seeing the remnants of a demolished roller coaster - the tracks suggested a dinosaur skeleton." Below is a link to the cover of the current issue:

https://www.saturdayeveningpos...ue/?issue=2022-07-01

I respectfully disagree with MikeD that "The Fog Horn" isn't a science fiction story.

Sure it is.

The trouble with such a label is that you could define science fiction quite narrowly and insist on certain standards, such as scientific accuracy.

If you insist that a science fiction story must have reasonably credible science, Ray is always going to be in trouble. And it's not just Ray—hundreds of books and stories that deal with time travel into the past would have to be declassified as science fiction, because physicists tell us that time travel into the past simply isn't possible.

But I don't think the requirement for a story to be science fiction is quite so strict. Instead, a story is quite fairly classified as science fiction if it suggests some vague scientific-sounding idea in terms of which the events in the story could happen.

You may think that's simply too wishy-washy, but the fact is that huge swathes of science fiction work this way. In the case of "The Fog Horn", Ray suggests that a dinosaur species might have survived somewhere in the unexplored depths of the ocean, despite the extinction of almost all dinosaur species many millions of years ago.

In my opinion, that's enough. It does suggest some sort of rational explanation for the existence of such a creature. Now if Ray had made the creature a whale that had been struck by lightning and turned into a dinosaur, that would be a different matter. That's fantasy, because there isn't even a token attempt at credibility.

It doesn't matter that the premise of the story is absurdly far-fetched. The existence of the creature is made to sound possible in the real world, however preposterously unlikely.

Now, if you insist on real, accurate scientific knowledge and principles in a story, that's a different matter. That's HARD science fiction, and I agree that Ray never wrote hard science fiction.