Martin H. GreenbergCritiques

Ray Bradbury’s first published work appeared in 1941, and this collection of 22 stories was produced to acknowledge his half-century of developing his unique blend of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and coming-of-age nostalgia.

The contributors range from Isaac Asimov, who penned “An Appreciation” as an introduction to the collection, to then-relative newcomers Orson Scott Card and Christopher Beaumont. Many are direct sequels to Bradbury tales, others pick up characters he created, many years after their first appearances, and a couple are good-hearted parodies of themes he visited often. But the real treasures here are those few tales that manage to re-create the magic, putting new flesh on the bones and new images in the mind’s eye.

For this reviewer, "A Lake of Summer" is the standout of the collection. It touches on themes Bradbury often visited – that time in a young boy’s life when the magic of childhood is first sullied by the harsh reality of the world. A reader picking up this story without looking at the byline would willingly swear it came from The Master’s typewriter, yet it’s marked by author Chad Oliver’s own incandescent talent.

Completely different in tone is "Salome", by veteran Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, who re-visits a grown-up member of Uncle Einar’s family, but looks at him with a very different set of eyes. A lighter touch is provided by Norman Corwin’s short and sassy "The Muse", in which a Greek goddess kvetches about the difficult of inspiring a writer who has plenty of ideas of his own.

No Bradbury tribute would be complete without a sample of the slowly-building horror Bradbury was capable of creating. Author R. Paul Wilson ratchets up the gooseflesh in ‘The November Game’ by picking up a nasty character from [The October Country] and dealing out a punishment-fits-the-crime revenge chiller.

Fans of Bradbury and students of late 20th century fantasy/horror/science fiction will want to put this volume firmly on the Keeper shelf.

Great collection of classic SF from 1942. My favorites were "Proof" by Hal Clement, "Nerves" by Lester del Ray and "Jay Score" by Eric Frank Russell. Some I had read before in other collections. While I have read Asimov's Foundation trilogy, I'm not sure I had read the original short story before. It just struck me as funny how the entire premise for the Foundation, a far future fifty year project to create the first volume of a complete encyclopedia of human knowledge, makes little sense to anyone who grew up with the internet, only 70 years after the story was written.

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Reading this in 2024, the entry "With These Hands" by C. M. Kornbluth is surprisingly relevant in our new Midjourney/Stable Diffusion world.½

A collection of science fiction stories with at least one story for each planet (Pluto has two, and there's a comet story too) from some of the old masters.
My favourites were: Brightside Crossing (of Mercury) by Alan E. Nourse for its evocation of the bloody-mindedness of human explorers; Waterclap (Earth) by Isaac Asimov for the intriguing idea of boiling high presssure water out of a deep sea space instead of forcing it out with even higher pressure air; The Snowbank Orbit (Uranus) by Fritz Leiber about a desparate orbital manouvre. However all of them were of interest to me.

I enjoyed "The Twonky" and "Mimic" the most. The rest I found either tolerable or excruciating. Generally, pretty awful prose, including some cringe-inducing dialect. One entry was practically a shaggy dog story.

Adversity