I sing the body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me,
and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them,
respond to them,
And discorrupt them,
and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Walt Whitman

Bradbury's famous story of the electric grandmother leads off this slim book. The novelette "I Sing the Body Electric" is an old favorite of many Bradbury fans, including me. It had been a long time since I first read it. Like much of Bradbury's "science fiction" stories, the science fictional element is rather small. Bradbury gives you something that is clearly science fiction but the story itself is about people and relationships and love. This is a sweet story about how a family deals with the death of mother and wife to a young family. There are four other stories (including the title story) as well as a short "screen treatment" at the end (which is nothing remarkable, just interesting). The unified theme of these stories is robots which are very human-like in attitude and behavior, if not appearance.

As a bit of trivia, "I sing the body electric" was first written as a TV episode for tv series "Twilight Zone" and is apparently the only thing written by Bradbury that was used in the original series.

This book was a special edition put together to collect Bradbury's robot stories. There are some nice but small illustrations for each story plus a large watercolor on the inside that I believe was done by Bradbury. ( )