About all that survived were memories of "The Third Expedition" (which I would have reread in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame as "Mars is Heaven!"), and memories of the closing image of book, the last lines of "The Million Year Picnic", where the family looks into the waters of the canal and sees their reflections: the new Martians (an image which reminded me of the last line of Kim Stanley Robinson's great novella "Green Mars": "A new creature stands on the summit of green Mars." ) Upon rereading The Martian Chronicles I soon appreciated that I hardly remembered the book at all. (It also occurred to me that T he Martian Chronicles is quite as eligible for "Best Novel" as, say, The Dying Earth, another collection of linked stories.) Then I realized I might as well read all the 1950 stories - from which point the step to just rereading the entire books was obvious. So I started in, picking out the stories I'd highlighted.
(I.e., about 1972-1973.) At any rate, my Bantam edition of The Illustrated Man is a 1972 printing, and I have an odd image of myself reading "The Veldt" in a junior high classroom. I believe I read both The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man back in the Golden Age, when I was 12 or 13. I figured I'd reread them and decide which if any to nominate for a Retro Hugo, given that my specific memories of the stories were quite vague. I selected a few stories from the list of 1950 stories that I vaguely remembered as being good and put them on my list. The following year came The Illustrated Man, which included several of the pieces from 1950. He also published The Martian Chronicles in 1950. In fact, he published some 15 stories in 1950, many of them rather good. In my conscientious attempt to fairly nominate stories from 1950 for the Retro Hugo, I noticed that quite a few of Ray Bradbury's stories were eligible. Anyway, for whatever reason I ended up adopting the attitude of Millhouse from The Simpsons to Bradbury: "I am aware of his work." Which is, of course, unfair, because his best work was really quite wonderful, as I hope this review shows.
And still got an A on the test by listening closely to class discussions. That just rubbed me the wrong way, and I read about the first 20 pages, and stopped. But we were assigned Dandelion Wine in 8th grade English, and our teacher told us that, as young boys living in northern Illinois, we should just LOVE Dandelion Wine, because it was about a young boy living in northern Illinois. I had had an ambiguous relationship to Bradbury's fiction - I really liked Fahrenheit 451, which I read in high school, 1974 or so. In his honor, I've uncovered something I wrote back in 2001 about Bradbury's first two collections.
Today would have been Ray Bradbury's 99th birthday.
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