His name may be synonymous with futuristic technologies,
but Ray Bradbury never learned to drive a car—the Jaguar
in the garage notwithstanding. He complains that there are
too many cellphones, too many machines. He may have
anticipated the Internet with a virtual
reality machine envisioned in his 1957
novel Dandelion Wine, but could hardly
be more scornful of the actual World
Wide Web—when a major search
engine approached him about putting
his work online, he responded: “To hell
with you. To hell with you and to hell
with the Internet.” And don’t expect to see Ray Bradbury
using an iPad or a Kindle. He prefers old-fashioned bricks-
and-mortar libraries as a place to expand one’s mind, and
has helped raise money to keep their doors open.
Yes, Ray Bradbury’s works are still up-to-date, still a useful
guide to the unfolding future. But don’t jump to the conclusion
that the man who wrote them is bedazzled by the promises of
tomorrow. Of the many stories he has written, the most deeply
felt and personal ones celebrate the past. Although Bradbury
has refused to cite any one of his books as a favorite, his late
wife Maggie admitted that he was most fond of Dandelion Wine,
an account of a young boy’s coming of in a small town in
Illinois during the summer of 1928.
That’s where Ray Bradbury was born, on August 22, 1920, in
Waukegan, a city of 19,000 citizens back in those simpler days.
Waukegan may be just 35 miles from Chicago, but the city, at
least as memorialized in Ray Bradbury’s fiction as “Green
Town,” might well have been several galactic light years distant
from that major metropolis which, four years before his birth,
had been dubbed by a poet as the “hog butcher of the world.”
Waukegan was “a land as bright, beloved and blue / As any
Yeats found to be true,” Bradbury would later write in a poem
so Ciceronian in its praises that it almost makes the reader
embarrassed to read it...or, then again, perhaps envious of
someone who, looking back on his childhood, could proclaim:
When Bradbury was thirteen, the family relocated to Los
Angeles, but the future author always retained more of Middle
America than Hollywood in his mindset. Even in old age, he
has held on to the enthusiasms of the small town child—for
candy, toys, the fanciful and imaginative. This childlike sense
of wonder must have been the impetus for his attraction to the
science fiction genre.
There was plenty to keep the young Ray Bradbury awestruck in
Southern California. Almost immediately upon arrival, he
began hunting out movie stars. Outside the gates of Paramount
Studios, he waylaid W.C. Fields for an autograph (who obliged,
handing it back with the comment: “There you are, you little son
of a bitch”). He chased Marlene Dietrich deep into the
recesses of a beauty salon, again emerging with a signature. He
crossed paths with the young Judy Garland, then still known as
Frances Gumm. And he convinced George Burn to let him
attend a rehearsal for the Burns and Allen radio show—a move
that precipitated Bradbury’s transformation from fan to industry
insider.
Burns offered encouraging feedback to the youngster’s early
attempts at writing. “He told me I was a genius and my scripts
were brilliant,” Bradbury later recalled. “Of course they were
lousy and he knew it.” But one of Ray’s jokes made its way into
a broadcast—heady stuff for a fifteen-year-old, and a
professional writing career was born. Soon after, a poster in a
bookstore on Western Avenue alerted Bradbury to the existence
of the “Science Fiction Society,” a local group where he met
Robert Heinlein and other writers, both established and
aspiring. Heinlein helped Bradbury publish an early story, and
by the early 1940s the lad from Waukegan was selling material
regularly to pulp fiction periodicals.
Almost from the start, Bradbury as-
pired to something higher than the
formulas of genre fiction. When his
story “Homecoming” was turned
down by Weird Tales, Bradbury
published it instead in Mademoiselle,
where it was championed by Truman
Capote; soon afterwards, it was
chosen for inclusion in The O
Henry Prize Stories of 1947.
Around this same time, Bradbury’s
work was accepted by Harper’s and
The New Yorker. By the early 1950s, when he began publishing
the novels and short story collections for which he is best
known—including The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated
Man (1951), Fahrenheit 451 (1953)—Ray Bradbury had evolved
into a strange hybrid, a genre writer with the soul of a poet.
Even a quick perusal of his classic works makes clear the
contradiction. Take, for example, a throwaway passage from The
Martian Chronicles. Here any other science fiction writer of
Bradbury’s generation would have written: “The rocket ship
landed.” Instead, this is what we get with Bradbury:
space? This passage reminds me of my own memorable
boyhood encounter with Ray Bradbury. He came to my home
town to give a talk, and I arrived hoping to hear of aliens from
outer space and other fantastic sci-fi concepts. Instead,
Bradbury talked about his love of Melville’s Moby Dick. You
may not know this, but Bradbury wrote the screenplay for John
Huston’s 1956 film adaptation of Moby Dick. If Ray had been
unavailable, might Heinlein or Asimov got
the call? I doubt it. If Asimov, despite all
his polymath pretensions, had written The
Martian Chronicles, he would have stuck
with: “The rocket ship landed.”
In truth, there was never much science in
Ray Bradbury’s science fiction. If sci-fi is
the literary equivalent of a theme-park ride,
Bradbury rates a C ticket at best. Many of
the stories in The Martian Chronicles, for
instance, could have been moved from the
Red Planet to Norman Rockwell’s small town America with
very few modifications required. Even Bradbury’s most fully
developed sci-fi work, Fahrenheit 451, relies very little on
futuristic technology—the mechanical canine that figures as the
most advanced gizmo in the tale was, according to the author,
inspired by The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) rather than any of
the many robots celebrated in pulp fiction tales—and makes it
greatest impact by addressing issues of anti-intellectualism,
censorship, authoritarian institutions and political correctness:
all demons of the mind not the machine, ones that don’t require
microprocessors or wireless networks to wreak their havoc.
Given these precedents, it was inevitable that Bradbury would
move even further afield from the expectations of genre
fiction. Dandelion Wine, a 1957 novel with a marked
autobiographical tone, showed how much Bradbury was willing
to thwart his sci-fi fans. Here he makes passing reference to
pulp fiction plot lines—time travel, witchcraft, even a fanciful
“happiness machine”—but in each instance Bradbury chooses
to parody the concept at hand. The happiness machine actually
makes people sad. The witchcraft proves to be a mixture of
urban legend and malicious gossip. The promised trip in time
turns out to be nothing more than an old Civil War veteran
telling stories of the old days. This is not just Bradbury
renouncing his roots, but positively ridiculing them.
My first experience of reading Ray Bradbury came when a
section of Dandelion Wine was assigned in school—I think I was
12 or 13 years old at the time, roughly the same age as the
protagonist in this story. This extract, called “The Sound of
Summer Running,” can stand alone from the rest of the novel,
and once again relies upon a very simple premise. Indeed, this
may be the simplest plot I have ever encountered in many years
of reading. A boy wants a new pair of sneakers—or what we
called “tennis shoes” back then
(even if you never played tennis,
you called them that)—for summer
vacation. That’s it, nothing more
or nothing less.
When I read this story again decades
later, I was struck by how vividly I
still remembered it from my first
encounter with it. Nonetheless, I
also recall my shock, at that young
age, that a writer could devote a
whole story to something so simple.
Around this same time, I had seen
the movie version of Fahrenheit 451, and I knew that Bradbury
wrote about outer space and futuristic societies, but the most
advanced technology in this story was a shoe! And not even a
swoosh on it! Yet when described by Ray Bradbury, a simple
running shoe can seem to embody the most amazing
ingredients. Here is part of his description:
Who needs a rocket ship, I ask, when Bradbury can point you
toward something as magical as that as close as you local Foot
Locker outlet?
Bradbury returns to the same small town setting for his 1962
novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Here he tries to stay
closer to a familiar genre recipe, in this instance attempting a
horror story in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft.
But once again, Bradbury rebels against
the constraints of the idiom. Here our
author continually steps back from the
wicked to luxuriate in the innocent. His
two protagonist, Will Halloway and Jim
Nightshade, are thirteen-year-old boys
who are both fascinated and bewildered
when a sinister carnival comes to town.
The innocence, both legal and meta-
physical, of these two youngsters is a
major theme of this book. Indeed, a
certain Peter Pan-ish quality pervades
Bradbury’s world view, and never more so than in this story,
where readers of a certain age can relive a chastened sense of
wonder that most of us out-grew in our youth…if we ever
possessed it at all.
Many of the adult characters in the book also seem caught up in
a radiant adolescent mindset. In just the opening pages, we
encounter Mr. Crosetti the barber, who cries with joy because
he smells some cotton candy. We meet Mr. Tetley, the smoke
shop proprietor who tries to scare the youngsters by hiding
behind the big wooden Cherokee he keeps outside his store, but
then gets transfixed by the sound of distant music. We follow
Miss Foley, a teacher, who finds herself magnetically attracted
to the carnival house of mirrors. And, as the tale progresses,
Charles Halloway, the middle-aged father of Will and a janitor at
the local library, emerges as the hero, a role he assumes
primarily due to his ability to be even more boyish than the boys
themselves.
None of these adults acts like a grown-up, and even the villains,
when they take center stage, operate in
the same manner as eternal adolescents,
corrupted but not matured by the years.
Ray Bradbury was already in his 40s when
this novel was published, yet every page
glows with the mindset of the very young.
It is hardly surprising that one of the
“horrors” of the story involves a carousel
that can make the unwary child who climbs aboard grow up too
fast. In the ever youthful mind of Mr. Bradbury, that is the
ultimate tragedy.
In the final analysis, there is more philosophy in this book than
horror. Bradbury never writes down to his reader, and when
forced to choose between thrills and chills, on the one hand,
and poetic imagery and philosophical musings on the other, he
always takes the high road. It is all too telling that the most
impassioned chapter in Something Wicked This Way Comes takes
place in a library, and focuses on a lengthy digression on human
history and the nature of good and evil. I suspect that, if this
book were a first novel arriving in a publishing house today, the
editor would have slashed away at this interlude, reducing it
from ten pages to two paragraphs. But the “non-commercial”
elements of Bradbury’s work (and there are many of them)
represent, to my mind, the most essential part of Bradbury’s
greatness: namely, his willingness to break all the rules, and
make every story—whether about Mars or witches or just tennis
shoes—into a personal statement, something no other author
would have written, or could have written.
This is precisely why Ray Bradbury, the most reluctant master
of science fiction, was arguably it finest exponent from the so-
called “golden age” that spanned the middle decades of the 20th
century. This genre has always struggled for respectability
because its conceptual brilliance has too often been
compromised by shoddy writing and a passive acceptance of
familiar formulas. Bradbury deserves our gratitude for being
incapable of the former, and seemingly unaware of the latter.
In the current day, when almost every type of story telling—
from the novel to the movie theater and beyond—seems
dominated by gimmicks and formulas, he is a role model that we
need more than ever.
but Ray Bradbury never learned to drive a car—the Jaguar
in the garage notwithstanding. He complains that there are
too many cellphones, too many machines. He may have
anticipated the Internet with a virtual
reality machine envisioned in his 1957
novel Dandelion Wine, but could hardly
be more scornful of the actual World
Wide Web—when a major search
engine approached him about putting
his work online, he responded: “To hell
with you. To hell with you and to hell
with the Internet.” And don’t expect to see Ray Bradbury
using an iPad or a Kindle. He prefers old-fashioned bricks-
and-mortar libraries as a place to expand one’s mind, and
has helped raise money to keep their doors open.
- Perhaps this is not surprising for an
author whose most famous work was a
book about saving books. If you read
Fahrenheit 451 years ago, you probably
recall that the threat to books came in the
form of fire—the title was derived from
the temperature at which paper burns.
But if you re-read it today with a post-
Cold-War perspective, you might be
more struck by Bradbury’s depiction of a
dumbed-down communal culture and
public hostility to literature. They didn't
start burning the books until most people
stopped caring about them. That’s a
theme that is more relevant now than
ever before, and all the tweets in
cyberspace year don’t undercut its
relevancy.
Yes, Ray Bradbury’s works are still up-to-date, still a useful
guide to the unfolding future. But don’t jump to the conclusion
that the man who wrote them is bedazzled by the promises of
tomorrow. Of the many stories he has written, the most deeply
felt and personal ones celebrate the past. Although Bradbury
has refused to cite any one of his books as a favorite, his late
wife Maggie admitted that he was most fond of Dandelion Wine,
an account of a young boy’s coming of in a small town in
Illinois during the summer of 1928.
That’s where Ray Bradbury was born, on August 22, 1920, in
Waukegan, a city of 19,000 citizens back in those simpler days.
Waukegan may be just 35 miles from Chicago, but the city, at
least as memorialized in Ray Bradbury’s fiction as “Green
Town,” might well have been several galactic light years distant
from that major metropolis which, four years before his birth,
had been dubbed by a poet as the “hog butcher of the world.”
Waukegan was “a land as bright, beloved and blue / As any
Yeats found to be true,” Bradbury would later write in a poem
so Ciceronian in its praises that it almost makes the reader
embarrassed to read it...or, then again, perhaps envious of
someone who, looking back on his childhood, could proclaim:
- Byzantium I come not from….
As boy
I dropped me forth in Illinois.
A name with neither love nor grace
Was Waukegan, there I came from
And not, good friends, Byzantium….
Pretending there beneath our sky
That it was Aphrodite’s thigh….
And uncles, gathered with their smokes
Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,
And aunts as wise as Delphic maids
Dispensed prophetic lemonades
To boys knelt there as acolytes
To Grecian porch on summer nights….
When Bradbury was thirteen, the family relocated to Los
Angeles, but the future author always retained more of Middle
America than Hollywood in his mindset. Even in old age, he
has held on to the enthusiasms of the small town child—for
candy, toys, the fanciful and imaginative. This childlike sense
of wonder must have been the impetus for his attraction to the
science fiction genre.
There was plenty to keep the young Ray Bradbury awestruck in
Southern California. Almost immediately upon arrival, he
began hunting out movie stars. Outside the gates of Paramount
Studios, he waylaid W.C. Fields for an autograph (who obliged,
handing it back with the comment: “There you are, you little son
of a bitch”). He chased Marlene Dietrich deep into the
recesses of a beauty salon, again emerging with a signature. He
crossed paths with the young Judy Garland, then still known as
Frances Gumm. And he convinced George Burn to let him
attend a rehearsal for the Burns and Allen radio show—a move
that precipitated Bradbury’s transformation from fan to industry
insider.
Burns offered encouraging feedback to the youngster’s early
attempts at writing. “He told me I was a genius and my scripts
were brilliant,” Bradbury later recalled. “Of course they were
lousy and he knew it.” But one of Ray’s jokes made its way into
a broadcast—heady stuff for a fifteen-year-old, and a
professional writing career was born. Soon after, a poster in a
bookstore on Western Avenue alerted Bradbury to the existence
of the “Science Fiction Society,” a local group where he met
Robert Heinlein and other writers, both established and
aspiring. Heinlein helped Bradbury publish an early story, and
by the early 1940s the lad from Waukegan was selling material
regularly to pulp fiction periodicals.
Almost from the start, Bradbury as-
pired to something higher than the
formulas of genre fiction. When his
story “Homecoming” was turned
down by Weird Tales, Bradbury
published it instead in Mademoiselle,
where it was championed by Truman
Capote; soon afterwards, it was
chosen for inclusion in The O
Henry Prize Stories of 1947.
Around this same time, Bradbury’s
work was accepted by Harper’s and
The New Yorker. By the early 1950s, when he began publishing
the novels and short story collections for which he is best
known—including The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated
Man (1951), Fahrenheit 451 (1953)—Ray Bradbury had evolved
into a strange hybrid, a genre writer with the soul of a poet.
Even a quick perusal of his classic works makes clear the
contradiction. Take, for example, a throwaway passage from The
Martian Chronicles. Here any other science fiction writer of
Bradbury’s generation would have written: “The rocket ship
landed.” Instead, this is what we get with Bradbury:
- The ship came down from space. It came
from the stars and the black velocities, and
the shining movements, and the silent gulfs
of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its
body and men in its metal cells, and it moved
with a clean silence, fiery and warm . . . It was
a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved
in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea
leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and
thrown itself onward into one nothingness
following another. (from The Martian Chronicles)
space? This passage reminds me of my own memorable
boyhood encounter with Ray Bradbury. He came to my home
town to give a talk, and I arrived hoping to hear of aliens from
outer space and other fantastic sci-fi concepts. Instead,
Bradbury talked about his love of Melville’s Moby Dick. You
may not know this, but Bradbury wrote the screenplay for John
Huston’s 1956 film adaptation of Moby Dick. If Ray had been
unavailable, might Heinlein or Asimov got
the call? I doubt it. If Asimov, despite all
his polymath pretensions, had written The
Martian Chronicles, he would have stuck
with: “The rocket ship landed.”
In truth, there was never much science in
Ray Bradbury’s science fiction. If sci-fi is
the literary equivalent of a theme-park ride,
Bradbury rates a C ticket at best. Many of
the stories in The Martian Chronicles, for
instance, could have been moved from the
Red Planet to Norman Rockwell’s small town America with
very few modifications required. Even Bradbury’s most fully
developed sci-fi work, Fahrenheit 451, relies very little on
futuristic technology—the mechanical canine that figures as the
most advanced gizmo in the tale was, according to the author,
inspired by The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) rather than any of
the many robots celebrated in pulp fiction tales—and makes it
greatest impact by addressing issues of anti-intellectualism,
censorship, authoritarian institutions and political correctness:
all demons of the mind not the machine, ones that don’t require
microprocessors or wireless networks to wreak their havoc.
Given these precedents, it was inevitable that Bradbury would
move even further afield from the expectations of genre
fiction. Dandelion Wine, a 1957 novel with a marked
autobiographical tone, showed how much Bradbury was willing
to thwart his sci-fi fans. Here he makes passing reference to
pulp fiction plot lines—time travel, witchcraft, even a fanciful
“happiness machine”—but in each instance Bradbury chooses
to parody the concept at hand. The happiness machine actually
makes people sad. The witchcraft proves to be a mixture of
urban legend and malicious gossip. The promised trip in time
turns out to be nothing more than an old Civil War veteran
telling stories of the old days. This is not just Bradbury
renouncing his roots, but positively ridiculing them.
My first experience of reading Ray Bradbury came when a
section of Dandelion Wine was assigned in school—I think I was
12 or 13 years old at the time, roughly the same age as the
protagonist in this story. This extract, called “The Sound of
Summer Running,” can stand alone from the rest of the novel,
and once again relies upon a very simple premise. Indeed, this
may be the simplest plot I have ever encountered in many years
of reading. A boy wants a new pair of sneakers—or what we
called “tennis shoes” back then
(even if you never played tennis,
you called them that)—for summer
vacation. That’s it, nothing more
or nothing less.
When I read this story again decades
later, I was struck by how vividly I
still remembered it from my first
encounter with it. Nonetheless, I
also recall my shock, at that young
age, that a writer could devote a
whole story to something so simple.
Around this same time, I had seen
the movie version of Fahrenheit 451, and I knew that Bradbury
wrote about outer space and futuristic societies, but the most
advanced technology in this story was a shoe! And not even a
swoosh on it! Yet when described by Ray Bradbury, a simple
running shoe can seem to embody the most amazing
ingredients. Here is part of his description:
- Somehow the people who made tennis shoes
knew what boys needed and wanted. They
put marshmallows and coiled springs in the
soles and they wove the rest out of grasses
bleached and fired in the wilderness.
Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the
shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer
were hidden. The people that made the shoes
must have watched a lot of winds blow the
trees and a lot of rivers going down to the
lake. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes,
and it was summer.
Who needs a rocket ship, I ask, when Bradbury can point you
toward something as magical as that as close as you local Foot
Locker outlet?
Bradbury returns to the same small town setting for his 1962
novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Here he tries to stay
closer to a familiar genre recipe, in this instance attempting a
horror story in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft.
But once again, Bradbury rebels against
the constraints of the idiom. Here our
author continually steps back from the
wicked to luxuriate in the innocent. His
two protagonist, Will Halloway and Jim
Nightshade, are thirteen-year-old boys
who are both fascinated and bewildered
when a sinister carnival comes to town.
The innocence, both legal and meta-
physical, of these two youngsters is a
major theme of this book. Indeed, a
certain Peter Pan-ish quality pervades
Bradbury’s world view, and never more so than in this story,
where readers of a certain age can relive a chastened sense of
wonder that most of us out-grew in our youth…if we ever
possessed it at all.
Many of the adult characters in the book also seem caught up in
a radiant adolescent mindset. In just the opening pages, we
encounter Mr. Crosetti the barber, who cries with joy because
he smells some cotton candy. We meet Mr. Tetley, the smoke
shop proprietor who tries to scare the youngsters by hiding
behind the big wooden Cherokee he keeps outside his store, but
then gets transfixed by the sound of distant music. We follow
Miss Foley, a teacher, who finds herself magnetically attracted
to the carnival house of mirrors. And, as the tale progresses,
Charles Halloway, the middle-aged father of Will and a janitor at
the local library, emerges as the hero, a role he assumes
primarily due to his ability to be even more boyish than the boys
themselves.
None of these adults acts like a grown-up, and even the villains,
when they take center stage, operate in
the same manner as eternal adolescents,
corrupted but not matured by the years.
Ray Bradbury was already in his 40s when
this novel was published, yet every page
glows with the mindset of the very young.
It is hardly surprising that one of the
“horrors” of the story involves a carousel
that can make the unwary child who climbs aboard grow up too
fast. In the ever youthful mind of Mr. Bradbury, that is the
ultimate tragedy.
In the final analysis, there is more philosophy in this book than
horror. Bradbury never writes down to his reader, and when
forced to choose between thrills and chills, on the one hand,
and poetic imagery and philosophical musings on the other, he
always takes the high road. It is all too telling that the most
impassioned chapter in Something Wicked This Way Comes takes
place in a library, and focuses on a lengthy digression on human
history and the nature of good and evil. I suspect that, if this
book were a first novel arriving in a publishing house today, the
editor would have slashed away at this interlude, reducing it
from ten pages to two paragraphs. But the “non-commercial”
elements of Bradbury’s work (and there are many of them)
represent, to my mind, the most essential part of Bradbury’s
greatness: namely, his willingness to break all the rules, and
make every story—whether about Mars or witches or just tennis
shoes—into a personal statement, something no other author
would have written, or could have written.
This is precisely why Ray Bradbury, the most reluctant master
of science fiction, was arguably it finest exponent from the so-
called “golden age” that spanned the middle decades of the 20th
century. This genre has always struggled for respectability
because its conceptual brilliance has too often been
compromised by shoddy writing and a passive acceptance of
familiar formulas. Bradbury deserves our gratitude for being
incapable of the former, and seemingly unaware of the latter.
In the current day, when almost every type of story telling—
from the novel to the movie theater and beyond—seems
dominated by gimmicks and formulas, he is a role model that we
need more than ever.
| conceptual fiction |
| Ray Bradbury at Ninety: An Appreciation |
| Ray Bradbury |
Click on image to purchase
| Click on image to purchase |
| Click on image to purchase |
by Ted Gioia
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mystery and suspense)
The New Canon (great
literary works published
since 1985)
Great Books Guide
(reviews of current books)
Post-Modern Mystery
(unconventional tales of
mystery and suspense)
Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at
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Conceptual Fiction:
A Reading List
(with links to reviews)
Home Page
Abbott, Edwin A.
Flatland
Adams, Douglas
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Amis, Martin
Time's Arrow
Asimov, Isaac
The Foundation Trilogy
Asimov, Isaac
I, Robot
Atwood, Margaret
The Handmaid's Tale
Banks, Iain M.
The State of the Art
Ballard, J.G.
Crash
Ballard, J.G.
The Crystal World
Bester, Alfred
The Demolished Man
Bradbury, Ray
Dandelion Wine
Bradbury, Ray
Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray
The Illustrated Man
Bradbury, Ray
The Martian Chronicles
Bradbury, Ray
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Burgess, Anthony
A Clockwork Orange
Card, Orson Scott
Ender's Game
Chabon, Michael
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Chiang, Ted
Stories of Your Life and Others
Clarke, Arthur C.
Childhood's End
Clarke, Arthur C.
A Fall of Moondust
Clarke, Arthur C.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Clarke, Susanna
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Danielewski, Mark Z.
House of Leaves
Dick, Philip K.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Dick, Philip K.
The Man in the High Castle
Dick, Philip K.
Ubik
Doctorow, Cory
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Gaiman, Neil
American Gods
Gibson, William
Burning Chrome
Gibson, William
Neuromancer
Haldeman, Joe
The Forever War
Hall, Steven
The Raw Shark Texts
Harrison, M. John
Light
Heinlein, Robert
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Heinlein, Robert:
Stranger in a Strange Land
Heinlein, Robert
Time Enough for Love
Herbert, Frank
Dune
Huxley, Aldous
Brave New World
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Lathe of Heaven
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Left Hand of Darkness
Leiber, Fritz
The Big Time
Leiber, Fritz
Conjure Wife
Leiber, Fritz
Swords & Deviltry
Leiber, Fritz
The Wanderer
Lem, Stanislaw
His Master's Voice
Lem, Stanislaw
Solaris
Lethem, Jonathan
The Fortress of Solitude
Lewis, C. S.
The Chronicles of Narnia
Márquez, Gabriel García
100 Years of Solitude
McCarthy, Cormac
The Road
Miéville, China
Perdido Street Station
Miller, Jr., Walter M.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Mitchell, David
Cloud Atlas
Niffenegger, Audrey
The Time Traveler's Wife
Niven, Larry
Ringworld
Noon, Jeff
Vurt
Okri, Ben
The Famished Road
Pohl, Frederik
Gateway
Pynchon, Thomas
Gravity's Rainbow
Robinson, Kim Stanley
Red Mars
Rowling, J.K.
Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone
Saramago, José
Blindness
Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein
Silverberg, Robert
Dying Inside
Silverberg, Robert
Nightwings
Simak, Clifford
City
Simak, Clifford
The Trouble with Tycho
Smith, Cordwainer
Norstrilia
Smith, Cordwainer
The Rediscovery of Man
Stephenson, Neal
Snow Crash
Stross, Charles
Glasshouse
Sturgeon, Theodore
More Than Human
Sturgeon, Theodore
Some of Your Blood
Van Vogt, A.E.
The World of Null A
Verne, Jules:
Around the Moon
Verne, Jules:
From the Earth to the Moon
Verne, Jules:
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Wallace, David Foster
Infinite Jest
Wells, H.G.
The First Men in the Moon
Wells, H.G.
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Wells, H.G.
The Time Machine
Zelazny, Roger
Lord of Light
Special Features
Notes on Conceptual Fiction
Ray Bradbury: A Tribute
Remembering Fritz Leiber
Curse You, Neil Armstrong!
Robert Heinlein at 100
Links to related sites
The New Canon
Great Books Guide
Postmodern Mystery
Ted Gioia's web site
SF Site
io9
Graeme's Fantasy Book Review
Los Angeles Review of Books
Jospeh Peschel
The Misread City
Reviews and Responses
SF Signal
True Science Fiction
Disclosure: Conceptual Fiction and its
sister sites may receive review copies
and promotional materials from
publishers, authors, publicists or other
parties.
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Conceptual Fiction:
A Reading List
(with links to reviews)
Home Page
Abbott, Edwin A.
Flatland
Adams, Douglas
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Amis, Martin
Time's Arrow
Asimov, Isaac
The Foundation Trilogy
Asimov, Isaac
I, Robot
Atwood, Margaret
The Handmaid's Tale
Banks, Iain M.
The State of the Art
Ballard, J.G.
Crash
Ballard, J.G.
The Crystal World
Bester, Alfred
The Demolished Man
Bradbury, Ray
Dandelion Wine
Bradbury, Ray
Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray
The Illustrated Man
Bradbury, Ray
The Martian Chronicles
Bradbury, Ray
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Burgess, Anthony
A Clockwork Orange
Card, Orson Scott
Ender's Game
Chabon, Michael
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Chiang, Ted
Stories of Your Life and Others
Clarke, Arthur C.
Childhood's End
Clarke, Arthur C.
A Fall of Moondust
Clarke, Arthur C.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Clarke, Susanna
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Danielewski, Mark Z.
House of Leaves
Dick, Philip K.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Dick, Philip K.
The Man in the High Castle
Dick, Philip K.
Ubik
Doctorow, Cory
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Gaiman, Neil
American Gods
Gibson, William
Burning Chrome
Gibson, William
Neuromancer
Haldeman, Joe
The Forever War
Hall, Steven
The Raw Shark Texts
Harrison, M. John
Light
Heinlein, Robert
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Heinlein, Robert:
Stranger in a Strange Land
Heinlein, Robert
Time Enough for Love
Herbert, Frank
Dune
Huxley, Aldous
Brave New World
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Lathe of Heaven
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Left Hand of Darkness
Leiber, Fritz
The Big Time
Leiber, Fritz
Conjure Wife
Leiber, Fritz
Swords & Deviltry
Leiber, Fritz
The Wanderer
Lem, Stanislaw
His Master's Voice
Lem, Stanislaw
Solaris
Lethem, Jonathan
The Fortress of Solitude
Lewis, C. S.
The Chronicles of Narnia
Márquez, Gabriel García
100 Years of Solitude
McCarthy, Cormac
The Road
Miéville, China
Perdido Street Station
Miller, Jr., Walter M.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Mitchell, David
Cloud Atlas
Niffenegger, Audrey
The Time Traveler's Wife
Niven, Larry
Ringworld
Noon, Jeff
Vurt
Okri, Ben
The Famished Road
Pohl, Frederik
Gateway
Pynchon, Thomas
Gravity's Rainbow
Robinson, Kim Stanley
Red Mars
Rowling, J.K.
Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone
Saramago, José
Blindness
Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein
Silverberg, Robert
Dying Inside
Silverberg, Robert
Nightwings
Simak, Clifford
City
Simak, Clifford
The Trouble with Tycho
Smith, Cordwainer
Norstrilia
Smith, Cordwainer
The Rediscovery of Man
Stephenson, Neal
Snow Crash
Stross, Charles
Glasshouse
Sturgeon, Theodore
More Than Human
Sturgeon, Theodore
Some of Your Blood
Van Vogt, A.E.
The World of Null A
Verne, Jules:
Around the Moon
Verne, Jules:
From the Earth to the Moon
Verne, Jules:
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Wallace, David Foster
Infinite Jest
Wells, H.G.
The First Men in the Moon
Wells, H.G.
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Wells, H.G.
The Time Machine
Zelazny, Roger
Lord of Light
Special Features
Notes on Conceptual Fiction
Ray Bradbury: A Tribute
Remembering Fritz Leiber
Curse You, Neil Armstrong!
Robert Heinlein at 100
Links to related sites
The New Canon
Great Books Guide
Postmodern Mystery
Ted Gioia's web site
SF Site
io9
Graeme's Fantasy Book Review
Los Angeles Review of Books
Jospeh Peschel
The Misread City
Reviews and Responses
SF Signal
True Science Fiction
Disclosure: Conceptual Fiction and its
sister sites may receive review copies
and promotional materials from
publishers, authors, publicists or other
parties.