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.
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:
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 aspired 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 metaphysical, 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 aspired 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 metaphysical, 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 |
by Ted Gioia
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literary works published
since 1985)
Great Books Guide
(reviews of current books)
Post-Modern Mystery
(unconventional tales of
mystery and suspense)
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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
Allende, Isabel
The House of the Spirits
Amis, Martin
Time's Arrow
Apuleius
The Golden Ass
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
Grass, Günter
The Tin Drum
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
Link, Kelly
Magic for Beginners
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
Obreht, Téa
The Tiger's Wife
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
Rushdie, Salman
Midnight's Children
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
Updike, John
The Witches of Eastwick
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
The Year of Magical Reading
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.
www.twitter.com/tedgioia
Conceptual Fiction:
A Reading List
(with links to reviews)
Home Page
Abbott, Edwin A.
Flatland
Adams, Douglas
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Allende, Isabel
The House of the Spirits
Amis, Martin
Time's Arrow
Apuleius
The Golden Ass
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
Grass, Günter
The Tin Drum
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
Link, Kelly
Magic for Beginners
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
Obreht, Téa
The Tiger's Wife
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
Rushdie, Salman
Midnight's Children
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
Updike, John
The Witches of Eastwick
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
The Year of Magical Reading
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.