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a new and flourishing market but is trying to express some of his own deepest feelings. It is significant that he lives in Southern California, that advance post of our civilisation, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life (you can eat and drink, watch films, make love, without ever getting out of your car), its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and bogus religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried, rooted in tradition and character. Here, on this signpost to the Future, sits Mr. Bradbury, telling us his dreams.
They are very sinister. When they impose themselves on us, they fill us with a sense of desolation and horror. Compared with these glimpses of the future, most of the old hells seem companionable and cosy. This is a world, we feel, to get out of soon as we can. An excellent covering title for these tales of tomorrow would be Better Dead. The price our descendants will pay for our present idiocies is terrible. After usnot the deluge but the universal nightmare. One of Mr. Bradbury's favourite devices, not without its symbolism, is the sudden transformation of the familiar and friendly into something appallingly menacing, so that just when you think all is well, you are trappedthese are not the people who will help your time-travelling escape but the police from the nightmare future; this is not your long-lost brother but a Martian who has assumed his appearance. The physicist, the astronomer, the biologist, may smile at the liberties such fantasies take, or dismiss their obvious impossibilities with a shrug. But can we afford those smiles and shrugs? I think not.
J. B. Priestley, "Thoughts in the Wilderness: They Come from Inner Space," New Statesman and Nation, 5 December 1953, p. 712
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Stephen Hugh-Jones
Why is Ray Bradbury so good? It is notthe conventional science fiction criterionthat his ideas are so striking. They tend to be no better than average; indeed many of these stories, as usual, are not SF at all and don't claim to be. It is partly a remarkable economy and delicacy of style; there aren't many people writing today who can say so easily exactly what they want to say. It is partly pure sentiment, that dogrose and cornflower sweetness common to so many American writers. This can be unspeakable corn, or not: Mr Bradbury sometimes teeters toward the borderline. This collection (The Machineries of Joy) gave me a lot of pleasure, as must be evident, but also some unease. One storythe explorers

 
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