I Sing the Body Electric

All that gorgeous language disguises some serious flaws. Namely: 1. Narrator, men, boys, and robots all have that same flights of fancy speech style, while women and girls are too weak and/or wily, 2. characters are indistinguishable from one another, only known by their roles, 3. Science & numbers are ridiculous, and 4. ideas, when stripped of language and summed, are simple. A two-star book, really... but oh that language.

Old but good collection...some beautiful stories at the beginning, some truly great ones at the end (I'm looking at you, "Heavy Set" and "Lost City of Mars")...and some absolutely terrible stuff in the middle. Clockwork grandma's and some of the adjoining stories have some staggeringly bad dialogue and just plod. If you find yourself getting bogged down, just skip to the next one.

There are a few outstanding short stories in this collection, including the titular “I Sing the Body Electric!”. The collection, however, seemed erratic and random, and would have been better served by combining stories from Bradbury’s vast collection in a more cohesive manner.

I don't always do well with short story collections. If they're good I want to read them one after the other, only to find the individual stories get lost in the blur. If they're not so good, I'm tempted to put the book down part way through and never pick it up again.

I suspected this book of Bradbury stories was more likely to be the former, so had a strategy going in. I would read one story at a time, switching to other books in between so that the stories remained distinct in my mind. And I took the time after finishing each story to jot down a very brief description of each one, again to help me remember them as individual tales. And that's what I'm going to share here.

Not all of these stories have science-fiction elements, and show more several reveal Bradbury's preoccupation with his fellow writers. I've marked my favorites with an asterisk.

The Kilimanjaro Device — A man invents a time-travel contraption to give Ernest Hemingway a better ending. (This is not the last we'll read of Papa. I gather Bradbury was a bit of a fanboi.)

*The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place — A comic tale of some bumbling IRA soldiers and the best-laid plans of mice and men.

Tomorrow's Child — A baby is born into another dimension, and appears in this one as a small blue pyramid with tentacles, to the distress of his all-too-human parents.

The Women — Something in the sea wants to claim a sunbather, but his wife has other plans.

The Inspired Chicken Motel — In the depths of the Great Depression, a chicken lays prophetic eggs.

*Downwind from Gettysburg — A man named Booth assassinates a man named Lincoln, 100 years after the Civil War.

*Yes We'll Gather at the River — The relentless march of progress leaves a small town behind.

*The Cold Wind and the Warm — The fairies return to Ireland, if only for a day.

Night Call, Collect — The last man alive on Mars is haunted by the voice of his younger self.

The Haunting of the New — A house forcefully renounces its history of debauchery.

*I Sing the Body Electric! — Robot Grandma comforts a family of young children after their mother dies.

*The Tombling Day — An old woman encounters her first love, who has been dead for sixty years.

*Any Friend of Nicholas Nickelby's is a Friend of Mine — Charles Dickens takes up residence in a small Illinois town — in 1929.

Heavy Set — An overgrown boy and his mama.

The Man in the Rohrschach Shirt — A retired psychiatrist finds a new clientele on the California beaches.

*Henry the Ninth — The last king of England surveys his kingdom.

The Lost City of Mars — An expedition to an abandoned underground city that runs itself — and the people who stumble on it.

The Blue Bottle — On a long-abandoned Mars, a man searches endlessly for his heart's desire.

One Timeless Spring — A 12-year-old boy is convinced his parents are poisoning him.

The Parrot Who Met Papa — A man birdnaps a parrot that met Hemingway and memorized his final unpublished manuscript.

*The Burning Man — On the hottest day of the year, a boy and his aunt pick up a most unusual hitchhiker.

A Piece of Wood — A pacifist soldier invents a device to turn the world's weapons to rust.

*The Messiah — The Second Coming of Christ, on Mars.

G.B.S. Mark V — A voyage through space with George Bernard Shaw.

The Utterly Perfect Murder — A middle-aged man travels across the country to avenge a childhood snub.

*Punishment Without Crime — A man is sentenced to an authentic penalty for a faux crime.

*Getting Through Sunday Somehow — A man struggles through a gloomy, sleepy Dublin Sunday until he meets the perfect antidote.

Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds — A brutal heat wave drives a man to desperate things.

Christus Apollo — A cantata contemplating other Jesuses on other worlds. show less

I find myself preferring Bradbury's stories of the '50's and '60's, but these are still a fine collection of stories, and Bradbury is always worth reading. There are books that subtract from the sum total of your life, because the time they took to read can never be gotten back. A Bradbury book can always be counted upon to add to your life total, in one way or another.

the man in the rorschach shirt is a short story worth reading. the post-Freudian psychologist who is reminiscent of so many wise thinkers confesses all his prior faults and his new future while finding pleasures in the small aspects of life. he also notes that the writer has an imagination that the historian can't match.

Some of Bradbury's best, with four of the 18 stories pure works orf genius, namely: 1) the kilamajaro device, 2) the women, 3) tomorrow's child, and 4) the lost city of Mars. Tomorrow's child is absolutely delicous! The poem at the end is a gratuious homage to Christianity, and inasmuch as the idea and worship of God is universal (with other species), I agree with the author.