I found this fantastic video on youtube - it's by youtube user Joey Fameli.
This is probably the
closest thing to a bona fide sci fi classic in these three volumes. I
know it, of course, from The Illustrated Man, one of the greatest
collections of SF stories ever. I read it again and again when I was
a kid. I can still feel the strangely embossed cardboard cover of the
edition I owned back then (Corgi Essential SF Library Edition – I
also owned Golden Apples of the Sun in this version). It came from
the stack of second hand sci fi in The Beehive Book Exchange in
Porirua, down the alleyway by the big butchers’ shop in the old
part of the mall.
That copy’s long
gone, but I picked a new copy a couple of years ago, after many years
away and visited it again. Some of the stories are a little corny by
today’s standards – The Man, The Visitor and The Other Foot, for
example, are very much of-their-time – but everything was dignified
and carefully crafted and some of the stories pack a real kick. The
Veldt is still brilliantly chilling, The Rocket is sweet and moving,
The Exiles is delirious and slightly unnerving.
This is another one
that still has its charge. Understanding why must surely take us
closer to understand the heart of classic sci fi.
There’s not much plot
in this story. It’s a close third-person view point study of the
spacer Hollis, listening in on his thoughts and final words of the
dying man and his colleagues. It’s an intensely psychological drama
where Hollis tries to make sense of his life in the last hour or so
he has left while listening to his ship-mates do the same.
Bradbury is
particularly good at evoking the simultaneous claustrophobia and
agoraphobia of being lost in space. He focuses on the palpable and
real experience of it – old arguments with co-workers, the empty
sky and the star, the sudden brutal force of being struck by a
meteorite and loosing a limb.
As in Rings of Saturn,
the story has a strongly frontier theme and echoes the adventure
stories of an earlier era. Science fiction seems to have colonised –
if you’ll excuse the expression – this kind of frontier
literature, and it can still provide a thrill. It connects science
fiction to the an older tradition in American fiction, that helps to
explain SF took off so strongly in the USA. Fifty years before this
was published frontier stories dominated the pulps, in the same way
that the empire dominated British popular fiction.
Placing this story in
this type of familiar environment adds to the vital credibility of
the setting. Like the frontier fiction, frontier SF has the whiff of
authenticity about it, the sense that this is something that could,
conceivably, happen rather than a fable or fairy tale. It’s not so
much the detail of the technology – in fact there’s no
technological detail at all – but the conviction of the characters
that asserts a highly believable futuristic scenario. Even today,
with our dreams of interstellar travelled no closer to being realise,
we can picture that interplanetary activity sketched in this series.
Bradbury affects that
imaginary leap that’s essential for classic SF, not just suspension
of belief but something a step further, something with slightly more
roughage to it than just a fantasy. He gives us a credible future and
a chance to picture ourselves there, not as unlikely space heroes or
super-scientists, but ordinary working joes.
Themes: space as a
workplace, shipwreck, the frontier, what’s life all about anyway?
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