S is for Space. Ray Bradbury

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Dedication

      For Charles Beaumont

      who lived in that little house halfway up in the next block most of my life.

      And for Bill Nolan

      and Bill Idelson, friend of Rush Gook, and for Paul Condylis …

       Because …

      Table of Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chrysalis

Pillar of Fire

       Zero Hour

       The Man

       Time in Thy Flight

       The Pedestrian

       Hail and Farewell

       Invisible Boy

       Come into My Cellar

       The Million-Year Picnic

       The Screaming Woman

       The Smile

       Dark They Were, and Golden-eyed

       The Trolley

       The Flying Machine

       Icarus Montgolfier Wright

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Also by the Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

Introduction

      Jules Verne was my father.

      H. G. Wells was my wise uncle.

      Edgar Allan Poe was the batwinged cousin we kept high in the back attic room.

      Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were my brothers and friends.

      There you have my ancestry.

      Adding, of course, the fact that in all probability Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was my mother.

      With a family like that, how else could I have turned out than as I did: a writer of fantasy and most curious tales of science fiction.

      I lived up in the trees with Tarzan a good part of my life with my hero Edgar Rice Burroughs. When I swung down out of the foliage I asked for a toy typewriter during my twelfth year, at Christmas. On this rattletrap machine I wrote my first John Carter, Warlord of Mars imitation sequels, and from memory tapped out whole episodes of Chandu the Magician.

      I sent away boxtops and think I joined every secret radio society that existed. I saved comic strips, most of which I still have in great boxes down in my California basement. I went to movie matinees. I devoured the works of H. Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson. In the midst of my young summers I leapt high and dove deep down into the vast ocean of Space, long long before the Space Age itself was more than a fly speck on the two-hundred-inch Mount Palomar telescope.

      In other words, I was in love with everything I did. My heart did not beat, it exploded. I did not warm toward a subject, I boiled over. I have always run fast and yelled loud about a list of great and magical things I knew I simply could not live without.

      I was a beardless boy-magician who pulled irritable rabbits out of papier-mâché hats. I became a bearded man-magician who pulled rockets out of his typewriter and out of a Star Wilderness that stretched as far as eye and mind could see and imagine.

      My enthusiasm stood me well over the years. I have never tired of the rockets and the stars. I never cease enjoying the good fun of scaring heck out of myself with some of my weirder, darker tales.

      So here in this new collection of stories you will find not only S is for Space, but a series of subtitles that might well read: D is for Dark, or T is for Terrifying, or D is for Delight. Here you will find just about every side of my nature and my life that you might wish to discover. My ability to laugh out loud with the sheer discovery that I am alive in a strange, wild, and exhilarating world. My equally great ability to jump and raise up a crop of goosepimples when I smell strange mushrooms growing in my cellar at midnight, or hear a spider fiddling away at his tapestry-web in my closet just before sunrise.

      You who read, and I who write, are very much the same. The young person locked away in me has dared to write these stories for your pleasure. We meet on the common ground of an uncommon Age, and share out our gifts of dark and light, good dream and bad, simple joy and not so simple sorrow.

      The СКАЧАТЬ