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I Sing the Body Electric!

1969

  • american science fiction
  • science fiction
  • short stories
  • kamimura, hikonojo, 1849-1916. [from old catalog]
  • fiction, science fiction, short stories
  • fiction, fantasy, collections & anthologies

The story

Eighteen stories with bizarre and whimsical themes which transcend time and space.

What it’s like

Warm, wistful and quietly strange, this Ray Bradbury story collection reads like a lamplit evening spent with an old storyteller who keeps drifting from the everyday into the uncanny. Bradbury's prose is lush and rhythmic, full of small-town summer heat, dusty porches, rain on tin roofs and the hum of machines in empty houses, with metaphors that stretch toward the lyrical without tipping into fuss. The mood moves between nostalgic tenderness and mild unease, so a grandfather's memory may sit beside a robot's first lonely dawn or a family's ordinary supper beside an encounter with something off-kilter. Individual pieces are short and self-contained, so the rhythm is unhurried, easy to dip into one at a time. Violence is minimal and mostly offstage; there is little gore, and any menace stays eerie rather than frightening. This suits a rainy Sunday, a bedside read, or a slow evening with a cup of tea, and it is especially good for readers who love speculative fiction for its emotional warmth and sense of wonder.

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