Ray Bradbury

An incantation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the title of Ray Bradbury’s landmark tale of supernatural suspense could be a tagline for Stranger Things. Teens Will and Jim are excited when ‘Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show’ comes to town in advance of Halloween. Then things start getting strange. Like the timewarp carousel scene in Stranger Things, this book features Will and Jim witnessing the show’s ringleader Cooger riding backwards on the merry-go-round, and turning into a boy of their own age. Intrigued, they follow him out of the carnival and into a world of increasingly bizarre events and curious characters. Things are never what they seem, in Hawkins or Green Town, Illinois, where Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade find themselves lost in a maze of mirrors, their wishes transformed into nightmares, their dreams invaded by a ‘Dust Witch’. You may find your dreams invaded, too.

From our article Books like Stranger Things

“Thrilling and sometimes terrifying, these stories are a feast for the imagination. He’s very good at the short story. I’m surprised, looking back at them, how many of them are more mild horror than science fiction or fantasy because I’m not a horror fan at all and never have been. I don’t think I cared, really, because I just liked his vision so much at the time. There’s a fantastic one called The Foghorn where a lonely lighthouse on a fog-bound coast starts sounding its foghorn and a prehistoric monster, which has been sleeping at the bottom of the sea for centuries, wakes up hearing this and thinks that it’s another prehistoric monster calling to it. It’s so lonely, this poor creature. So it’s basically a 1950s monster movie, and I think it actually did end up getting turned into a rubbish, “brontosaurus-rampaging-through-New York” film. In the story your sympathy is with the monster completely and it’s just this sad story about the monster hearing the foghorn and thinking that there’s another like it somewhere and then learning that it’s all alone after all. People say, sometimes with justification, that science fiction isn’t interested in emotions and feelings and characters and things, but Ray Bradbury is. And he is brilliant for that reason.” Read more...

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Young Adults

Philip Reeve, Children's Author

“Bradbury’s love was science fiction, but not because of technology. When he went to space in The Martian Chronicles, it was already well-known that Mars was nearly or completely lifeless. It didn’t matter. He was writing about the Mars of the dreams of children growing up in the 1930s, the Mars that Edgar Rice Burroughs had written about. Bradbury’s martian stories are infused with tragedy, lost dreams, ancient glories and hope resurgent. And the way he writes! This is language that is meant, like ancient Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, to be read aloud. It contains its own music. It is music.” Read more...

The best books on Science Fiction

Orson Scott Card, Novelist

“It captures a unique moment in the history of human discovery. It’s a combination of the transcript of that panel discussion – which took place the day before the Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to orbit Mars in 1971 – and essays that the panel participants wrote roughly one year later. The transcript and the essays book-end one of the most spectacular unveilings we’ve had in the history of solar system exploration. The book combines the scientific with the poetic. It includes a couple of poems by Ray Bradbury, whom I think of as the poet laureate of space” Read more...

The best books on Space Exploration

Andrew Chaikin, Science Writer