<\/p>\n
When I was a kid back in the third quarter of the twentieth century I came upon science fiction in the children\u2019s section of the Brooklyn Public Library.\u00a0 And so I read Heinlein\u2019s and Asimov\u2019s juvenile sf stories.\u00a0 As I got a little older I was able to borrow from the adult collection and soon discovered all the golden age authors and some of the newer, edgier writers.\u00a0 But at a certain point I discovered Ray Bradbury.\u00a0 I remember he had two collections called R is for Rocket, S is for Space.\u00a0 But when I read them I found out he wasn\u2019t writing space opera.\u00a0 In fact, some of his stories didn\u2019t seem to be science fiction at all.\u00a0 At the time, I didn\u2019t know what fantasy was.\u00a0 They just seemed to be strange stories.\u00a0 Later on, I found some of his stories showing up on \u201cThe Twilight Zone\u201d TV series and this helped me categorize them as something weird and fun.\u00a0 But whatever I called him Bradbury was different from the other writers I knew.\u00a0 Each of his stories had to be evaluated on the merits.\u00a0 Some of his stories lacked fantasy plot elements and at the time these stories seemed lacking in interest.\u00a0 Others were almost horror stories and these kept my attention best.\u00a0 Even his most externally identifiable science fiction stories, \u201cThe Martian Chronicles,\u201d didn\u2019t feel like other science fiction stories.\u00a0 Even if there were ray guns and aliens and space ships it didn\u2019t seem as if these were the point of the story.\u00a0 They were more like parables or morality tales.\u00a0 And to a kid this was perplexing.\u00a0 But I always considered Bradbury as something worth reading.\u00a0 He was high value.<\/p>\n
Fast forward twenty years.\u00a0 It was the late nineteen eighties.\u00a0 I was in an old used bookstore in Boston during my lunch hour from a design engineering job I had.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t read any science fiction in a while.\u00a0 I was browsing through a pile of books that had been displayed earlier in the year as summer reading.\u00a0 There was a used hard cover book with a mylar library-type jacket cover on and a cover painting of a little blond haired boy virtually covering the pavement with his chalk drawings of lines and shapes.\u00a0 The book was called \u201cDandelion Wine\u201d and the author was Ray Bradbury.\u00a0 It was a novel length book and it surprised me because I didn\u2019t remember Bradbury writing many novels.\u00a0 At the time \u201cFahrenheit 451\u201d was the only one I could think of.<\/p>\n
On a lark, I bought it.\u00a0 I put it on my bookshelf and figured I\u2019d get to it when the project I was on slowed down.\u00a0 Well I forgot all about that book and before that project slowed down I had changed jobs and was too busy for reading.\u00a0 It was about nine months later in July, when I picked it up again.\u00a0 I was going on vacation with my wife and kids to Old Orchard Beach, Maine for a week.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very working class old beach resort where middle class people go to sit by the ocean and let their kids dig sand castles and swim.\u00a0 And later on, you can go down to the pier and buy bad pizza and ice cream for your kids and let them get fake tattoos or go down to the amusement park and watch them be centrifuged in the dozen or so kinetic devices that are used to extract dollars from parents and regurgitated food from kids\u2019 stomachs.\u00a0 The several years I brought my young family there are among the happiest memories I have.<\/p>\n
Anyway, when the family settled in the beach house at night and the kids settled down to reading or watching the TV I picked up Dandelion Wine.\u00a0 And I was surprised to find I had already read it.\u00a0 But wait, not really, I\u2019d read parts of it.\u00a0 What Bradbury had done was patch together a number of his older stories along with transition scenes that tied them together, and make a narrative about a summer for a boy and his family and neighbors in Green Town, USA circa 1928.\u00a0 What it really was, was an ode to the boyhood Ray Bradbury had lived and imagined in Waukegan, Illinois.\u00a0 He used the memories of his childhood home and passed them through the story writing algorithm in his head and invented a world that struck me as remarkable.\u00a0 Here were the mundane short stories that as a kid didn\u2019t click with me because there were no monsters or space ships.\u00a0 Now they were knitted together to talk about what was magical about being a twelve-year-old boy in a small mid-western town in the early twentieth century with three months of summer vacation ahead of you.\u00a0 They are stories about family and friends and growing up and living and getting old and even dying.\u00a0 And they are mostly about being a kid.<\/p>\n
Since that summer I\u2019ve re-read that book a dozen times in whole or part.\u00a0 I mostly read it when I have some vacation time in summer.\u00a0 This year I\u2019ll be sixty.\u00a0 When I read that book I\u2019m not even sixteen, I\u2019m twelve.\u00a0 It\u2019s remarkable.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t grow up in a small town.\u00a0 I grew up on the relatively mean streets of Brooklyn, NY.\u00a0 And I was born forty years after him.\u00a0 But I can understand what he\u2019s saying and feeling in his alter ego character. \u00a0He\u2019s captured the essence of boyhood in its quintessential form, summer freedom.\u00a0 And the setting is a simpler time and place.\u00a0 It\u2019s idyllic.\u00a0 Not realistic but almost archetypal.<\/p>\n
I imagine there are many for whom this type of story has no appeal.\u00a0 It\u2019s not high adventure or technical fun.\u00a0 But if any of this strikes a chord try the book out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was a kid back in the third quarter of the twentieth century I came upon science fiction in the children\u2019s section of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,5,237,4,242],"tags":[26,68,200,199,38,44,59],"class_list":["post-1107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-current-events","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","tag-american-exceptionalism","tag-book-review","tag-fantasy","tag-ray-bradbury-bradbury","tag-review","tag-sci-fi","tag-urban-fantasy"],"yoast_head":"\n